We have to admit, Ari Folman’s follow-up to “Waltz With Bashir,” completely fell off our radar but due to some nice work at over /Film, we’ve got a first look at forthcoming film “The Congress,” and it’s beautiful.
Based on the short story “The Futurological Congress” by Stanislaw Lem (best known as the author of “Solaris,” which was obviously made into a movie, twice: once by the great Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and once by Steven Soderbergh in 2002 ) about a man ” “who is propelled into a world where hallucinogenic drugs have replaced reality,” the actual film seems to have taken a kernel of that idea and expanded it into a story about “the world of an actress (Robin Wright). She’s in decline because the studios just sampled her and they kept using her image. She walks into the future, which is a world that is totally controlled by the manufacture of psychiatric pharmacology products.”
As you might glean from the still, Robin Wright looks a bit older than she actually is. Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter Folman had said that his plan was to keep the same actress, but show her aging via the animation process.
The film is set to be shown at Cartoon Movie, an animated sales conference that takes place in Lyon, France from March 3-5. The film is not yet complete, though they do have enough footage done to start showing it to buyers. It looks and sounds like a fascinating project and we hope we get to see this one soon.
“Waltz With Bashir” was definitely one of the best films of 2009, obviously came very close to winning the Foriegn Oscar and it boasts an amazing and haunting score by Max Richter. We’d love it if Folman worked with him again.
Waltz was 2008, and was simply robbed of that Oscar (and Best Animated Film and Best Documentary and Best Picture, alas).
Given the nature of animation, I wasn't expecting to even hear a peep about this for at least another year, so it's very exciting it's this far so soon.