>>REVIEW
THE DANISH POET
NARRATED BY Liv Ullmann
DIRECTED BY Torill Kove
Opens Friday, February 16 (will be screened before The Queen)
Uptown Screen
This may sound like sacrilege, but I’m tired of animated shorts from the National Film Board (NFB). I don’t question their cultural significance or their lasting power worldwide, but the NFB is constantly turning out 15-minute animated dramas that ultimately all look and feel the same. You know the kind – highly personal stories, narrated front-to-back by an earnest voice, populated by simply drawn characters who have limited features and often no more than 12 hairs on their head. The Danish Poet is one such film.
Opening with a mildly experimental sequence where railroad tracks turn into Watson-Crick DNA strands, The Danish Poet explores the power of chance on genetics by telling the story of a poet suffering from writer’s block and how fate has its way with his romantic life.
Let me be clear. There is nothing wrong with this film. It’s charming, its artistic style draws broad comedy from simple animated sketches and, like most NFB shorts, The Danish Poet has a bit of a dark side. The problem is that by the end of the film’s meager 15-minute running time audiences are left wondering if this story is so personal, why is it relevant to me, and if there is going to be so much narration, why has it become a film rather than a printed short story? The answer has less to do with storytelling and more to do with NFB tradition. The Danish Poet fits quite snugly into its canon, and as such you know exactly what to expect. |
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