Animated by an annihilating creative power, Casa Lobo will certainly be the craziest stop-motion you've seen since beautiful lurette... An aesthetic ball from Chile on a poisonous tale background to (re)discover quickly!
Sectarian happiness
Opening up images of a German colony (inspired by the authentic Colonia Dignidad, founded by a former Wehrmacht brancardier), Casa Lobo directly announces the color. A dirty photograph, DV type, noisy, highlighted by a disturbing voice-off boasting the broads of this German colony, which is soon guessed to be sectarian.
But almost immediately the live action gives way to the stop-motion and history of Maria. The girl fearing the punishment of her community for her lack of involvement ends up fleeing through the woods. Guessing a wolf thrown into her tracks, she lands in a strange house to protect herself from the crunches of Ysengrin. Two pigs welcome, two very special pigs, taking increasingly anthropomorphic traits.
Plastic foil
Chileans Cristobal Leon & Joaquín Cociña develop with their Casa Lobo a true metaphorical narrative around this little girl trying to escape from a sectarian emanation. Yet the script will quickly move on to the background of this film as its formal side takes over until pure hebology. And maybe that's the only weakness that's going to be Casa Lobo. So crazy formally that it becomes almost impossible to follow history... The spectator is therefore content to let himself be carried by this wave of images full of an absolutely frightening inventiveness.
The film could also have a perfect place in an installation of plastic arts, where the public would come in film and go before the end. Forget the narrative, the formal shock is enough. Yet, Casa Lobo discovers itself unhappily in its totality and the millefeuille of ideas deployed in the eighty minutes of film makes it all the more overwhelming (in the galvanizing sense of the term).
Close to the recent masterpiece of Phil Tippett (just in box at Carlotta) Mad God, or even more by its terrifying themes Shinamarink (or The House, always the best horror movie of 2023 and far !) available on Shadowz, Casa Lobo hollow idea of the passage of time as a vector of rot. Because under the camera (or rather the photograms) of Cristobal León & Joaquín Cociña, nothing lasts... The chewed paper blackens, the walls change color and sever, the limbs disintegrate, and in the end only the mould, the asses of candles extinguished and the dead characters remain.
Ode to rot
And this idea is reflected in the art itself of the two Chileans. No matter what work appears in front of their objective – sketch of a drawing, a painting, a sculpture – they will give them life as much as they will give them death. With a constant clock, the same ones that panic from their needles overexcited in the planes of Casa Lobo, the drawings are born, extinguished, rotted, scattered in a thousand cockroaches coprophages before taking life again, in another form, elsewhere in this strange Sheet house Filming.
An ode to the inherent rotting of life (and therefore of creation), staggering from beginning to end of Casa Lobo… Jusqu’à sa scène post-générique où l’on entraperçoit l’image crasseuse d’une jeune femme nourrissant un petit cochon au biberon. L’image elle-même porte les germes de sa propre mort – crasseuse photographie DV griffée et bruitée – emportant dans son sillage la gêne flippante qui traversera finalement tout le long-métrage.
« C'est un des films d'animation les plus effrayants et visionnaires que j'aie jamais vus. »
Parfaitement logique pour Ari Aster (Heredity, Midsommar) de recruter ces deux génies de la stop-motion pour la section animée de son Beautiful is Afrid, tant l’univers visuel des Chiliens colle à ce que Aster déploie dans son chef-d’œuvre horrifique du début d’année. Expérimental, génialement inventif et glauque à souhait, on vous promet que Casa Lobo sera le tant attendu choc en stop-motion !
Ça a l’air superbe. Je dois aussi rattraper Pinocchio cette année.