Post by gw on May 25, 2019 7:58:50 GMT
Most people are aware of animated films based on books but there's also ones that are based on plays. I'm going to talk about a few of them.
The most obvious one is Peter Pan. I haven't seen the movie since I was young but I remember some parts like Captain Hook narrowly escaping death by pushing his legs against a crocodile's jaws. Personally I preferred the movie Hook but I always found most animated Disney films to be gutless examples of lukewarm capitalist filmmaking with their cutesy but bland characters, especially the Disney films from the 50's.
Then there's the Czech film The Devil and Kate, based on an opera and directed by Vaclav Bedrich, which I can't describe very well since I haven't seen it subtitled. It involves a devil who meets his match with a stubborn woman.
This list wouldn't be complete without discussing Jiri Trnka's stop motion film A Midsummer Night's Dream. I didn't like this adaptation as much as many others did. It was good from a technical perspective but the plot didn't interest me much since I had already read the original and because the characters are designed well but don't have any real facial expressions because Trnka's such a purist in his works. If you like this sort of purist puppetry with still heads based on puppet theater then you may well like it more than I did.
Ubu and the Grande Gidouille is based on several plays in the Polish Ubu series of plays from Alfred Jarry which were made to deliberately offend the taste of the audience. According to the Wikipedia article it is a satire of Macbeth. The main character is a shortsighted ugly man who at the behest of his wife takes over his kingdom and goes on several misadventures as he goes from one awkward role to another after that. The film was Jan Lenica's second and last feature film and it is done in his typical surreal cutout style which suits the material well, though the film feels overly abridged and hard to follow towards the later parts due to its origin.
Bath is a Soviet Russian film which satirizes bureaucracy of the early USSR and mixes stop motion with puppetry and live action. It is very artistic but it also feels very cheap and it's hard to connect with emotionally if you don't know much about the USSR from the time that the film was made.
The Tragedy of Man, which was originally to be done as a miniseries, was Marcell Jankovic's adaptation of the Hungarian play which is about Adam and Eve being tempted out of Eden by the devil and seeing the future in a weird sort of dream of the state of human kind until the future. It is the best animated play adaptation that I've seen so far but it has a very unusual sort of mentality expressed through the way the characters interact that I couldn't make much sense of. Since it's all part of a dream shown by the devil, that makes up for the fact that it functions on a different mental wavelength than mine. I guess I'm just not used to philosophical movies of this sort.
Also has no trailer
This is the whole film since there was no trailer available.