Since I mentioned The Fall in my last post, I felt it was an appropriate lead in to twin German animating/producing duo Wolfgang and Christoph Lauenstein, who animated a short sequence in the film. I feel conflicted about talking about this sequence, because it is really important that it be seen as it was intended (within the film), but in talking about the Lauensteins and animation in general it is a very important piece.
To first quickly talk about The Fall (I'll try not to go on and on though I could); every image has been carefully crafted and beautifully executed, and from what I can understand much of this is credited to the director Tarsem Singh, who was fully dedicated to the film. There is never anything in the frame that was not intended to be in the frame, and everything within the frame is symbolic or integral to the film as a whole. No matter how many times I watch it I am always noticing new things and in constant awe of the raw beauty in the story and the way it has been executed.
The acting is extremely real, partially because they are very talented and partially because one of the two main characters is played by a six year old girl, and this in many ways informed and changed the actual story (a mistake she makes is written into the script, filming in a hospital is done through holes in the bed-curtains so the intimate environment shared between her and the other main character is truthful, she was only allowed to see certain characters as they appear in the film, etc).
Everything really comes together, and this in combination with the story make it extremely easy to become emotionally involved. There is a great deal of pain in the film, as well as discussion around the constructions of and ways of dealing with pain. The Lauensteins animated scene comes in at a very important turning point/climax in the film, and the sudden change in media (live-action to stop-motion) is EXTREMELY jarring (as it is intended to be).
You can watch the scene without "ruining the ending" in any way, or anything like that (I promise), but what you will be losing is contextualization. Contextualization in terms of the way that every object in the sequence is significant, but also contextualization in the way that you will be missing the entire nature of why having this scene in stop-motion is so effective. So really I urge you to just watch the whole movie and look out for it. But if you want to just watch the scene (or have already seen the whole film) you can watch it here. It is the main character, Alexandria's construction of her surgery after falling and hitting her head. The sequence moves seamlessly back into live-action with direct relationship between the fluttering of butterfly wings and Alexandria's eyes blinking rapidly awake.
The scene is, in the context of the film (and probably without it as well), pretty disturbing, which is to say that the Lauensteins have been extremely effective in creating a scene that both represents the way Alexandria would interpret the events as well as transferring the anxiety she would have felt to the viewer. This was a sort of revelatory moment for me, because though I have seen films with a mix of live-action and stop-motion (Jan Svankmajer's work for example) -it was usually used to briefly animate things that could not otherwise be moving about on their own in the environment of the live-action, and would happen throughout the film. Having just this one scene fully animated, and as a way to show a different perspective, especially that of a child, is just so perfect and so effective in relationship to the rest of the film that it really seemed to place animation on a different plane for me.
It is also impressive stylistically and technically. The Lauensteins have a very distinctive style, which combines claymation, puppet animation, and computer animation, and the figures seen in The Fall are deeply reminiscent of the figures in their claymation short Balance from 1989, which have appeared in other (mainly advertising) work by the two since then as well. The scene in The Fall is a pretty big departure from their work thematically however, which is usually quite humorous.
The Lauensteins are a good example of the different ways animation can be used, and the different effects it can have based on its contexts. I again, urge everyone to see The Fall, for this scene as well as the entire film, and also to check out The Lauensteins' site.
images: screen grabs from The Fall c. Wolfgang & Christoph Lauenstein
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