Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Red Turtle!

Article theme: Ocean Rain - Echo and the Bunnymen

*Record scratch* *freeze frame* Yep, that's me. I bet you're wondering how I ended up in this predicament...

The idea that silent movies are obsolete or can only be revived sporadically as a gimmick (remember The Artist?) can be thrown out after watching The Red Turtle, a 2016 animated gem without a line of intelligible dialogue. Wouldn't a talkie feel the need to expand on the protagonist's backstory and similar nonsense? But do dreams do that? No. Our protagonist is everyman. So are we all.

Womb symbolism or an actual cave? You decide!

Everyman washes up on a deserted island anywhere or nowhere. He sets out to build a raft in hopes of escape, but some unseen force keeps smashing each progressively larger iteration, driving him back to shore. I won't spoil anything that happens, but it's not a film of plot. Take in the moments, the textures, the quiet, contemplative days, the haunting soundtrack, the emotional journey from desperation to anger to despair to hope to you'll-see-what.

Even on a bog-standard DVD, the textures are transportive.

In the same spirit as our hero, I won't say much, and it's no demerit to this monument to beauty that I don't have much to say.

Watch The Red Turtle.

Call It Heavy Metal Noise

If your favourite movie doesn't open with a spaceman driving a muscle car in space you are gay.

Heavy Metal is the best van art kino. If I had a van it would look like Heavy Metal, which would make me unemployable, but that's OK because van ownership lends itself to serial killing anyway, and I would rather be a serial killer than a wagecuck, and more productive.

Based Robby the Robot working the hot dog stand.

Heavy Metal isn't a movie like Captain America Infinity War is a movie. That is to say it isn't flavourless corporate crap promoted on the basis of, and meaningless without, a context situated in an interminable continuity that rewards its developmentally stunted audience with canned water cooler topics. It's a throwback to an era when a movie wasn't a soulless cartographic exercise in world building for r*dditlords. It's not a "universe", but an experience.

There aren't enough ziggurats in everyday life.

It's an anthology of vignettes animated by different units, giving it an ever changing but somehow consistent visual sensibility which is loosely tied together by an aptly ever changing glowing green sphere called the Loc Nar, which serves as narrator and primary antagonist. It's a coveted object that seems to influence people toward evil, reminiscent of Tolkien's Ring, which serves to remind you young faggots that decades before Lord of the Rings was franchise fodder to be raped and cannibalised by Hollywood studios (The Hobbit Cinematic Universe Trilogy Now In 48 Frames Per Second), it was a counterculture stoner classic and inspiration for metal bands whose members had sex (not black metal).

The sum of all evil bullies a young girl for the lulz.

Halloween goals.

The greatest and best segment is heavily inspired by Moebius's Arzach strips, and stars a mute albino waifu riding a big pterodactyl bird across a desert landscape. Arzach should have been the basis for the future of comics instead of Marvel and DC because it explicitly rejects "universe" and continuity tedium for dreamlike imagery and free association. The only decent comic book movies after Heavy Metal were Tim Burton's Batmankinos because they were largely surrealistic and free-associative, but with a German Expressionist aesthetic instead of the more ineffable imagery of Heavy Metal. Everything else has been terminal cancer.

Absolutely a   e   s   t   h   e   t   i   c

Taarna fights the warlord in single combat even though his entire army is just standing there, and thereby defeats the Loc Nar somehow I guess. While this would seem like inexcusable narrative incongruence to a typical subhuman 2018 Cinemasins viewer, in the context of a fever dream like Heavy Metal it makes perfect sense, because sense exists in a state of relativity to the exoticism and superreality of the art, something 2018 mouthbreathers will never understand.

Based Taarna has zero tolerance for the {{{green}}} menace.

Heavy Metal also features two of the great bastards of cinema: Harry Canyon, a cynical, amoral future noir cab driver and occasional carjacker-disintegrator, and STERNN, based criminal Chad mastermind who's got an annngle.

When you have a chin like that you can park anywhere you want.

The first time I watched this kino I thought it was just OK, but now I love it, because in a world of long hours, dumb politics and constant disappointment (Britain), we need psychedelic adolescent escapism with arthouse characteristics more than ever.

1982's "The Snowman" is a Cosmic Horror Christmas Kino!

If your parents weren't disgusting crackheads, you will have grown up watching short animation kino The Snowman at Christmas time. No doubt your young heart will have thrilled to the innocent joy of creation, the bravura flight around the world, and the whimsical dance sequence.

But it will also have been cruelly punctured by the ending, which I will spoil for the crack babies (the snowman melts), because it's far too late for them now. I'm here to rectify that, by revealing that the snowman is a servant of the dark Elder God Cthulhu, who even now slumbers at his cyclopean house in sunken Rl'yeh.

The first sign something is amiss is when the snowman turns his head as the young boy observes him through the glass of his front door, in what horror film viewers will recognise as classic horror film grammar. Compare the moment in Scream (1996) where Drew Barrymore sees Ghostface from behind through the window and he turns around to face her. Something-seeing-you-from-behind-glass is horror grammar, and the animators know it, as they are professionals. This is why only patricians can appreciate art.

This happens at the witching hour, by the way.

The snowman then proceeds to gain the boy's trust so he can take him as a sacrifice to his dark master. The second clue to his true nature is that the cat shits its pants when it sees him. As we know from Stoker's Dracula and others, animals can sense the presence of the uncanny. In fact all the animals in the picture run away from the snowman or behave wildly in confusion, except for the owl, and the owls are not what they seem.

One day I shall write at length on the connections between the Lovecraftian and Lynchian branches of cosmic horror.

The snowman then takes the boy flying around the world, and we get the only lyrics in the whole picture (silent cinema, as you will know, is preferable wherever possible). These include the following:

Suddenly swooping low on an ocean deep

Rousing up a mighty monster from its sleep

That sounds like Cthulhu to me. The kino shows a whale, and the plebeian will interpret that as the "monster" of the lyrics, but it's evident to me that true kinographers know to suggest the presence of the true horror through environmental signifiers. Consider Spielberg's use of the water ripples to suggest the T-rex in Jurassic Park; Park is a very good film, but it would be kino had he never shown the dinosaur at all.

In other words, the presence of the whale indicates the forces arising far beneath the surface: it is driving even massive creatures to the surface in flight.

Absolutely eldritch.

Given just one more day, when the stars were right, the snowman would have sacrificed the boy to bring about Cthulhu's rise. The day is still coming when he will rise up from the sea. His vast wings will black out the stars, and all the Earth will tremble in horror and terror as he walks upon the land!

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nfah Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!