{"id":6393,"date":"2018-02-25T08:00:35","date_gmt":"2018-02-25T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6393"},"modified":"2018-02-24T00:05:56","modified_gmt":"2018-02-24T05:05:56","slug":"the-girl-without-hands","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/02\/25\/the-girl-without-hands\/","title":{"rendered":"The Girl Without Hands."},"content":{"rendered":"

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby<\/em>, which scored one of the nominations, wasn\u2019t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. At that point, though, I hadn\u2019t seen any of the films ranked above it (using Rotten Tomatoes scores, a crude measure but useful for our purposes here). I can now say I have seen one film that was eligible for the award, and was #BetterThanBossBaby: The Girl Without Hands<\/em> (La jeune fille sans mains<\/em>), a stunningly animated version of the Grimm Brothers folk tale about a girl … um, with no hands. It\u2019s available to rent on iTunes<\/a> and amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The girl, never named, suffers for her father\u2019s avarice; when the film starts, the impoverished miller strikes a deal with the devil to give him \u201cwhat\u2019s behind his mill\u201d in exchange for wealth, not realizing that his daughter was in the apple tree behind the mill at that moment. Eventually, the man\u2019s refusal to give up the river of gold that is now running his mill costs him everything, including his daughter, whose hands he lops off at the devil\u2019s insistence. She flees, eventually finding a prince who marries her, only to have the devil reappear and try once again to claim her for his part of the original bargain.<\/p>\n

This adaptation, first released in France in 2016, was entirely written, directed, and animated by S\u00e9bastien Laudenbach, marking his first feature film. The animation style is like nothing I\u2019ve seen before in an animated feature – the outlines of characters and objects are rough, and the colored portions inside those lines don\u2019t always move in sync with the outlines, which is obviously by design and gives the entire film a ghostly atmosphere. The colors are bold and vibrant, with less shading than we expect now from animated films that try to look three-dimensional. The film is mostly faithful to the original tale, which has many supernatural elements, and Laudenbach\u2019s non-realistic approach fits it perfectly.<\/p>\n

The Grimms\u2019 story is a rather blunt, grotesque fable about the corrupting power of greed, with just one character of any import, the girl, voiced beautifully by French actress Ana\u00efs Demoustier. Her faith in her father is not rewarded, and her strength in the face of the tragedy is part of the story\u2019s moral (which sort of pounds you over the head). Laudenbach and Demoustier at least manage to humanize her, even though his fidelity to the story limits how much depth the character can get on screen, and he altered the ending slightly to tie the restoration of her hands to something more specific than the Grimms offered. She\u2019s an obvious object for pity; Laudenbach and Demoustier make her more than just pathetic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the imagery that makes this movie, though; Laudenbach gives the film a tactile look, like we\u2019re watching images flicker on canvas or paper. He plays little visual games with his characters as well, having them move as if they\u2019re aware that their outlines and their flesh aren\u2019t quite together, such as having a character hide in what looks like its own shadow at one moment. It\u2019s just such a feast for the eyes, in a way that\u2019s completely novel in the era of hyper realistic CG animation, and it\u2019s thoroughly refreshing.<\/p>\n

As for why this was overlooked by the Academy … I have no idea. It ran at Cannes in the ACID program, a simultaneous screening during that city\u2019s film festival, in 2016. It won the grand prize in the Tokyo Anime Awards last year. It\u2019s at 100% fresh with 19 reviews, all of which were written in 2017. I can\u2019t believe voters saw this and still went with Boss Baby<\/em>; hell, The Red Turtle<\/a><\/em> got a nomination last year and was just as obscure. Watch The Girl Without Hands<\/em> and I think you\u2019ll agree its omission is a mistake.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When the Oscar nominations were announced a few weeks ago, I tweeted an image showing all of the eligible films for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, and showed that Boss Baby, which scored one of the nominations, wasn\u2019t close to a top five film in the group in the estimation of critics. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[925,25,37,713,215],"class_list":["post-6393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-movies","tag-adaptations","tag-animation","tag-french-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6393"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6395,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6393\/revisions\/6395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}