Wonderful Movie

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

"Drawing", cartoonist Robert Crumb once said, "is just an excuse to crosshatch." That most angsty of illustrative techniques is put to striking and eerie use in Fear(s) Of The Dark, a collaborative showcase which sees hipster artists from America, Italy and France exploring various manifestations of fear to a greater or lesser strike rate.A main drawback of the film is that it isn't in the least bit scary. Despite the varying grip of the intertwined narratives, however, the artwork is of a consistently high standard, ranging from the dense pencil work of French cartoonist Christian Hincker (aka 'Blutch') to Marie Caillou's manga-influenced techniques and Charles Burns' stark, instantly recognizable style, familiar from 'RAW' magazine, record covers and 'Black Hole' comic, which at the time of writing is a potential comic-to-screen adaptation for David Fincher.All kinds of nightmares, phobias and neuroses are brought to light (and dark) here, from Cronenbergian body horror (a recurrent theme) and the fear of penetration, to a fear of powerlessness, self-knowledge or social ostracisation; while Richard McGuire's grandstanding finale brilliantly literalises the film's title.In the first of two repeated interludes, Blutch visits a pack of slavering hunting hounds upon a succession of terrified villagers, while their 18th century master, a frightful wraith in a tricorn hat, cackles with poisonous glee. Rendered in a series of savage crosshatches, this is gory and macabre stuff as the hellhounds tear their prey limb from bloodied limb before turning on their handler who has dared to show them their own reflection.A second, more tedious bridging sequence features the work of graphic artist and typographer Pierre Di Sciullo, whose abstracts are accompanied by a dreary monologue from Nicole Garcia, endlessly articulating bourgeoisie fears such as "I'm scared of being mediocre"; "I'm scared of being politically unaware"; and "I'm scared about having to explain the superiority of Western culture to an Afghan villager watching TV with me." Yes, we get it.Charles Burns' EC Comics-inspired yarn riffs on body horror, sexual disgust and male fears of emasculation - all familiar Burns territory - as a strange, humanoid mantis takes its revenge on a nerdy boy who bottled it up years before, taking over his girlfriend and rendering him a helpless brood-mule for its alien spore.Marie Caillou's twee, brightly shot ghost story, queasily at odds with the prevailing atmospherics, sees a doctor administering frightening sleep-inducing injections to a psychiatric patient so that she may complete her nightmares about her childhood, when she was haunted by a samurai ghost.Lorenzo Mattotti's tale, richly rendered in charcoal, concerns the hunt for a ferocious, unseen beast which is killing off the populace of a rustic village ("the police fished out the peasant's mutilated head from the river"). A goose's mounting panic, as it is tied to a stick overnight in an attempt to draw the nocturnal monster out, is palpable.Finally, New Yorker Richard McGuire, who works with hand-drawn paper cutouts, demonstrates what animation is truly capable of using just black and white, as a man takes shelter from a blizzard in a deserted, pitch-black Victorian mansion. With the viewer as much in the dark as the panicked, blundering traveller, McGuire ratchets up the tension, introducing tinctures of organic light from candles or holes in the walls and throwing up strange optical illusions, until finally unleashing the terrible power of a well-timed white-out. Here, an excess of 'light' is to be feared as much as the dark.All in all, a bit of a hodgepodge, this. Its natural home will be on DVD, where the occasional desire to fast-forward can be indulged. However, fans of the contemporary animation scene will find much to admire here.

Here is the producer Prima Linea Productions' summary of the film Fear(s) of the Dark/Peur(s) du noir (2007) which combines the work of eight artists:"Spiders' legs brushing against naked skin... Unexplainable noises heard at night in a dark bedroom... A big empty house where you feel a presence... A hypodermic needle getting closer and closer... A dead thing trapped in a bottle of formaldehyde... A huge growling dog, baring its teeth and staring... So many scary moments we have experienced at some point in our lives – like the craftsmen of this journey straight to the land of fear. Six of the worlds hottest graphic artists and cartoonists have breathed life into their nightmares, bleeding away colour only to retain the starkness of light and the pitch black of shadows. Their intertwined stories make up an unprecedented epic where phobias, disgust and nightmares come to life and reveal Fear at its most naked and intense..."The artists are Blutch, Marie Caillou, Pierre Di Sciullo, Jerry Kramski, Lorenzo Mattoti, Richard McGuire, Michel Pirus, and Romain Slocombe. They are designers who have done logos, product designs, and other things besides animation. Some of the black and white drawings are gorgeous, rich, subtle, pleasing to the eye--even distractingly so. Where the images are most beautiful, the animation is most lacking.The best story is one by Charles Burns of a nerdy boy who loves insects and grows up isolated and timid as a college student. Like the sucker Koistinen in Aki Kaurismaki's 2006 film 'Lights in the Dusk,' he is then seduced by a woman who only wants to entrap and use him, only this one is far more sinister and is perhaps the descendant of a praying mantis-like bug the man lost under his bed long years ago (he still sleeps in the same bed). Combining elements of Poe and Kafka, this story, which sensibly combines story elements that don't quite fit, is genuinely creepy. The drawing is fluent but utilitarian.Caillou's story is set in Japan and concerns that standard image of Japanese helplessness and provocation to perverts, a uniformed schoolgirl. There is also a sinister doctor with a big hypodermic and the ghost of a samurai and a creature with several layers of eyes. The trouble is that this story frequently interrupts itself and never finishes.In between these are two other stories, because it is the team's aim to make their omnibus into some kind of seamless whole. First there is the animations of Blutch of the eighteenth-century man with a team of snarling dogs who attack a helpless boy. Then there is the screen of geometric games by Pierre di Sciullo, entertaining us with imagery that ranges from Saul Bass to the Russian Avant Garde, while an ironic, nagging woman (well voiced by Nicole Garcia, who has made a career of this kind of character) lists things she's "afraid of" or doesn't want to become.Otherwise, I was not very taken by the stories and at times could barely follow them. The device of intermixing two of the animations/short films with the five others is a laudable effort to achieve unity and flow, but it only makes a confusing collection more so.The language is French, though the team is multinational, including American and Italian. The film was shown at Sundance as part of a horror series. The images have a pencil look, achieved however with the latest technologies. For connoisseurs of black and white drawing in film, this is worth a look for the different styles. But as a cutting edge horror or scare movie or an accomplished series of animations, this collection seems very over-hyped.The film, shown at Sundance in January 2008 and at international festivals, debuted in Paris theaters February 18, 2008, and is part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, February 29-March 9.

Peur(s) du Noir is essentially 5 short black and white animations interspersed by segments of a woman droning on about her fears, illustrated with interesting animated black and white shapes (I should note, I watched the film in French, and as my French is not perfect, I did not catch everything she said, but got the general impression that she was your typical anxious overachieving yuppie).The five shorts all used different animation techniques, but were overall pleasingly creepy. There was a cruel aristocrat and his dogs, an Italian village ravaged by a mysterious beast, a budding scientist and his insect specimens, a Japanese girl bullied by classmates/ghosts, and a refugee from a snowstorm shacked up in a Victorian house. This final short was, I thought, the most effective. It was done in pure black and white, and the only light shed in the house (with wonderfully Goreyesque wallpaper) came from a candle the traveller carried with him in his explorations. This allowed for some great reveal moments, and additionally built up the tension extremely well.Overall, a must see for fans of art-house animation. If it comes to a cinema near you, take the opportunity to see it, because I suspect it will be difficult to find on DVD.

The story begins with what appears to be an old, sadistic British general walking a pack of angry dogs. A dog gets away and chases a small boy... thus beings one of a few stories of people's fears. The fears displayed in these animated segments usually involve an insect or animal beast. I think that the director either had a fascination or fear of bugs/animals.In between each segment, a soothing french voice tells us her "fears" but what I interpret as her observations and cristicms of society and social behaviors.One segment, a man is haunted by a praying mantis; in another, a girl is possessed by the ghost of a samuarai, in another.. a man has an encounter with the ghosts of an abandoned house.Each segment has a unique art style where people's bizarre fears become their lives. A great artistic representation of how people's fears can so easily become part of their reality - whether those fears are overcome or succombed to.