by Annette Basile
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Intro:
… truly extraordinary.
In 1982 there was Koyaanisqatsi, a groundbreaking documentary of images married to music, free of traditional narrative. Directed by Godfrey Reggio and exquisitely scored by Philip Glass, the film’s title came from the Hopi language and means ‘life out of balance’ or ‘chaotic life’. It was pioneering cinema, with viewers finding their own meanings within the time-lapse footage and sometimes frenetic pace.
In a way, Tall Tales is Koyaanisqatsi for the digital age. It’s every bit as captivating and meaningful, and also suggests, in one interpretation, something is out of balance. The electronic, somewhat ambient music – which is being released as a self-contained album – is by Thom Yorke (of Radiohead fame) and fellow-Brit Mark Pritchard, while the incredible images are from Australian artist Jonathan Zawada, who has supplied imagery for The Avalanches amongst others.
Like Koyaanisqatsi, this is not a traditional film with a narrative. On the surface, Tall Tales is a series of music videos, yet it’s much more. Surreal and hypnotic, the mostly CGI animated sequences are interspersed with stock and archival footage, with lyrics that are sometimes clear and sometimes unsettlingly submerged. The sound and images fit perfectly and repeating visual motifs help to form a cohesive whole. The individual music tracks are joined together by brief segments featuring a cute, video-game character – an anthropomorphised bird carrying a ‘hobo sack’ or bindle.
One segment shows identical, synchronised robotic machines, which look like twisted arms, creating paintings on canvases. The robot-arms are all making the same painting to start with, but by the end of the segment, each is producing its own unique work. A comment on machine learning and AI-generated art, perhaps, or are there other meanings buried beneath?
Some of the images are freaky but many are fascinating and beautiful. One stand-out animated scene, which has the look of stop-motion, depicts communal chaos in a village, where conflict and general strangeness rule.
Tall Tales is a generic title for a film that’s anything but. Billed as “a fairytale for the modern world”, it’s a Rorschach test and will likely deliver new interpretations on subsequent viewings. The music is superb and there’s so much visual depth and breadth in the animation that it’s hard to believe it all came out of one mind.
Tall Tales is truly extraordinary.
