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'Where is Anne Frank': great ideals and questionable animation for the film about Anne Frank's diary

2022-04-29T13:07:23.301Z


Ari Folman, director of 'Waltz with Bashir', revives in our days the imaginary friend of the Jewish girl to defend her legacy


“To enhance even more in my fantasy the idea of ​​the long-awaited friend, I would not like to write down the facts in this diary without more, as everyone does, but I will make the diary itself be that friend, and that friend will be called Kitty ”, wrote Anne Frank in the shocking chronicle of her confinement in an attic during the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands.

And in those brief lines of the first pages of his diary also appear the bases of

Where is Anne Frank,

the animated film that the Israeli Ari Folman has composed based on the character: fantasy, longing, friendship and, of course. , Kitty, here the protagonist of the story and not a mere recipient.

More information

The Dutch publisher Ambo Anthos stops the reissue of the book that points to a Jewish notary as an informer of Anne Frank

The imaginary friend revives in our days to defend the legacy of the Jewish girl, and in that sense the film is irreproachable: the message is clear, fair and implacable.

What good is it for us to continue baptizing streets, hospitals, schools and other public bodies with the names of famous people who fought for equality, solidarity and justice —like Frank—, if that message is not accompanied by real measures that make our societies towards progress, towards acceptance, and to banish the behaviors and ideas that those same human beings have already faced in the past?

The message, of course, is even obvious, and since it is presented with clear explicitness in the film, it must be inferred that it is didactic.

Now, so manifest and so instructive that, in the cinema, for lack of conflict, of discussion,

of subtlety and nuances, it is too flat.

Of a neatness so well-intentioned and indisputable that it has little dramatic interest.

Presented at the Cannes festival in 2021, the film received unanimous favorable comments, and not only for its impeccable message.

Also because of its shape.

And there they are going to allow this critic a dissent: the drawings, the textures, the colors, the artistic conceptual treatment and the designs of characters and spaces are quite ugly.

Something better when you get out of the everyday and the figures and actions inspired by reality to enter a certain fantasy.

And also better outdoors at night than indoors during the day.

But, in general, far below the artistic expressiveness that, without going any further, with another type of animation, Folman himself created in his much more exciting and creative

Waltz with Bashir

, through the techniques of rotoscoping and the capture of movements of real interpreters brought to a digital model.

The idea that Kitty, the imaginary friend, is invisible in the Frank girl's house museum, before the contemporary visitors of the place, but that she revives and is palpable outside is very nice.

However, the staging of that duality is never attractive enough in the story as a whole.

And the fact that Folman's own parents inhabited—and survived—the terrible quarters of the Auschwitz extermination camp adds another element to the film's obvious communion.

Although, deep down, it is not very clear who the project is aimed at, a commission from the Anne Frank Foundation: adults may end up thinking that it lacks depth, and children may find it too musty.

WHERE IS ANNE FRANK

Direction:

Ari Folman.

Genre:

animated drama.

Belgium, 2021.

Duration:

99 minutes.

Premiere: April 29.


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Source: elparis

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