MIND GAME: Epiphany in a Whale's Mouth

Rating: 🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋🐋
[TRAILER]

I think this type of movie in this mode is why animation is important as a form. One thing that animation can do that live-action never can (convincingly, dramatically) is stretch and morph human bodies and the actions they can reasonably perform to mirror/magnify/explore undiluted emotion.

There is a nuclear explosion of a scene in this movie where this guy is trying to run out of a whale’s mouth. This whole dense blitz of objects is crashing in all around him through the gaping hole above but he’s running and running and running and he’s running so hard that his body starts to elongate and grow sketchy and change colors and splinter apart in these ways that we can FEEL, you know?

Like you know exactly what that visual means and how it feels, those moments of pure effort, pure panic, pure adrenaline, pure chaos contained just barely in your body, you’re about to burst open so the light pours in and you find something new and tell something grand and your whole body is pounding and shining and vibrating and then—the moment passes and you’re back on your old shit.

I think that maybe both the greatest joy and the greatest tragedy of art—of the process of identifying, elucidating, and transposing pure emotion—is that it simulates those moments of epiphany. Animation, at its best, can remove some of the limitations and filters of communication via the actual human body and get straight at the post-physical ineffable.