First, genre films are characterized by cultural values of "duality", repetition and predictability. (makes the audience seem very receptive and comfortable for the audience)
The characteristic of animation is that it can cover various types as a good carrier, and "Suicide Shop" is a good example.
It includes four types of films: dramas, musicals, black comedies, and action films (the part of the father chasing the son).
My idea is to analyze the films by drama, musical, and black comedy one by one.
As a feature film, it tells a relatively serious story, with relatively complete character relationships and narrative structure, and you can more or less understand some truths from it. It's a standard drama.
The story is set in a dead French town, where a well-known old shop is particularly booming. The old shop sells suicide products on behalf of them. Their professional sales system makes customers willing to pay, and suicide has become a common thing for local residents, which is why the small shop is extremely popular.
The main clue of the story is from the daily composition of a family in a suicide store, and the other clue is from the customers who come to buy suicide supplies to outline the dark microcosm of the whole society for us.
We can see that the impression of urbanites is hunched, hesitant and cautious, desperate and submissive, still at the mercy of fate and powerless to resist.
No matter what class they are in, they are heavily stylized.
In the image of the family, except for the youngest son Alan (mapping Alan Turing), he is a special image of the savior, and the rest of the family members have the characteristics and performance of round characters.
The round characters have complex personalities, especially the boss Mishima (mirroring Yukio Mishima), who is ostensibly a greedy businessman, selfish and ruthless, even trying to kill his youngest son. But he also felt guilty for his fears and went to see a psychiatrist. His speech was funny, and the paragraph where he demonstrated to the guests how to cut the abdomen on the spot was undoubtedly a direct shot of Yukio Mishima's suicide method in those days, and a typical round figure appeared on the paper.
The youngest son, Alan, looks like a flat figure on the surface. He has a simple personality. He likes to laugh from birth. The character of the flat character does not change with the change of the plot. It can be said that he has no idea, he is the idea himself. This further illustrates his revolutionary status. The audience can easily remember him. It can be explained that he is too optimistic and has become his label. This is the director's intention.
A complex movie often needs both round and flat characters, and as the story develops, they collide with each other and usually approach life more correctly. From them, we can see the deep meaning behind the director, the profound philosophy about life and death, giving people a wonderful sense of human depth.
We must admit that the flat figures themselves are not as gigantic as the round figures in terms of their achievements in shaping them. And we have to admit, flat characters are best when they're portrayed as comedic characters. Conversely, serious or tragic flat characters tend to be annoying.
The optimistic and life-loving Allen to a certain extent dispels the sharp black background of the film itself. Due to the audience's psychology of substituting themselves into the plot, the corresponding performance is that the audience likes to watch the savior appear in this dark story, which can bring psychological comfort to the audience to a certain extent.
In the eyes of Patrice LeConte, "Suicide Shop" can't be made into a live-action film at all, and only animation can present its dark humor and imagination in front of the audience. He also added song and dance elements to the story and made a "musical comedy".
So from the perspective of musicals, the feature is that singing is relied on the screen to promote the development of the plot. The death song of the pigeons at the beginning is undoubtedly very good, laying the dark color of the early stage.
Afterwards, it just went to the Disney animation-like family carnival route. Even though the audience has always been more willing to see hope and Happy Ending, the endless happy singing and dancing is indeed suspected of going too far, but it weakens the original appeal.
But as a black comedy, it certainly stands out. It is a kind of humor that can't be laughed or laughed. It is a mixture of tragic content and comedy form. It expresses the absurdity of the world, the alienation of society from people, the confusion after the rational principle is broken, and the futility of self-struggling. It is its central content. In the face of all this, people let out cynical laughter and distanced themselves from reality with a humorous attitude towards life in order to maintain the dignity of the devastated people. A type of film that expresses humor and interest from a worldview of pessimism, horror, disappointment and pain.
It's easy to think of a gothic dark healing movie - "The Addams Family".
While the 1991 film is an escape-style horror film, the dark humor of the unique gothic temperament, in the hands of director Barry Sonnenfeld, makes people see that the family is more sanctimonious than many others. The more precious kindness of innocence. In this simple emotion, the love of husband and wife, the loyalty of master and servant, and the family affection between brothers, these precious and true feelings are brewing, which builds the warm and ironic warmth of the movie. The formula has always been this way.
The characters in this film are more anxious, pessimistic, desperate, and their criminal behavior is a projection of the social environment.
Suicide crowds support suicide specialty stores, and the group of suicides and suicide fines in the film are the projections of the entire social environment. Contrasting with reality is ironic. (Dark comedy was born and developed in the 1960s and prospered in the 1970s, which has its own specific background. At that time, after the end of the Korean War in the United States, on the one hand, social conflicts and labor-capital conflicts were frequent. On the other hand, McCarthyism made the whole Society has formed an atmosphere of repression and suffocation)
It follows a classical linear narrative, but also makes people smile every now and then. With the awakening of self-consciousness of sister Monroe (allusion to Marilyn Monroe) and the acquisition of true love after sexual liberation, the plot has embarked on a standard comedy line.
The end episode looks pretty good except for a cyanide crepe that Mishima gave to the belated suicide for free, killing him, and the end of the story looks pretty good, but the city is still dark, far from the light of the crepe shop. , is allegorical.
other:
To shoot this film, the technicians found a way to achieve a stereoscopic effect on traditional 2D hand-painted images, and the final rendering effect is similar to a stereoscopic kirigami book. The director also emphasized that "Suicide Shop" was conceived as a 3D movie from the very beginning.
Overall review of the film:
The director's ambitions can be seen in general, but the tone of the film (the second half) is too positive. Although it avoids the suspicion of beautifying death, the didactic component of "loving life" is a bit blunt and the connection is not smooth. Although no one wants an animation to teach children how to commit suicide until the end, the sharp black tone and setting of the story itself are the most outstanding part of the whole film. It is worth mentioning that the film has a strong French flavor: scattered structure, literary tone, quirky temperament, and acerbic language. Uniqueness is its only sign.
It can only be said that it is a good attempt, but it is not perfect.
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