LA JEUNE FILLE SANS MAINS / THE GIRL WITHOUT HANDS (2016)

You know the drill for animated features: a ten-minute crawl of fast scrolling end credits (hundreds & hundreds of faceless tech meisters) to patiently sit thru in hope of a brief animated encore.  (Usually a plug for some putative sequel.)  Not here, more like two minutes; four or five names per card; half of those names Sébastien Laudenbach.  And that’s only fair since this minor astonishment is all but entirely the work of said M. Laudenbach.  (His main credit reads ‘Written and Drawn by.’)  Taken from an exceedingly dark, presumably unexpurgated fable by those laugh-a-minute sadists, The Brothers Grimm, the visual style suggests thru quick, throbbingly alive sketches, often a mere impression of events & characters to start our imagination.  It’s up to us to complete the thought.  At times, Laudenbach might be playing a game to see just how little he can get away with and still have it all register.  Naturally, not everything comes off for us to work things out, but with a story this ghastly, perhaps that’s for the best!  Here, a poor miller sells his daughter to a devilish creature for plentiful water and ’dirty’ gold only to find she’s rejected as barter because her pure tears have ‘spoiled’ her hands.  Off they come or lose the deal!  Yikes!  Later, she’ll get useless, if handsome, gold replacements from a Prince before he goes off to lose a war; believe an enchanted lie about her giving birth to a monster; then return to . . . well, you can’t imagine.  Young inventive kids, the scribblers in your life who create a notebook of squiggles and tell you a story to go with it, might be excited to see how the simplest of color washes and broad strokes work to make form, characterization & movement.  Alas, the underlying story and level of violence (even with a happy ending) would give anyone under 13 nightmares for months.  Older than 13, too!

DOUBLE-BILL:  In addition to earlier shorts,  Sébastien Laudenbach has now made what appears to be a friendlier feature: CHICKEN FOR LINDA!/LINDA VEUT DU POULET/’23 (not seen here).  OR: In the Sell-Your-Soul-To-The-Devil Department, this story recalls Stravinsky’s L'HISTOIRE DU SOLDAT/A SOLDIER’S TALE which was also made into a superb film by eccentric animator R.O. Blechman working in CinemaScope.  But it only seems to be currently available in Pan-and-Scan abominations at half it’s original length.  A real loss.