Audience Member
The animation is extremely life-like and effective throughout its minimalist approach. The story is its weaker part and you have to stick with it to get to the crux of what happened in the past and its relevance to the winds of change happening in Czechoslavakia at the time it is set.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
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Audience Member
Stylistically strong and tonally mysterious. A clever and thought-provoking animated film noir--Astonishing animated art-house drama!!
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/22/23
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Audience Member
A morose Czech train dispatcher is haunted by memories of a German woman who was deported after World War II when he was a boy. In shadowy, noirish black and white animation, this is an interesting-looking picture, but unfortunately it's hampered by a gloomy minimalist plot where almost nothing seems to happen, but the story still manages to confuse.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
02/08/23
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Audience Member
Based on a graphic novel trilogy from Czech artists Jaroslav Rudis and JaromiÂr 99 (who also write the screenplay), filmmaker Tomas Lunak's debut movie Alois Nebel is an existential rotoscopy animation about identity and disconnect. Film noir mystique filtered through Buñuel-like surrealism, its narrative problems dont stop you from being compelled by the lusciously rich visuals.
Alois Nebel is the name of our dour hero, voiced and embodied on screen by Miroslav Krobot (who previously delighted in Bela Tarr's The Man From London). Alois is a decoy protagonist, with his significance in the film's overarching narrative being incidental; yet it is through his fractured perspective that the story unfolds.
An ageing guard at a baron train station, his life is as routine as the locomotives that pass him. At least, that's what his stoney-faced exterior leads the people around him to think. Behind it all, he is tormented by hallucinations of his childhood: stripped from the clutches of his mother in Nazi-occupied Prague.
Back in the present day, the only tangible narrative thread is the story of The Mute (Karel Roden), a silenced man who is chased over the Polish border carrying an axe, an old photograph, and skeletons in the proverbial closet. When Alois' nightmares start to become more vivid, and his co-worker wants to steal his job, he is thrown into a local mental asylum. Bunking with The Mute, the pair form a taciturn relationship which will suffer grave consequences once they escape the ward.
Although there are further plot developments that help, I found Alois Nebel a difficult, confusing film to engage with. There are so many ways that director Lunak obfuscates the plot. Firstly, its already an illusory story filled with contextual flashbacks and flash forwards, and two central characters (one an actual mute) who barely speak a word between them. Even when they are dominating the screen, the rotoscoped animation makes it incredibly difficult to register any facial expression or emotion (a problem that Linklater got around by making his actors exacerbate their movements in his rotscopic animation movie A Scanner Darkly). If you really want to 'get' Alois Nebel, having an extensive knowledge of the Czech Republic slang, rural locations, folklore and the relationship with Nazi Germany in WW2 may come as an advantage, as Lunak certainly isn't giving us any expository tips.
Regardless of these plotting and cognition problems, Alois Nebel is a stunning mood piece. That mood may be glum, but the beautiful, Waltz With Bashir style rotoscopy is alluring from the very opening scene of a train sluggishly approaching the screen, right through to the unyielding shots of an inmate being lobotomised in the asylum. It's pure aesthetic vision, and Petr Kruzik's moody score often helps lay on some emotional attachment to it all, even if we fail to understand what the hell is going on.
I should clarify, my problems aren't in being confused with the plot, but confused by the point or directorial message of the whole thing. Is it style over substance? Looking at individual sequences in the film, I'd disagree- the visuals really are that breathtaking. As a whole film, however, Alois Nebel coasts on the comic book-like design, and in the process deals with it's war-time story a little too impersonally, or unjustly. In the end, at a slight 84 minutes running time, Alois Nebel's canvas will certainly draw you in.
Yes, that was a pun. Fuck you, pun haters.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
01/12/23
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Audience Member
lowsy pacing, hard to follow, ok story once you figure it out
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/21/23
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Audience Member
A mute stranger appears on a small train station managed by Alois, an introverted man who is run past by time. So begins a beautiful, deeply melancholic but somewhat tedious animation "Alois Nebel," a film with heavy themes of war and the pain of survival.
Director Tomás Lunák offers somber tones and quiet moments that convey the emptiness the characters feel keenly. On the other hand the narrative isn't all that dynamic. This is beautiful stuff, but as its strength lies in emotion more than in analysis, one might have expected the presentation to be a bit more potent.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/01/23
Full Review
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