Jason Sondhi

We’ve featured so many French student animations at this point that I can’t even summon the wit to make jokes any longer. The degree of skill and vision is so routinely high that I don’t bat an eyelash at the artistry displayed, as I know soon another will come, more splendid than the one before. That doesn’t mean I love them any less mind you!

Matatoro is the most recent one I’ve come across, thanks the prolific media-curator Curious Brain. The directing team of Mauro Carraro, Raphaël Calamote, Jérémy Pasquet describe their work as a reinvention and reinterpretation of the hermetic world of the bullfighting: the fighter, the bull, and the audience.  In telling this story they continue upon the Supinfocom theme of experimenting with the normally lysol-clean features of 3-D, adopting water-color aesthetics, seen in films like recent Oscar-nom Madagascar.

While stylistically pleasing, the techniques displayed are not groundbreaking. To me it is the flexing of the filmmakers’ poetic muscles that warrant attention. Most Supinfocom films display an unapologetically commercial tendency- —the Oktapodi-phenomenon, I call it, most recently seen in Meet Buck. Matatoro is delightfully weird, however— surreal, impressionistic, and psychoanalytic- —if a requisite of great art is in some sense inscrutability, then this is the most artistic of recent French student animations.