Street of Crocodiles

Although the imagery is familiar, I'm pretty sure that this was the first film from the Quay Brothers that I had seen and this is why I think it will stick with me. I will not pretend to understand the full commentary or relevance of it but the end titles do help with the portrayal of a soulless world and its outcome. What the makers have succeed in is creating a crushingly animated world where even the puppet freed from his strings comes to misfortune and perhaps looks back to wish he had never been able to break free from his mechanised controls/shackles.

This seems to be the thrust of it from what I can understand and in this regard I found it darkly satisfying and disturbing. With the theme in the background the foreground gets filled with disturbing images of decaying machinery and puppet figures, the doll-headed ones being an image that many viewers will find themselves recognising even if they are not entirely sure why. It is the creative images and movements that drive the film and even when I was not sure what I was watching, i was still very much held by what I was seeing. It is a dark and nightmarish piece of animation and I enjoyed it very much for that – even if it was not the most comfortable viewing ever.

The Brothers Quay are two of the most unique and visually surprising film makers in a long time. Street of Crocodiles is a short they made, and is full of unbelievable animation. An incredible mix of objects are used for the props and characters, creating strange effects and meanings. The visual style of Street of Crocodiles has been copied in many recent stop-go animation films, including many of the music videos for the band Tool. However, nothing can match the virtuosity of the Brothers, who support their impressive animation with political insight, dealing with the strife of their homeland in Europe. Truly amazing things are accomplished by the brothers in this film, such as using telephoto lenses to change focus in mid animation. The amount of detail and work that is put into this film is unbelievable, but the result is even more impressive.

I saw "Street of Crocodiles" on my first Filmfestival in 1991. Its darkness and sadness, its brutality and decay, this strange feeling of being somewhere else and someone else who does not understand the rules of this world. The world of the genius brothers Quay confirmed my urge of being a filmmaker. It's a kafkaesque journey into your subconsciousness. It is unique. 10 of 10.

Devotees of Jan Svankmajer and Kafka, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay distill every disturbing dream you've ever had into a decidedly unsettling short film. American by birth, the twins seem European by sensibility and have settled in London to make their films. Street of Crocodiles is one of their better known efforts and is obliquely influenced by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, who published the memoirs of his solitary life under the title, Sklepy Cynamonowe (literally translated as The Cinnamon Shops, although generally known in the English speaking world as Street of Crocodiles). The Quay's short follows a gaunt puppet who is released from his strings as he explores his bizarre surroundings: rooms full of dark shadows, unexplained machinery and strange eyeless dolls. Everything has a sense of decay and Victorian melancholy. There is a notion of a plot, possibly dealing with sexual tension, but really Street of Crocodiles is about establishing a mood and a nightmarish and deeply sinister world. The Quay's use of tracking shots and selective focus is unparallelled in the world of stop motion.

I like the Brothers Quay work in small doses, and all at once with one film coming after another it becomes too staggering an experience to handle. But seeing Street of Crocodiles really made it for me in terms of connecting it to other Quay brothers work, in terms of how their surreal representations and obsessions and neuroses come into their work, and how it pulled off so well this time. A lot of time their avant-garde impulses almost get the better of them, and many a fantastic image and sound is presented but without much context, leaving it almost impenetrable. I didn't get that this time around with this film- which happened to make Terry Gilliam's top 10 favorite animated films of all time- as it presents its ideas a little more coherently, and unlike other Quay work it ends not on a sudden beat but on one that actually makes sense, in its own non-sensical form.

It's really just one of the most pure visualizations of a nightmare world envisaged, as a puppeteer opens up a box and looks in at a figure moving around in this run down slum of a city, where screws continually keep unscrewing from their places and deformed dolls go about as they please performing grisly tasks. This animated figure (who really is anything but animated, as the character doesn't move around too much, except to continually look at things that perhaps he shouldn't, or doesn't understand at first) gets embroiled in the dolls' plans, which may or may not involve unscrewing his own head as well. At times it seemed like the Quays could go off again into the wormholes of their own visions, but they resist the temptation to go completely with the narrative- whatever there is of it anyway. Disorder and decay were words that kept floating in my mind, and all amid an atmosphere of not necessarily despair, but one that lacked much hope for any of its minions. Featuring some of the most inventive production design I've seen in any stop-motion film, and cinematography that still stuns me hours after watching it, it's a real little marvel of what can come out of the darkest corners of the mind, put to light and molded with the utmost care.