French animation team Jean-Loup Felicioli & Alain Gagnol followed their popular A CAT IN PARIS/’10 with a winning (if less sampled) feature showing similar strengths & weaknesses. ‘Weaknesses’ perhaps too strong a term; rather an average story sense yet to equal their dazzlingly flat, painterly, poster-ready visuals. Both films hang on a secret double life; here a teenage boy undergoing chemo-treatments releases a phantom copy of himself at night, flying around the city while his corporal body sleeps. And what a time to have a ghostly presence on the scene as Manhattan is being attacked by a computer virus released by a Super-villain with the face of a Cubist bust. The boy soon joined by an injured cop down the hall, the only person to not only witness his phantom form, but to be able to remember it upon waking. And while their daring adventures and close calls run the story, far more memorable is the visual flair in character design and settings, along with a bold Fauvist color scheme (an urban one) that vivifies every frame. At the end, we almost get a sacrifice to save the day, but someone chickened out. The producers? The distributors? Felicioli & Gagnol? A pity. A willingness to go for the fences and not worry about possible sequels might have made this one work on another level.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: CAT on the whole more successful; this one more intriguing. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/une-vie-du-chat-cat-in-paris-2010.html OR: Compare the style with some of the BATMAN animated direct-to-video features from the same period.
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