Toronto International Film Festival: The utilization of hand-drawn animation as preferred medium for artists to assimilate and explicate real-world chaos in recent years has produced gorgeously sensitive visions including Cartoon Saloon’s “The Breadwinner,” and just this year the animated documentary “Flee” and Ari Folman’s tenderly fantastical “Where is Anne Frank.”
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Realized with few flourishes of imagination but an undaunted resolve for dealing with human tragedy, “Charlotte,” by directors Tahir Rana and Éric Warin and based on a screenplay from writers Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis, joins the growing list of such mature animated projects with underlying social justice concerns. Unlike the aforementioned examples, however, this one takes less adventurous chances with form.
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In the early 1930s as the Nazis came to power in Germany, Charlotte Salomon (voiced by Keira Knightley) and her family, as well as the rest of the Jewish population, caught wind of the institutionalized hatred that was to come. Closely following the chronology of events leading up to World War II, the film introduces the burgeoning artist in Berlin when she gets accepted into a prestigious school against her family’s advice.
Replicating the human image without personal interpretation, something that directly clashes with Salomon expressionistic style, becomes the only accepted mode of artistic engagement in the Third Reich worldview. Curiously, almost as if Rana and Warin had also adhered by those restrictive parameters, the only aesthetic inventiveness in this historical tale are a handful of sequences were Solomon’s paintings briefly take over the screen providing a contrast to the reality.
Elegant character design portrays the people in Salomon’s life with great attention to photographic evidence of their physical traits. The backgrounds reflect that same keenness for accuracy rather than reinvention maintaining a solemn visual tone with warm saturated colors. The fluidity of movement in the figures is not as accomplished as in other independently produced animated pictures of similar magnitude. Though noticeable for anyone paying close attention, it doesn’t act as a major a cause for distraction.
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With dialogue-heavy scenes where Knightley (or Marion Cotillard in the French version) verbalizes introspection, “Charlotte” recounts how she first met an important benefactor, the romantic relationships that marked her work over the years, and her eventual escape to France to reunite with her grandparents and attain a semblance of safety all while separated from her father and stepmother. The timeline mostly follows a straight line, again, not deviating much from just stating what happened and when.
But calamity for this Jewish family isn’t exclusive to the harrowing of the time period, but to a generational battle with mental health that has claimed the lives of multiple members of the clan as well. Some of the most uncomfortably confrontational scenes involve Charlotte and her controlling and emotionally abusive grandfather (Jim Broadbent), bent on having her as a servant, and the awful choices she must make out of pity. Charlotte unearths wounds too profound to fully heal; yet even as the harshest turning points come to pass, the directors handled them in an implied manner without graphic imagery.
When thinking about what this narrative gained from being executed as an animated featured, considering that it lacks vibrancy and elements that feel exclusive to this medium, what comes to mind is a more manageable budget, because it’s certainly more financially feasible for the filmmakers to accomplish a period piece across multiple countries in animation than live action. “Charlotte,” handcraft and all, unfurls as a conventional drama where what the characters say to each other carries more significance than what’s shown.
Other films with comparably delicate stories and painful subject matters have tried to exploit animation’s potential. There’s the flawed but ambitious “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet,” which employs a traditional framing device for its fictional present about an imprisoned thinker, but intersperses lyrical and surrealist chapters that an array of filmmakers conjured up for the feature. Even Folman’s latest effort “Where is Anne Frank” harnesses mythology and magical components: portraying Nazis as monstrous masked figures or bringing to life an imaginary character as its main heroine.
As much as Charlotte Salomon’s life is inherently worthy of admiration, and that it’s a valid creative choice on the directors’ part to make a tonally modest and straightforward depiction of the events, one can’t help but yearn for a version where her oeuvre and its stylized interpretation of her intimated universe had been a more deeply intertwined with how her prolific and unimaginably tragic story was told. [C+]
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