It all started with an animal confessing that the bravest thing he’s ever said is the word “help”. Before The boy, the mole, the fox and the horseits main quartet came to life little by little through the illustrations that its author, the British Charlie Mackesy, published through his Twitter account. instagram, first as a kind of personal therapy and, later, as an international phenomenon that ended up crystallizing in the greatest editorial success of the last pre-pandemic Christmas. In December 2019, Mackesy had gone from illustrating books for Oxford University Press to rising to the top of the best sellers on Amazon, thanks to those more than 30,000 followers who entered their stores every day. stories to find inspiration in the form of haiku drawn and written by hand. After March 2020, however, what was a sensation became almost sociological movement and emotional lifeline for many of his followers. it was as if The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse I would have left at the exact moment. Just when the world needed it most.
Among the millions who were inspired by Charlie Mackesy’s boy and animals during the height of lockdown were none other than JJ Abrams Y Woody Harrelsonexecutive producers of a animated medium-length film that Apple TV+ premiered worldwide on Christmas Day. The idea of translating the book into audiovisual language came from Cara Speller, who began working with Gorillaz in her first video clips and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for her work on the short Pear Cider and Cigarettes, directed by graphic artist Robert Valley. Speller reached an agreement with businessman Matthew Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund Freud, to launch the most ambitious project of his career: some 150 people working remotely from more than twenty countries with the aim of being able to translate the nervous, sketchy line Mackesy’s lightweight, incredibly distinctive character to a respectful yet expansive animated language. The result of such a titanic work speaks for itself: The boy, the mole, the fox and the horsethe movie is a triumph of form and a more than sure candidate for Best Animated Short Film in the this year’s oscars. His respect for the idiosyncrasy of the original work, added to his decision to transmute the spring landscapes for a winter that allows them to accentuate the presence of the characters, are truly remarkable.
Refering to intrinsically Mr. Wonderful quality of the wholeLet’s say that the medium-length film doesn’t help too much who (like the author of this article) have problems with it. Mackesy claims to have been inspired by conversations with family and friends to draw a kind of introspective psychodrama, where each animal protagonist represents an aspect of the child’s personality, still in a state of gestation and growth. To his surprise, he says, hundreds of people around the world have written him messages of thanks after seeing his problems reflected in The boy, the mole, the fox and the horse, a work so abstract and universal that it ends up becoming a perfect blank canvas. When the mole asks the boy what he wants to be when he grows up, he answers without hesitation for a second: “Nice.” That kind of über-emotional Esperanto without any direction is magnified in an audiovisual production that includes the voices of Idris ElbeGabriel Byrne and Tom Hollander, as well as a delicate score by Isobel Waller-Bridge, but there is also a sense that Mackesy simply needed to aim for the lowest common denominator of the human experience to move someone who didn’t need much to be moved. The truth is that this tear-jerking festival, remote-controlled to the middle palate, is empty, as it was thought to be filled with whatever each spectator brought with them.. Its packaging, however, is very beautiful to see.
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