Beyond Beyond 720p - (2014 Lang: Sweden, Sub: English)

Excellent feature animation!

BEYOND BEYOND I was just about to fall off the chair the other day when I watched a DVD. It was a feature animated film from 2014 directed by a Dane, Esben Toft Jacobsen, but the production team seemed to be Swedish. I did not think the level of ambition in Denmark today held out for more than the usual run of the mill stories and production design, but I was wrong, and luckily so. It was a fairy tale in which a child, this time a rabbit, cannot bear the loss of his mother and thus embarks on a journey on ship to bring her back. The love story from Orpheus and Eurydice for children. There is a whole lot of help and adversity from all sorts of mysterious creatures he meets on his way, and it is exceedingly captivating to follow with plenty of pace all along. I sat and enjoyed the obvious references to Miyazaki, with little creatures that run in packs over the ground.

This time they are not black but blue-green. The angel is in this version a scaly dragon- like creature, and Sct. Peter is a touching bureaucratic frog-like guy. Of the almighty godlike chaos force we only get to see the tentacles, but it is reminiscent of squid arms and enclose in the climax our poor friend's vessel. The character design is innovative and appealing. It is nice to see that you do not have to follow the standard tradition of design within CGI animation, which has become almost mandatory in the business. A story of life and death can be very strong, and it is in this case. I also got to think about the Irish film director Tomm Moore, who received an Oscar nomination for 'Song of the Sea' last year. Esben Toft Jacobsen had deserved a nomination as well.

Would-be storytellers sometimes make the mistake of thinking that, because the story they are telling is a fairytale and involves magic, that the niceties surrounding "willing suspension of disbelief" may be safely ignored. Important plot elements can then simply be pulled from various bodily orifices, flung at the audience in cheerful disregard and with a brightly smiling face accompanied with jazz hands while shouting "Wow! See?! It's magic!".

And so it is with the storyline of "Beyond Beyond". Which is more than simply unfortunate because, in most other respects, "Beyond Beyond" is actually quite good. Well-designed caricatures of characters, good production values, and vivid imagery all combine to make a movie that would have been quite memorable had a decent plot line been a part of the mix. The "moral of the story" punchline at the end read as ridiculous to me because the plot elements it was supposed to flow from were… ridiculous.

The context of the story is the life and afterlife of anthropomorphic rabbits. There are only a couple of characters in the story which are not either rabbits or very closely rabbit- related creatures.

The characters are engaging, especially the young rabbit-son Johan with his unflagging determination to reunite his family. Johan's mother, for unexplained reasons, has become ill and has been carried off by The Feather King, which is the equivalent of dying in this universe. The Kingdom of the Feather King is, for the purposes of the story, where you go when you die. Johan is having none of this and is going to the Kingdom of the Feather King to retrieve his mother and reunite his family, and he isn't taking no for an answer.

Johan's grim determination to get his mother back is the thing that carries the entire film. He tries to be polite and gives adults and those in authority the opportunity, repeatedly, to give a reasonable explanation as to why things should be the way they are, politely listens to what are essentially non-answers, does a quick "Nope, not buying it" turnabout and forges ahead while the adults look on, appalled.

There's another character in the story, Bill, who is also one of the few non-rabbit characters. He's as dissatisfied with the status quo as Johan, and goes about doing quite a bit more damage to that status quo. Where Johan is singly focused on retrieving his mother and has no desire to upset any apple carts beyond that one objective, Bill seems determined to rearrange everything in the rabbit- afterlife to suit himself. Bill's character is self-centered, random and rebellious and so, quite predictably, The Kingdom of the Feather King begins to come apart at the seams as the effects of Bill's changes begin to set in.

The net result is that everything has to be set back to rights, Bill's changes have to be undone, and Johan has to accept the fact that he can't be with his mother until such time as his own ticket gets punched. Literally. But hey, it's not so bad because Johan can always send his mother letters as messages in bottles cast into the ocean. I kid you not. More reliable than the USPS. We're even given the sense that others are communicating with their loved ones through message bottles as well.

The trouble with all of this is that none of it makes any sense.

For the purposes of this review, I have barely scratched the surface of the plot line which involves a giant, tentacled creature that normally runs things in the Kingdom of the Feather King and sheds scales which determine who's to die and be collected by The Feather King, phalanxes of rules which must be obeyed without rationale or explanation (or even comprehension, for that matter…), and completely glosses over the fact that the very presence of Bill in The Kingdom of the Feather King fundamentally contravenes the rules all by itself (how was he in there without his ticket being canceled in the first place, and why did he need a ticket now to go back there and how did he get such a pivotal role in the creation and maintenance of The Kingdom without having apparently died to get there in the first place, etc.). The plot is arbitrary, complex, and full of elements that don't need to be there.

None of it makes any sense, none of it hangs together, the rules appear arbitrary (especially when every question that gets asked basically only gets "just because" for an answer) and so on. One completely empathizes with Johan and his blanket rebellion against the "order of things" because no one in their right mind would accept any of this nonsense, ESPECIALLY when the rules give a sense of simply being made up for no particular reason other than to portray an absurdly complex structure to the afterlife. Supporting the desire to rebel is the fact that everybody dwelling in the afterlife seems to just stand around, unhappy and bored. As irresponsible and destructive as Bill is, one has to emphasize with his motivations even if his very existence makes no sense at all. Write down the plot elements to the next fever-induced nightmare you have and I guarantee it'll make more sense than this does.

Because of all this, the moral you actually derive from the story is, "Life and death makes no sense at all, it's horrific and sad AND boring. But tough nuts to you. Follow the rules and like it."

Personally, while I can enthusiastically recommend the movie to be enjoyed for its production values and imagery, as long as you go in with eyes open and knowing that the story is a complete loss, I would certainly never recommend letting any sort of a child see this picture because NOTHING in it makes for any sort of impression I would like a kid to have.

Beautiful work. Poorly done story.