Tè di sangue e filo rosso

This is a super unsettling movie, and got to me in a way where I started wondering whether I'd seen it as a child, 20-something years ago, and had repressed any memories of it up until this point. But then I saw it was from 2006, and so if I had seen it, it would've likely been something I'd remembered.

I didn't like that feeling of being weirdly nostalgic and also overwhelmed by dread at the same time, but for eliciting such a response, I think this animated film's a success? It's slow and not always captivating after a while, but the style is cool and the animation/making-of is impressive, once you know it apparently took 13 years in total to make.

I saw this on Christmas Day and was rather thankful. 2006 has been a bad year for movies and at the end of each year I start to put together my additions to my short list of films everyone should watch before they die (if they want to be lucid in a film life).

Only two per year are allowed and I had none for 2006. I may put this on the list of what I call "Fours."

Its a short film that seems excruciatingly long. Its a flaw that I think starts to work for the thing after it has stopped working against it. The reason is a matter of pacing. Usually, we look to cinematic storytelling to be economical, like say it is in dreams. Something is shown only as it adds value, nothing is shown for mere completeness. We'd wonder about a filmmaker that shows us every act of the detective driving to an interview: opening and closing car doors, turning the key, fastening seat belt and so on.

In this movie, the filmmaker apparently hasn't mastered the notion of economy. If you have three mice and each is to eat three worms, prepare to see nine worms roasted, grabbed, chewed and swallowed. If you have three mice rescued from carnivorous plants, you'll have to see the entire rescue in detail three times. I suppose if you spend a month for a minute of film (what this works out to) you would be reluctant to cut. So your first impression is likely to be that there is no imposed rhythm, that the thing plods.

But it works for it, I think in an unintended way. The early Herzog had a trick: he would shift in and out of documentary mode with his camera. When in that mode, he would act like a newsman discovering and documenting something real. The camera would catch what it could and linger wherever it happened regardless of narrative necessity. It had the effect of making what we saw real. And of course it was: we saw a crazy man in a South American jungle doing crazy things that we knew were really done as we saw them.

But Herzog in those same films would insert formal shots. Stylized poses and action that reminded starkly that what we are seeing is something staged, artificial. Moving between these two modes is one of the most effective cinematic devices in the book, and that's what we have here. Some shots are so stylized, they're clichés: beings on a quest silhouetted by a setting sun. It works.

We also have what I call folding, tricks to place us in the thing. The story is a bunch of dolls placed to evoke emotional memories in us, and the story has them (those very dolls) obsessed with a doll. Also, if you know the history of fantasy well, you'll immediately recognize that this in an inverse Alice in Wonderland, instead of Alice imagining animals, they imagine her. More: there's a wonderful teaparty, card game which has many enticing elements, the one of note here is that they play with cards that have no faces. Later, the "story" is drawn on those faces.

Finally, we have a framing device. The story features an egg that appears down a stream, is placed in the doll, hatches and things happen. It is framed by the living doll pouring tea, placing an egg in the teapot (which in the story will come floating down a stream). At the end of the story, an object in a pouch is placed in the same stream by the mice and it appears in our living doll's teacup. A bit dear but clear.

And all of this before we get to the actual images. They are extremely effective. Absolutely, breathtakingly engaging. They are original, and sharp because of it. No, there's no Quay or Svankmejer in this. No, it's not dark in any respect. I've said before that to make interesting films you have to be an interesting person. Encountering this makes me think there is an interesting person in this woman, someone worth knowing, though I suspect unless you fully enter her world she will not touch you.

Back to the film, when you watch it, notice how she handles the psychedelic sequence. Its a well known problem in film: how do you show something that is by definition unshowable? How do you use vision to bend vision, the actual process of cognition? What she's done here is gentle, not wild. But it is effective and original. Barriers rather than colored lights. William Morris intercessions.

A final note. The sound. Its sparse, sharpedged, economical in ways the visuals aren't. An amazingly effective compliment.

It may be that this is an unrepeatable event, that we may not get another special thing from this woman. Or it may take too long, but let's hope not. In any case, she's in my life in a small way now, and may find her way into yours if you experience this.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

One filmmaker working on a feature-length stop-motion animated film with dolls and other materials constructed by hand must be an act of obsession--in this case, one that is reported to have taken 13 years to complete. Reflecting that, "Blood Tea and Red String" concerns dollmakers and puppeteers obsessing over and maneuvering for control of a doll, its animation and of the life borne from it. It even infects their dreams, drug-induced hallucinations and drawings. It's why so much time is spent focused on the sewing and other workings of creation, as well as destruction. That the puppeteers happen to be mice and the dollmakers some rat or wolf-like creatures with crow beaks only puts a fairy-tale layer atop what is essentially a film about its own making. It also helps that hand-crafted, personal touch pays off with some beautiful animation, undiluted by dialogue, but with a pleasant score and effective sound effects.

In the largely live-action bookend scenes, the filmmaker plants the germ of an idea--with an egg that flows downstream for the fairyland creatures. The dollmakers sew this egg into their doll, which the puppeteers steal after the doll-making "Oak Dwellers," as the film's maker, Christiane Cegavske, calls them, refuse to sell the commissioned puppet. After the egg hatches, and the bluebird flies away, one of the mice is inspired to write down the story in pictograph form. Meanwhile, the shaman frog reads the scrolls, the spider spins yarns, and the dollmakers retrieve the hatched idea and send it back down the stream to be unraveled and crystalized by the live-action animator's hand.

As for the fairy-tale layer itself, I was rather flummoxed by what I suspected might be religious symbolism. There's the Moses myth with the floating down stream business, with the animator's hand naturally being the creator, the god, of this film. Then, the Oak Dwellers hang the doll on their tree in a crucifixion pose, a position the mice will also put it in at various times. There is also the doll's stigmata-like hand holes for the mice to employ the Christ doll as a string puppet. Conversely, one may see the female-gendered doll as a Virgin Mary type birthing the blue jay. There's even the business of resurrections with the frog's hearts, plus the forbidden fruit.

On the other hand, I like others' interpretations just as well if not more so. The guy on the DVD's commentary track brings up "The Lord of the Rings" and "Pinocchio," among other things, and he and Cegavske briefly discuss the works of Beatrix Potter. There's the Labyrinth going back to Greek mythology, and elements such as tree dwellers and mystical gardens are fairy-tale staples. Better still is Tedg's IMDb review where he claims the fantasy to be the inverse of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," of the animals dreaming Alice. After all, there is a mad tea party, with the playing of cards and even a raven--once again raising the riddle of how a raven is like a writing desk. There are chattering flowers to go along with the anthropomorphic animals, there's the recurring theme of consuming food and drink--sometimes with psychedelic effects--and, again, there are the hearts, and, clearly, the film's favorite color is red--red string and red-blooded tea, although it's the spider that cuts off the heads. Caterpillars, however, are merely food here.

Cegavske avoids explaining the picture in the DVD commentary for a reason. It's ambiguous and symbolic enough to recall many a fairy tale and original enough to be of its own creation. Moreover, Cegavske claims she doesn't know the whole story of these creatures, as though, as within the film, the dolls were the ones who presented the story--the inanimate doll, via the egg, to the animated dolls that are the dollmakers and puppeteers, to the live-action hand of the creator and, finally, to us.

It's hard to describe the delirium of watching this movie, you get to see three albino mice in Elizabethan costumes playing gin rummy with blank cards whilst sipping blood tea. The clanking of porcelain cups and ticking of the clock makes for a frenzied enough soundtrack to push this reviewer over the edge all by itself. There is also a spider in this movie with the head of a Mrs Danvers who calmly mummifies the hummingbirds she catches in her web with red string. Another of the menagerie is a crow with a skeleton head. This is theatre of the macabre par excellence, and certainly would not suit all viewers.

There is a sense of messianism and deep longing in the white mice towards the doll of their affection which I found actually quite touching. This sense of the mystic is not to be found in similar stop motion features like Jan Svankmajer's Alice. I sometimes wonder if we, like the mice in the movie are simply child-like in our existence, fumbling for meaning, victims of an experience that we cannot possibly understand in the round.

The sense of composition in this work is so exquisite. Of course with a film that is almost a solo effort by Cegavske, and which took over a decade to complete, one would not expect anything else. But the devotion does shine through. You could take so many frames from this movie and hang them on the wall.

"Blood Tea and Red String" is the latest watch in my line of obscure animated films I wanted to see. I gotta say for all the talk of this thing being a horror movie, it really only delivers on that in the imagery. The story, while darker than most childhood fairy tales, doesn't revolve around the macabre. It is a Gothic, haunting movie but not really what I'd call horror.

As for the film itself, I liked it. Would watch again if I had the chance, though it's not necessarily a re-watchable kind of flick. It is an art-house film - through and through. While this is the kind of art-house stuff I can get behind (or at least, you know, is actually entertaining and thought provoking instead of pretentious or dull), art movies are something you have to be in the mood for.