Tim here. The official trailer for the upcoming animated feature Loving Vincent came out yesterday, just a couple of months after the long-delayed film picked up the Audience Award at this June's Annency International Animated Film Festival. We first heard about Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's biopic of painter Vincent Van Gogh back in 2015, but the labor-intensive production missed a hoped-for 2016 release. Here, then, are the results of that labor.
It almost seems silly to run this through the Yes, No, Maybe So filter, because honestly, I've been a firm and immobile YES for a year and a half now. Some of the dialogue and cast choices push me in a bit of a Maybe So direction (when Chris O'Dowd speaks, all I can think is "hey, it's Chris O'Dowd as a voice actor!"), but I know that I'll be there Day 1, whenever Day 1 turns out to be here in the Midwest (it's September 22 in New York, September 29 in Los Angeles, and the rest of the country starts rolling out October 6).
So instead, let's spend a minute talking about why Loving Vincent has that very one-of-a-kind look. Billed as "the world's first oil painted feature film", which is slightly harder to quantify than the film's PR people might hope, Loving Vincent consists 65,000 frames painted by a team of 125 classically-trained painters on glass, with about two-thirds of those have been copied over live-action reference footage. It's not at all unlike the old rotoscoping technique used in things like the Betty Boop cartoons or Ralph Bakshi's features.
And sure enough, what you get from that looks for all the world like Vincent's own oil paintings (every scene is based on a specific painting from his career) given fluid life.
Animation purists can grouse - and to be sure, already are - over whether this "counts", of if it's just a special treatment of live-action material (but let's not forget, a substantial portion of the film is drawn "new", including, if I don't miss my guess, that aerial shot in trailer). But the technology surely matters less than the end results, and those look amazing: the tactile quality of thickly-applied oil paint, shifting and shimmering as it changes under the light, is like nothing I've ever seen in a movie, at least. Whether Loving Vincent is anything more than just a routine biopic remains to be seen, but there can be no doubt that at least it's going to be one of the most visually unique films of 2017.
But that's easy for me to say, I'm an animation junkie. What do you think? Is Loving Vincent a Yes, a No, or a Maybe So?