Loving Vincent.

One of the five nominees for this year’s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (along with the modern classic that is Boss Baby), Loving Vincent stands out primarily for its appearance: It is the first animated film made from hand-painted frames, in this case done with oil paints on canvas. The conceit was to tell a story about Vincent Van Gogh that used his style and even images from his paintings as the background, while actors portrayed the various characters in front of green screens and were painted into the frames. The 94-minute film comprises over 65,000 frames, each its own painting, created by over 120 painters, while the story comes from letters recovered after Van Gogh’s suicide and the subsequent death of his brother, Theo. The plot here is a bit thin, although the work by the actors – who are more than just voice actors here – elevates what story we get. If you appreciate the visual aspects of animated films, though, you won’t be able to take your eyes off the screen. (It’s on iTunes and amazon.)

The story begins a year or so after Van Gogh’s death, when the Postman Joseph Roulin asks his son Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver a letter from Van Gogh to his brother and patron, Theo, that was somehow lost but serves as the last letter he wrote before he took his own life. The quest to find Theo turns into a deeper interest in learning what happened to Vincent in the last few months of his life, and why a person who claimed six weeks earlier to be in great spirits decided to end his own life. Armand, who’s a bit credulous to be entirely credible here, bounces around like a sort of soft-boiled detective, visiting the guest house where Van Gogh stayed and the doctor who treated him for his depression and, later, who saw him after he’d shot himself. The mystery aspect here – at one point, Armand becomes convinced Van Gogh was shot by someone else, perhaps in a prank gone wrong, and was covering for the culprit – isn’t compelling at all, since there isn’t any real doubt that Van Gogh 1) was suicidal and 2) shot himself, but the story here is the means to the end of walking us through a tour of Van Gogh’s output.

I went into this knowing almost nothing about the works of Van Gogh, and decided to leave any further reading until after I watched it lest I spoil some aspect of the film. The poster for the film uses his 1889 Self-portrait, but you’ll see many of his most famous works as backdrops for critical scenes; I spotted The Night Café, Wheat Field with Cypresses, Wheat field with Crows, The Town Hall at Auvers, The Sower (at the end), and Café Terrace at Night (the opening scene). The filmmakers also used Van Gogh’s paintings to ‘design’ the characters, most of whom are based on real people Van Gogh painted, with other characters created from his paintings. Some of the likenesses are remarkable, especially Jerome Flynn (Bronn in Game of Thrones) as Dr. Gachet, although there was really little they could do here to make Saoirse Ronan look like anyone but herself.

Because the story itself is so slight, Loving Vincent is more of an achievement than a great film; there’s never been a movie that looked like this, and it subtly introduces some of the audience to the works of one of the most important painters in western history, several of whose paintings have sold for nine figures. (Only one of Van Gogh’s paintings sold during his life, out of the 800-plus he painted.) It’s a gorgeous film to watch, and the leisurely pace of the plot fits the content; you’re meant to savor and even examine these backdrops, not to just focus on the action or dialogue. But that also means it’s not a film for everybody; I’m probably on the outer fringes of the audience for this movie, because I know nothing about art and don’t feel like I even appreciate it like most art fans and collectors would. I can say, however, that I understand Van Gogh’s style more now having seen the movie, and would at least be able to identify some of his works as his, which is more than I would take home from most movies I see.