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Madame Tutli-Putli

by Chris Lavis & Maciek Szczerbowski
A National Film Board of Canada Production
DVD, 17min 21s, colour
Sales: $15.95
Distributor’s Website: http://www.nfb.ca.

Reviewed by Kathryn Adams
Australia

kathy@pacific.net.au

For Montreal based filmmakers, Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, animating their first professional stop motion short, Madame Tutli-Putli,was “excruciatingly difficult.” The pair, who also wrote and directed the film, spent 15hour days in a darkened room for two years working on the puppet animation alone. As a result of such painstaking tedium and attention to detail, this dynamic duo have not only earned themselves a host of awards, including an Academy Award Nomination this year for Best Animated Short Film, but also have created a menacingly suspenseful film and brought the beguiling and enigmatic Madame Tutli-Putli to life.

The film’s ominous opening, with Madame Tutli-Putli laden with luggage and waiting for a night train, sets the mood and draws you in immediately. Through clever sound design (David Bryant), superb art direction and a stirring and emotive music track (directed by Bryant and Jean-Frédéric Messier), it is evident from the opening shot that something sinister is out there. Once on board the train, Madame Tutli-Putli encounters other passengers, but as night falls she finds herself alone and caught up in what has been described as “a desperate metaphysical adventure. Adrift between real and imagined worlds.”

Lavis and Szczerbowski, who founded their production company Clyde Henry Productions in 1997, are also sculptors and collage artists, talents that are brought to the fore in their impressive puppet and set design. The pair chose to cast aside traditional stop motion puppet armatures for hand-built aluminium wire skeletons and experimented with their own hand-designed body moulds to create their puppets. All of the film sets were hand-built and filled with an assortment of treasures the filmmakers tracked down in hobby shops or retrieved from garbage bins! They worked closely with their costume designer (Laurie Maher) who, with the same eye for detail, scoured flea markets for fabric and hand-dyed tiny costumes, giving the Madame her unique style.

The lighting is particularly outstanding in this film. Lavis and Szczerbowski travelled on trains to observe the way light danced over passengers’ faces as the train moved so they could mimic the same effects when filming their interior carriage shots. The pair has revealed that “scale lighting kits were created out of miniature fluorescents pulled from the wreckage of a defunct martini bar, and lighting effects were achieved with smashed car mirrors found on the street outside the studio.”

Adding to the list of technical and creative processes that have combined to give this film its distinctive look are the special visual effects used for the eyes of the puppets. The production team joined forces with portrait artist, Jason Walker, who created the exacting technique of filming human eyes and digitally placing them onto the puppets. This lends a real sense of artistry to the film and enables the puppets to express complex human emotions and nuances that are missing from many contemporary computer-animated films.

Madame Tutli-Putli’s gestures and movement are so fluid and life-like at times that it is easy to forget that she is essentially just wire and feathers. A close-up of her footfalls as she walks through an empty dining cart during one eerie scene is a prime example of Laurie Maher’s masterful choreography.

It is debatable whether or not the storytelling comes up to that of the stunning visuals––its metaphysical pathos could be lost on mainstream audiences; however, there is no doubt about the suspense it creates. With no dialogue, the film’s tension is generated through sound and vision, reminiscent of Hitchcock’s penchant for unsettling his viewers in this way.

Visually arresting from start to finish, this evocative film has something new to offer the world of animation and its exceptional production values are testament to the effort these two filmmakers and their dedicated team have put into every frame.