Animated Feature Contenders: "This Magnificent Cake!"
Saturday, December 14, 2019 at 10:24AM by Tim
With no more new animated releases coming up for a while, this round-up is changing focus: we'll spend the next few weeks looking at some of the more noteworthy titles eligible for the Best Animated Feature Oscar this year. And "feature" barely feels like the right word to describe the 44-minute This Magnificent Cake!, but it just makes it according to the Academy's rules (which state that a feature is more than 40 minutes long).
So it might make it to "feature" on a technicality, but it's unquestionably noteworthy. This is the longest collaboration to date from Belgian directors Emma De Swaef & Marc James Roels, who have made a cottage industry over the last decade with some of the most distinctive-looking films in the world. Not a claim to make lightly, but it's hard to come up with any other way of putting it. The duo's characteristic style is to fashion puppets out of wool and other craft material, and then give them life through stop-motion animation; it's basically what you'd get if you were told to make a movie using only the things you could find in a fabric store...
As surprising and unique as this style is, it's not what makes This Magnificent Cake! such a wild, troubling, stimulating experience. Though by all means, it counts for a lot. What really gives the film its kick, though, is the story being told. All of the films by Marc & Emma's – as they officially go by on their website – are fundamentally grown-up affairs, using the adorable, kid-friendly fuzziness of their puppets to contrast with the weary anxiety and emotional complexity of the stories. Even so, there's something ingeniously perverse about using such a cutesy aesthetic to craft a viciously satiric story about the hellish crimes of Belgian's colonial history in Africa in the late 19th Century.
And it's an anthology film on top of it, finding room within those 44 minutes to tell five different stories about the different people involved, from the officers bloodlessly executing some of the most atrocious cruelties in the history of humankind, to the African victims of King Leopold II's violent regime (he, like Belgium itself, is never named outright, but it's pretty unambiguous what's going on). The film performs an ambitious balancing act of moods: given the goofy-looking puppets and the toy-like world they inhabit, it would be impossible for this to play as anything but a weird, surreal lark, and the filmmakers don't shy away from that. The movie has a dry and absurd sense of humor, keeping things understated enough that's never exactly laugh-out-loud hilarious, but it's certainly impossible to take things seriously. Next to this, there's a sense of twee awe at seeing how the film creates a world out of felt and wool and cotton. And next to both of these is the soul-gutting horror of the colonial regime, presented without sensationalism but also without holding anything back, as each of the five stories descends into psychic darkness or violence as they end.
The huge gap between these moods – really, just the gap between the appealing, warm look of the puppets and the inhumanity of the stories those puppets are enacting – could easily go too far on the one hand and trivialize the history being dramatized, or too far on the other and make this a dreary harangue. That neither of these happen is tribute to De Swaef and Roels's confident execution of their material, using the gulf between style and content to make the ugliness of Belgian history come across with all the more force. Watching cotton water merrily mimicking the foam of a waterfall, for example, is as charming as it gets, and then watching several woolen Africans bash their skulls open on the rocks of that same waterfall seems all the more grisly for how quickly it rips away that charm. It's an impressive use of tonal whiplash to do the work of storytelling, and it leads to an extremely unapologetic, confrontational story about colonialism where you'd never expect it.
I am, in truth, not sure that This Magnificent Cake! can actually do the things it sets out to do: five stories in 44 minutes means that they're all dealt with pretty swiftly, which is a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, these are essentially just a series of sucker punches to the gut, and getting in and then right back out is a perfect way to put that across. On the other hand, with less than nine minutes, on average, to build characters, set up a distinct situation, and then tell us a moral about the spiritual cost of colonialism, the film can't be accused of slowing down to let things sink in and linger, and it's hard not wonder if, say, a 60-minute This Magnificent Cake! might have been even better. Leaving the what-ifs aside, though, this is a gem: one of the strangest animated films of the whole decade, aggressive both formally and politically, alive to the viciousness of the human animal, and yet somehow, persistently dazzling and watchable.
More on the Animated Contenders
Frozen 2
Klaus
Missing Link (Interview)
White Snake
Ne Zha
I Lost My Body
How To Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
The 32 Eligible Films
Current Predictions
Reader Comments (5)
Okay, now this sounds more like something that I'd WANT as the Art Animation That Could in the Animated Feature race.
I enjoyed it, but it falls into the trap of so many other anti-colonialism films from Europe: it almost entirely revolves around the colonists, with the African characters relegated to the periphery.
Wow!!!!! I wanna see this NOW. Where? When!
it is frustrating that the line up at Oscars seems destined to be Toy Story 4, How to train your dragon The Hidden World, Frozen II, Missing Link (which had mixed results) and then one courtesy to Klaus, I lost my body, Shaun the Sheep Farmageddom or the exgtremely underrated The LEGO Movie 2 (which is one of the best animated films of the year and a worthy sequel to a masterpiece)... Yeah, Toy Story 4 is absolutely deserving... but even if they all are, we are going to see again big studio killing all the competition... Weathering With You or Buñuel at the Labyrinth of the Turtles are regretfully longshots...
I saw this at the London Short Film Festival in early 2019 and it really is quite a visual feast, and actually has some very incisive, clever and provocative takes on colonialism. Really something! So I hope it gets nominated.