REVIEW OF LUNATIC BY JACK BENJAMIN OF INDY FILM LIBRARY
As I hinted at recently when talking about Phil Tippett’s Mad God, Stop-motion animation is possibly my favourite mode of storytelling. As realistic and smooth as CGI might become, its imagery is muted behind a pallid, grey-blue veil – but each rustling, jerky frame of a stop-motion is inherently bursting with life. Even in the most banal of moments, there is a charm to the art form championed by Lunatic – a feeling that whether or not an audience engages with it, somebody suffered for it, crafted it, nourished it, loved it into life.
But perhaps what I love most about director Robin Noorda’s vision is that he has created such a thing of beauty, and targeted it at being pointedly absurd, obscene, and at times crass. The dissonance between the amazingly rendered visuals and the grim, gallows humour on display adds an extra shock value to every joke – and will no doubt illicit belly-laughs from an audience.
The film follows Antonio, an astronaut abandoned on the Moon after coming out as gay to his co-pilot. As he endures his final, torturous hours in silence, Antonio clutches at straws searching for the bright side, including a line in which he suggests even though he was a minority on Earth, up here he is finally the majority. He also celebrates at being the first homosexual to walk on the Moon – though he uses a rather more derogatory word to describe himself in that instance, still underlining the bigotry which has led to his being stranded.
Carrying on from this, even in his silent, peaceful seclusion, Antonio cannot escape the madness of the doomed planet that has cast him out. As lounges in one particular crater, having apparently downed a bottle of wine, he tosses it to the floor, where it slowly clinks against a wealth of other debris scattered across the Moon’s once-pristine surface. Daily newspapers flutter into his visor, plastering it with the latest titillating gossip from a society that even now finds a way to mock him. And, while he sits monologuing behind a desk, creating his own fake news show, the wasteful and feckless population of Earth is finally consumed by flames – leaving him with nobody but the on-looking tardigrades for company.
Intermittently, Antonio’s narration is superseded by a poem, written by Noorda, delivered by what turns out to be an artificial intelligence distantly related to the HAL 9000. But while the film briefly touches on much of the AI doom-hype that suggests the technology will be our ultimate downfall, it is soon made clear that one area where human labour will always been sought after is in the pursuit of its own destruction – leaving the machine somewhat sidelined during an intergalactic war between Elon Musk and a coalition of oligarchs.
It is here that one of the film’s main problems comes to the fore, though. As required by IFL’s submission process, Noorda has explained that he has used AI in the actual production of this film. Some shots had what he calls “AI inbetweening” to lighten the load when it comes to his otherwise painstaking mode of animation. That is not necessarily a problem – and while sometimes fingers and other objects do noticeably warp as a result, it shows how using AI to help smooth over human productions might work in the future, and enable more survivable productions of this kind of work. In the world of animation, where the limits of creation were largely based on time and imagination, one of those key pressures might be about to lessen, enabling talented people around the world to produce amazing work as they always have – without necessarily having to lose their minds in the process while fixating on the minutiae of the process.
So, as occasionally strange as the visuals look, and in spite of the fact I feel it detracts a little from the ‘hand-made’ charm of the medium, I can make piece with that knowing at least Noorda was breaking his back or sweating over transitionary frames we hardly notice for longer than he had to. But, it is more of a problem when talking about his other use for AI: voice-acting.
While the AI used to narrate the piece seems to be based on his own voice – and is credited as “AI Generated Voice of Robin Noorda” – his co-star, “AI Generated Antonio Astronaut” is not. That role might have been played by a real actor willing to perform for credit alone to build their CV (or hypothetically, a certain film critic who would jump at the chance for fun) – there are a lot of them around if you bother to look. And while the use of AI for Robin Noorda’s lines might be relevant as it transpires the voice is actually coming from a robot, it is not clear what using the technology here adds to Antonio’s character.
In fact, it seems like the use of AI actively detracts from the character, because while admittedly it sometimes reaches emotive peaks I would not have expected it to manage, it does not understand the rhythm and pacing of Noorda’s prose. Lines of his poetic dialogue sometimes meld together in a way that means they don’t land well on the ear, and some audiences may struggle to understand them entirely. Again, that might be appropriate for the character of the robot – but less so for the human marooned in space, whose plight we should be empathising with.
Still, what has been produced here is breath-taking to look at, and broadly a joy to engage with. Noorda has shown me yet another angle on the fantastically dry Dutch comedies that Indy Film Library has been regularly sent in recent years. It revels in the absurdity of some of the Earth’s most serious crises, and throws in a number of self-inflicted wounds for good measure. I look forward to introducing it to audiences at next year’s Amsterdam showcase.
As I hinted at recently when talking about Phil Tippett’s Mad God, Stop-motion animation is possibly my favourite mode of storytelling. As realistic and smooth as CGI might become, its imagery is muted behind a pallid, grey-blue veil – but each rustling, jerky frame of a stop-motion is inherently bursting with life. Even in the most banal of moments, there is a charm to the art form championed by Lunatic – a feeling that whether or not an audience engages with it, somebody suffered for it, crafted it, nourished it, loved it into life.
But perhaps what I love most about director Robin Noorda’s vision is that he has created such a thing of beauty, and targeted it at being pointedly absurd, obscene, and at times crass. The dissonance between the amazingly rendered visuals and the grim, gallows humour on display adds an extra shock value to every joke – and will no doubt illicit belly-laughs from an audience.
The film follows Antonio, an astronaut abandoned on the Moon after coming out as gay to his co-pilot. As he endures his final, torturous hours in silence, Antonio clutches at straws searching for the bright side, including a line in which he suggests even though he was a minority on Earth, up here he is finally the majority. He also celebrates at being the first homosexual to walk on the Moon – though he uses a rather more derogatory word to describe himself in that instance, still underlining the bigotry which has led to his being stranded.
Carrying on from this, even in his silent, peaceful seclusion, Antonio cannot escape the madness of the doomed planet that has cast him out. As lounges in one particular crater, having apparently downed a bottle of wine, he tosses it to the floor, where it slowly clinks against a wealth of other debris scattered across the Moon’s once-pristine surface. Daily newspapers flutter into his visor, plastering it with the latest titillating gossip from a society that even now finds a way to mock him. And, while he sits monologuing behind a desk, creating his own fake news show, the wasteful and feckless population of Earth is finally consumed by flames – leaving him with nobody but the on-looking tardigrades for company.
Intermittently, Antonio’s narration is superseded by a poem, written by Noorda, delivered by what turns out to be an artificial intelligence distantly related to the HAL 9000. But while the film briefly touches on much of the AI doom-hype that suggests the technology will be our ultimate downfall, it is soon made clear that one area where human labour will always been sought after is in the pursuit of its own destruction – leaving the machine somewhat sidelined during an intergalactic war between Elon Musk and a coalition of oligarchs.
It is here that one of the film’s main problems comes to the fore, though. As required by IFL’s submission process, Noorda has explained that he has used AI in the actual production of this film. Some shots had what he calls “AI inbetweening” to lighten the load when it comes to his otherwise painstaking mode of animation. That is not necessarily a problem – and while sometimes fingers and other objects do noticeably warp as a result, it shows how using AI to help smooth over human productions might work in the future, and enable more survivable productions of this kind of work. In the world of animation, where the limits of creation were largely based on time and imagination, one of those key pressures might be about to lessen, enabling talented people around the world to produce amazing work as they always have – without necessarily having to lose their minds in the process while fixating on the minutiae of the process.
So, as occasionally strange as the visuals look, and in spite of the fact I feel it detracts a little from the ‘hand-made’ charm of the medium, I can make piece with that knowing at least Noorda was breaking his back or sweating over transitionary frames we hardly notice for longer than he had to. But, it is more of a problem when talking about his other use for AI: voice-acting.
While the AI used to narrate the piece seems to be based on his own voice – and is credited as “AI Generated Voice of Robin Noorda” – his co-star, “AI Generated Antonio Astronaut” is not. That role might have been played by a real actor willing to perform for credit alone to build their CV (or hypothetically, a certain film critic who would jump at the chance for fun) – there are a lot of them around if you bother to look. And while the use of AI for Robin Noorda’s lines might be relevant as it transpires the voice is actually coming from a robot, it is not clear what using the technology here adds to Antonio’s character.
In fact, it seems like the use of AI actively detracts from the character, because while admittedly it sometimes reaches emotive peaks I would not have expected it to manage, it does not understand the rhythm and pacing of Noorda’s prose. Lines of his poetic dialogue sometimes meld together in a way that means they don’t land well on the ear, and some audiences may struggle to understand them entirely. Again, that might be appropriate for the character of the robot – but less so for the human marooned in space, whose plight we should be empathising with.
Still, what has been produced here is breath-taking to look at, and broadly a joy to engage with. Noorda has shown me yet another angle on the fantastically dry Dutch comedies that Indy Film Library has been regularly sent in recent years. It revels in the absurdity of some of the Earth’s most serious crises, and throws in a number of self-inflicted wounds for good measure. I look forward to introducing it to audiences at next year’s Amsterdam showcase.
