A messy delight: French filmmaker Sébastien Laudenbach’s hand-drawn animation.
There were good reasons for my 3-year-old sister to wail in terror when she rode Snow White’s Adventures at Disney World in 1981. It was a truly frightening ride, and, like the 1937 Disney film that was its inspiration, it drew on the creepy storytelling of the Brothers Grimm. Walt Disney turned to Grimm folktales repeatedly for his animated features, though films like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella tended to emphasize cuteness over the more unsettling aspects of the Grimm stories.
The same can’t be said for The Girl Without Hands, a French animated feature based on a Grimm tale. Yes, elements of this striking film may remind you of Disney’s Grimm features, including troubled parental relations and a more or less charming prince. But there also is shocking violence, as well as intense psychosexual imagery, and even peeing and pooping.
The film, which screens Oct. 25 at 7 p.m. in the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art’s Spotlight Cinema series, features a visual style that’s a dazzling alternative to the clean digital look of most animated movies at the megaplexes. This is the debut feature by Sébastien Laudenbach, previously a maker of short films. He animated The Girl Without Hands himself, by hand, and his design is a messy delight. It shimmers and pulses with color. Numerous images linger with me, including a colossal angelic being that lives underwater, and a menacing wild hog, which stares out with glowing red eyes.
Like the best folktales, The Girl Without Hands taps keen undercurrents of dread. It’s short, just 73 minutes, and all the more powerful for that. The story begins unfolding in snapshots over the opening credits. A miller (voiced by Olivier Broche) and his wife (Françoise Lebrun) have a daughter. He plants a tree by the mill, and as the girl grows up, its upper branches become her refuge. In one dreamy scene, the girl (Anaïs Demoustier) watches from the tree as birds dive into the sea. She smiles.
The family falls on hard times. One day, when the miller is out chopping wood, he encounters the devil (Philippe Laudenbach), who offers riches in exchange for ... well, in exchange for the daughter, it turns out, though that isn’t clear to the miller at the time. This deal would never hold up in court. The devil comes to collect, and eventually, by a horrifying fairytale logic that I will let you discover, the girl has no hands.
She sets off into the woods, like fellow Grimm protagonists Hansel and Gretel (and Snow White). With the help of that giant water creature, she finds her way to a castle occupied by a kindly prince (Jérémie Elkaïm, whose husky voice is so seductive it made me giggle). Calamity follows, brought on by that pesky devil. In an inspired conceit, this demon appears in a variety of guises, including a gruff old man, an ice-skating young woman and a little boy who skips and plays while everything around him goes to hell. Talk about creepy.
