At once animal and human, past and future: in its very first minutes, Sun Xu’s epically constructed animated film already opens up a visually exuberant narrative universe in which philosophical observations and an oppressive social satire merge in excitingly associative fashion. The director worked with hundreds of animators for more than ten years to bring “Magic Atlas” to the big screen – by way of woodcut animation, ink drawings, contemporary painting and Persian miniatures, while deliberately avoiding rotoscoping and other techniques not based in analogue image-making. Magic and escapism are urgently needed, for the fictional coal empire of Luocha imagined by Sun Xu is ultimately a totalitarian dictatorship whose inhabitants are kept in check by camera mosquitos and collectively-ordered amnesia. And magicians end up in prison, because flying – or even letting your imagination run wild – is considered suspicious in Luocha. When one magician comes across the orphan boy Xiao Zhi, magic (mental) possibilities emerge to escape this captivity – or is it voluntary surveillance? Reincarnation becomes an opportunity for liberation here in suitably vivid fashion.

Marie Ketzscher