Presented as part of the Pulsation selection of the GIFF (Geneva Internation Film Festival), Art College 1994 offers a lively two-hour dive in a Chinese art school in the heart of the 1990s.
China Animated
After being subjugated by 3D animation of Deep Sea at NIFFF, now the proposal of Jian Liu (already noticed with his Have a Nice Day in 2017) Art College 1994. If the country is the same and we remain in the world of animation, the proposal is decidedly diametrically opposed: 3D moves to both dimensions, the world of childhood disappears in the face of bottling questions of entry into the adult world, and pure fantasy becomes a blatant realism.
Thus, Art College 1994 opens on his quartet of buddies, all students in a Chinese art school of the 1990s. Bavard, the film appears at first glance rather airtight, stretching his long conversation, pouring in both philosophical and vulgar adolescent the most trivial. And while the construction of the plans – a foreground where characters with rather simplistic and little nuanced features are found, against a more provided background, tending almost towards photographic representation – attracts the eye, the overall statism of the feature film makes it hardly more welcoming.
Nevermind
However, as friendships develop and develop in favor of the love stories that come to enchass them, one will gladly let oneself be carried by this strange animated film, extremely free as much on the background (we discuss for a long time art, obviously, but also family relations, the importance or not of the traditions, the position of China in the world) as on form (the feature film sometimes stops for several minutes on a drawing, on a song, before once again resume the course of its narration).
Perhaps the most interesting is the speech Art College 1994 on the creeping arrival of capitalism. Dismissed in substance in the dialogues between the characters on several occasions, however, one finds the influence of the West on this young, post-adolescent China, ready to draw the contours of the country of tomorrow. Talks about Kurt Cobain's death to multiple posters (The Godfather, Rambo, pin-up moults Playboy...), it is felt that he depicts a pivotal moment when capitalist refusal is still on all lips, while the bodies are already giving up to Western customs.
A key feature of the largely innocent choice of two capital works directly mentioned – on several occasions – in the Art College 1994. First The Godfather (1972) of Francis Ford Coppola, the organ of New Hollywood, this pivotal movement of emancipation of directors of the tutelage of studios by the emergence of immense authors (to say so quickly)... But also In Utero, this Nirvana album coming after the monster success of Nevermind, of which it is necessarily (see then) so much question in Art College 1994 and which was to mark a schism with their precedent, which they considered "too smooth".
Two pieces of art hardly chosen at random, therefore. The desire for caesure in which they belong and the pivot point they draw perfectly dialogue with this transmutation to work within the Chinese society, which is almost infected by capitalist hydra and which feels its own foundations weakened.
In short, a feature film for adult animation, to put in the graphic line of White Plastic Sky (sometimes retitled) Sky Dome 2123), which tries to question the torments of the era through its cluster of characters. Slow, long and sometimes hermetic, he deserves to be caught up in it as his freedom of tone brings a wind of freshness into a genre that too often relies on his achievements.
You made me want, I missed Annecy! Despite the slowness, it's nice to see the film showing the uniqueness promoted by the Chinese model. I imagine that the conditions of production must be complicated and the message must go into submarines all the more.
I love the title by the way!
Very curious too.