Comment Wang-Fo fut sauvé

This beautiful animated movie set in medieval China. A great painter called Wang-Fo is joined by a devoted acolyte Ling who is mesmerised by the great man's work. Wang-Fo's paintings make reality pale into significance. So much so that Ling's wife commits suicide as a result of feeling inferior to the spellbinding images Wang-Fo paints of her. The Emperor arrests them on the grounds that Wang-Fo's paintings have made him miserable because he now hates reality.

This both celebrates the power of art, while questioning that power. Wang-Fo creates images of extreme beauty but they ultimately leave devastation in the real world. The art work in this feature is very nice, the back drops in particular are stunning; they resemble traditional Japanese landscape art themselves. The tone is reflective, while the ending is very poetic. This is certainly a lovely feature.

This animated short has been included as an extra on the R2 DVD of Laloux's Fantastic Planet, released by Eureka in their Masters of Cinema series. It is without doubt sublime. In fact although Fantastic Planet was superb it is almost overshadowed by this 15-minute short.

In it we have Wang-Fo, a supreme master of painting in medieval China. Reality is portrayed in his paintings even more beautifully than it actually is, in fact once one has seen the work of Wang-Fo, one scorns reality. In one part he paints the narrator's wife, who then falls out of love with her and in love with her portrayal in the paintings. One's glee is aroused when one realises the reflexivity involved. You are yourself witnessing animation that is so good that you are in danger of falling out with reality yourself (especially as regards the unreal landscapes in the film, highly influenced by Oriental art).

Without wishing to give away the plot too much I will say that Wang-Fo's skill incurs the Emperor's displeasure. His work is portrayed as being tantamount to sacrilegious because of its tendency to diminish reality. The Emperor orders Wang-Fo's mutilation, and it is how he is saved (the title points to this being the key to the riddle) that really makes the movie transcendent.

What makes me happiest about this movie though is the profound sense of ambivalence engendered. One feels both sides of the argument, that great art is at once transcendent and a perversion. Is Wang-Fo a criminal or an angel (and there are certainly parts where his skill is portrayed as very sinister)? This is a topic that has always fascinated me, having always buried myself in books and images and ideas, steadfastly avoiding subsequently dimmed reality.

Henry Fuseli, a painter of Gothic fantasy commented (to misquote him from memory) that the lover of fantasy will forever be disappointed by reality. Laloux leaves the viewer room to make up their own mind about whether such decadence is worth the price it demands.

This animated short based on a short story by Yourcenar, itself taken from Lafcadio Hearne who retold a tale of more ancient origin, was apparently considered by Laloux to be his finest work.

The best of Laloux's films seem to create worlds that combine a quiet, lyrical beauty with a cruel brutality and this film achieves this in an unflinching fashion. Meanwhile, it poses questions about art and reality, loyalty and deceit, and has a surprising, inexplicable conclusion that defies logical interpretation, but is tonally perfect for the film and had me thinking about its messages for days after. Wonderful, and achieves so much in its short running tme.