The Wolf House (2018, Cristóbal León & Joaquín Cociña) (Patreon)

67/100

"Like no animated film I've ever seen" risks sounding hyperbolic, and there are definitely precedents and influences, ranging from Švankmajer to Kentridge, for most of The Wolf House's constituent parts. Still, it's impossible not to be gobsmacked by a movie that's constantly assembling and then disassembling and then reassembling itself before your eyes, in both two and "three" dimensions simultaneously. I virtually always enjoy stop-motion, and here the motion literally never stops—it's not simply that the figures are changing position, but that they're in a permanent state of radical metamorphosis, as if we're watching time-lapse footage of the film's creation (with the animators' hands digitally removed) rather than the film itself. Even more stunning, arguably, is what León and Cociña do with the house's walls, which seems so labor-intensive as to be almost inconceivable. Are they repainting the entire damn wall(s) for each frame?! (I read a couple of interviews with them and didn't really find an answer. But that's what it looks like, and if they're cheating they've been careful to make it look as if they're not by adding paint drips to convey false haste.) Whatever the process, it's a marvel to behold, and the dimensional bleed-through—painted figures kicking 3-D objects across the room; the entire range of color on a human figure just sort of sliding off of its body and onto the floor—often had me gasping.

It can be pretty exhausting, too, though, even at just an hour and change. At times, I felt the same sense of visual-processing overload that hindered me from loving The Lego Movie, though it helps that this film doesn't have nonstop verbal humor competing with its whirlwind of images. Just letting it wash over you doesn't entail missing half the jokes. At the same time, I confess that I was unfamiliar with Colonia Dignidad when I sat down to watch this, and consequently had barely a clue what the "story" (such as it is) of Maria and her two pig-kids was meant to represent. It works reasonably well as free-floating surrealism, with a nightmarish tinge, but presumably plays quite differently if you're aware that the protagonist has escaped from the Chilean version of a Nazi death camp, and that The Wolf House's grim conceit is that we're watching a military dictatorship's propaganda film. (A live-action prologue incorporating archival footage establishes this, but is vague enough to be incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with the history.) So I surely didn't appreciate this to the full extent that its makers intended. My eyeballs do work, though, and that's sufficient for a whole lotta gaping.