At once animal and human, past and future: in its very first minutes, Sun Xun’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 Xun 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

Charel the bachelor is the odd man out in a small village community of simple-minded oddballs. They grumpily let him now that he does not live up to the manly character of his name anyway. A careless moment with the beloved fish of his otherwise hard-hearted mother catapults him from the outsider position into the centre of an unfortunate chain of events. Full of good intentions and hopes of recognition, he poaches his way through the biblical story and returns with a heavenly child. Not part of his plan: The village does not see him as a divine messenger but as the Horned One. “Melk” portrays its Bruegel-like, robust characters precisely, down to the smallest facial twitch and squeaky voice, subtly interweaving the absurd and the everyday and plundering art history shamelessly yet skilfully to distort a peasant play into a folk horror tale. It’s for films like this that animation was invented.

André Eckardt