Le Mans 1955

The poetry is the basic trait of this moving animation. The second - the pure geometry . And the delicacy of story. Portrait of a tragedy, it is not the story of a terrible car race but a film about people defined by theirs desires, regrets, difficult decisions, acceptance, sacrifice and the thoughts about the other. Short, superb work.

This short animated film is a stylish, yet distorted presentation of what happened at the infamous "24 Hours of Le Mans" race of 1955.

The film starts well enough, but what threw my suspension of disbelief off was that in the film it had been dark for quite a while before The Thing That Makes This Race Infamous happens. Which in real life happened on 11th June 1955 at 6:26pm, three and a half hours before sunset, in full daylight. After this intentional distortion it was unfortunately impossible for me to concentrate on the actual story anymore. If they intentionally distort this simple fact, why would I care of the rest of it?

Could be worse, of course. At least they didn't add sad rain.

As it is, I'm still giving the film an average grade, a 5 that is. Without the distortion, it could easily have earned a 7 or 8 from me. Difficult to tell exactly after the magic was broken.

I came to this thinking that it was somehow connected to the film Le Mans 66 (in the US as Ford v Ferrari) but it is not. Instead it is the story of a tragic accident that occurred during the 1955 Le mans 24 hour race.

In telling the story the film is impressively cinematic. It is an animation but it has great shot selection and 'cinematography', which combines with a strong colour palette and sense of the drama and tragedy. This produces the foundation on which the fire plays out. The delivery of the moral drama is perhaps a bit rushed, but this sort of comes with the territory in a short film, and it compensates for it by some dramatic moments, and solid voice work. The scale of the animation is impressive; technically it shows some limits in its movement, but mostly it is impressively designed and delivered - while the story means you are not focused on the elements of the film so much as you are on the whole.

Being familiar with the event I heard about this movie a while ago, and how it skillfully and delicately captured the drama and mood as it unfolded, it took a while before I had an opportunity to actually watch it, alas with high anticipation.

Well, it did not match the expectations and I have a hard time understanding all the fuzz. It has a distinct graphical style for sure, but not to the extent that it is different from many others. It is slick, but that's really it and it did not, at least to me, convey any particular sense of drama per se.

What effectively kills this movie though is that it takes serious liberties with the actual event it portrays, which begs the question of what really is the point of the movie? As a movie it barely makes sense, and I can understand that the representation as shown is both moving and shocking for a viewer/film festival reviewer, whom either hasn't heard of the accident before, or isn't familiar with the details, but to me it was a serious flaw that so much was just made up for dramatic effect. Especially since the reality was even more dramatic, and beyond making it more sinister by having it play out in the dark, I can't see any viable reasons for straying like this. The events are for example well documented in numerous articles, not to mention Wikipedia.

Mild spoilers ahead I guess, and I'm not an expert but for example, John Fitch did not have an argument with Neubauer at the time of the accident, he was standing next to Levegh's wife and saw the whole event unfold. John Fitch neither had to persuade Neubauer, as he too quickly came to the conclusion that it would be a PR disaster regardless if they won or not.

In all the movie oozes of lost opportunities. It was undoubtedly a horrific tragedy, but more interesting would have been to see the reasoning behind keeping the race running. Another aspect is that, as this was obviously before cell phones, apparently few people on the other side of the track realized the extent of what had happened until hours later, which is something that is so much more remarkable given that it happened during daylight, and not as shown in the movie when it was dark and the crowds had started to recede.

First off, the art style is unique; I have never seen anything like it and I love it. Second, I already new about the 1955 Le 24 Heures du Mans Tragedy, but this put it into a perspective that forced me to understand how and why it was such a tragedy. I have watch it, over and over, a total of 7 times, Noticing even finer details. The imagery of Levegh's crashed 300SLR as a mangled mess of blood and fire, much like his own cadaver, is astounding; even more so when you realize it's blood red for the fire and heat. Finally the conclusion is very poetic and is the nail in the coffin of this artistic depiction of a tragedy that killed 80-84 people, and injured 180 others.