O Jogo Masculino

Jan Svankmajer's stop-motion films are ultra-bizarre and often creepy. Some of them are also pretty funny--and "The Male Game" is also a tad creepy.

The film stars the same actor in every role. He plays a guy at home watching a soccer game, the players on the field AND the referee. However, this game ain't normal in any sense! The players often are giant cutouts that move about using stop-motion. And, in closeups, they are clay. Why the closeups? Because the game features a unique way to score--by ripping the opponents' faces apart! Scissors, a child's train, bottles--anything goes as the clay faces are torn to pieces! It's all very surreal as well as a wonderful commentary about the brutality of the sport and the fans. Weird but very enjoyable and the stop-motion was done quite well--as you'd expect from Svankmajer. Not his best, but quite good.

Mixing live action scenes with a quite original (and brutal dark comedy) animation and smart edition with football pictures, this is an acidic Czech film that makes fun with the recurrent brutality in that sport and the way men deal with it. Also the ritual of supporting, drinking beer, eating anything, appears in this innovative film. Not only it worth for the competent animation but also for the gags.

"Manly games" is a combination of live action, very creative claymation, and a sport documentary. It stars when thousands of men of different ages and social standing arrive to the stadium to watch a soccer game. Then we see a man who is going to enjoy the game watching it on TV in his apartment where the fridge in the kitchen is filled with beer bottles. When the game begins, we realize that the rules of the game have been changed: the points seem to come from the team who kill more of the other team's players. The funniest and most shocking scenes demonstrate the amazing skills and imagination with which the players of one team dispose or their opponents. I've always thought that there is no creature in the world that has developed the ability in torturing, mutilating, and murdering its own species with such creativity and delight as humans do and Svankmajer proved me right.

"Male Games" or "Manly Games" is a more ambitious piece of animation from filmmaker Jan Svankmajer, largely due to its premise. Rather than relying completely on claymation or stop-motion, the film combines three different techniques into one fourteen-minute film: live action, cartoon animation, and stop-motion. The combining of these three techniques, for a 1988 short, is obviously not going to be perfect in terms of visual continuity, but Svankmajer does about the best he can, and there is certainly no criticizing it entirely because of this. In fact, the film remains a fun one to see because of its dark sense of humor, combined with a subtle yet apparent social commentary.

The setup involves a man entering his apartment and sitting down before his TV to watch football (soccer). As the game begins, the viewer sees that the goal of the game is not to make goals but to literally murder as many opponents as possible. Every time a player is killed, using some sort of crazy method, they are dragged off while the crowds cheer and the man (who by the way plays all the players) guzzles more beer and cookies. An amusing finale follows.

Overall, it's an amusing film with plenty of dark comedy, even if the combination of techniques isn't perfect. The shots of the crowd are in black and white and probably stock footage, while the cartoon animation on the field is color and clearly not live action. But the stop-motion is superb, and the deaths are comical if dark, with lots of creativity involved in each one. As other reviewers have already said, the short seems to be creating a commentary on the brutality of sports, in a hilariously exaggerated fashion. Not the strongest Svankmajer effort, but among the more amusing shorts he made.

Svankmajer is a god! Really funny animation, a wonderful critic against soccer and supporters. See it! You will laugh a lot