Familiar Territory

Film: The Breadwinner
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on the latest internet machine.

I bought a Chromebook today because there are new restrictions that have been placed on my laptop. I suppose those restrictions are fair; the laptop I generally use is owned by where I work. But streaming sites in general have been made no-fly zones, as have some game-related sites that I like to go to. So I bought myself a Chromebook and christened it today with The Breadwinner, which has just shown up as a streaming option on NetFlix. It wasn’t a film that I was leaping at the chance to watch, but Best Animated Feature is the only one of the latest set of Oscar nominations I hadn’t hit yet.

The first thing that struck me here was that this felt very familiar. Then I realized that I had kind of already seen this before. Osama, released in 2003, is very much the same basic story as The Breadwinner. In both films, a young girl and her family are more less left without a man in the household in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan. Since women are not allowed to leave their houses when not in the company of a man, this sets them up to slowly starve to death, unable to even set foot outside their home without the fear of immediate reprisal. In both cases, the daughter—still young enough to possibly pass for a boy—disguises herself in an attempt to find work and buy food. In the case of Osama, this goes tragically, terribly wrong. In the case of The Breadwinner, that’s much less the case.

The Secret of Kells

Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Sometimes you find something that you really didn’t expect. Such was the case with The Secret of Kells for me. I’ve been trying to knock out animated films pretty regularly, since that’s an area where I have regularly been lax on this blog, and it just happened that this film is currently streaming. I expected pretty much standard animated fare. What I got instead was the sort of eye-opening film experience I had watching The Adventures of Prince Achmed. This is not a film that you watch for the story, although the story is very good. This is a film to experience for the gorgeous artwork.

It doesn’t look like this at first. In fact, the animation looks initially rather rudimentary and old, not at all like the three-dimensional work of modern animation. It’s disconcerting at first, and then the reality dawns: the animation is specifically designed to look like an ancient illuminated manuscript. Original story author and co-director Tomm Moore said that after seeing the culturally-inspired artwork of Mulan, he wanted to do something similar with Irish heritage and art. The result is a film that is uniquely gorgeous. To do this, he used a fictionalized account of a fictional version of the Book of Kells, and illuminated manuscript of the four gospels, something considered one of Ireland’s greatest cultural relics.