Tales of the Night: Pretty and French

Location Info

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O Cinema Miami Shores

9806 NE 2nd Ave.
Miami Shores, FL 33138

Category: Movie Theaters

Region: Upper Eastside/Miami Shores/Biscayne Park

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Details

Featuring the voices of Julien Beramis, Marine Griset, and Michel Elias. Written and Directed by Michel Ocelot. 84 Minutes. Not rated. Friday through Sunday, November 23 through 25, at O Cinema Miami Shores, 9806 NE Second Ave., Miami Shores; 305-571-9970; o-cinema.org.

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More About

• Michel Ocelot
• Joseph Campbell
• Jolly Ranchers
• Aryan Nations
• Racial Issues

Sometimes when you appropriate the storytelling modes of other cultures or time periods, the result is an enormous, semi-informed embarrassment that you ultimately have to zip-a-dee-disavow because of the finished product's zip-a-dee-ay-trocious racism or whatever. Even approached conscientiously, with the best possible intentions, an artist's own cultural biases inevitably inform the finished product, and while Disney's Song of the South was Aryan Nation garbage, director Michel Ocelot's pretty Tales of the Night (Les Contes de la Nuit) is just really, really French, even with the English vocal track with which it has been released here. Although the film adopts the storytelling modes of other cultures — Caribbean, African, Middle-Eastern, and others — the film bears a certain emotional remove and coolness of affect you don't generally find in folk tales. It's also clear that this episodic film was assembled from a children's series from French TV, as each act is prefaced with a didactic little preamble in which the three main characters have a shallow, uninformative discussion of the culture from which they're about to appropriate the next story. Two young kids and an old man occupy an abandoned, magical movie theater every night, and the stories they tell become movies in which they take part. Beautifully designed, the background shapes of trees and buildings consist of cool blues that pop forward from warm red skies, lending depth to a stylish, flat art style — a sharp contrast with the ghastly Jolly Rancher color palettes of most American animation. All characters are rendered in silhouette, with only occasional glimpses of their eyes, each figure distinctively shaped and easily distinguished. The stories are quick, tiny surveys of a given culture's conventions told as monomythic, Joseph Campbell-esque pastiches and animated with fluidity and deliberateness that nearly excuses the film's slightness.