It might come as a surprise to many dedicated movie freaks that Dominica has a vital animated film community; not a hugely influential one, admittedly, but large enough to make this singular production stand out in a world of inventive animated features. Apparently, the director, Tomás Pichardo Espaillat, recruited more than 20 local animators for the film, with several working on individual episodes in the story at once. The finished product is a kind of sampler of all their techniques and if Pichardo Espaillat doesn’t necessarily meld them all into a stylistically unified whole, he manages to keep things lively and intriguing. These styles range from conventional cell-like animation using watercolors, oils, and charcoal to mixed media using fabric, wood, paper, and cardboard and on to manipulated film stock of naturalistic settings and stop-motion clay figures. 

Consequently, the story, as it were, is beholden to the form rather than the other way around, with the POV shifting restlessly from one character to another.  At center is four related individuals whose stories overlap without any real temporal connections. In the introductory section, Olivia is an older woman who imagines that a former lover, Ramon, lives under her bed and communicates with her through cloud patterns. Her son, Mauricio seems only slightly concerned with what he obviously sees as his mother losing her grip on reality because he has more to worry about with his current girlfriend, Barbara, a professional animator who seems fed up with Mauricio’s lack of ambition and commitment. Pichardo Espaillat includes several wildly impressionistic scenes from Olivia’s past showing scenarios that may or may not trace her love life, from a piquantly fateful meeting with a sailor in a bachata bar—reportedly involving the input of six separate animators—that’s enlivened immeasurably by Cem Misirlioglu’s wildly original score, to a fantastic romance that has Ramon impulsively kiss a stranger in an open market and then spitting into a flower pot to produce a plant-lover who can’t help but be dependent on him, despite his not being prepared for such a serious relationship. 

The meaning of these episodes is less important than their emotional trajectory, which is dictated by the various textures and colors utilized. In the end, you feel less like you’ve sat through an art project and more like you’ve explored someone else’s dreamscape on drugs. The metaphors are rich and often funny—at one point Olivia treats Ramon as literal baggage, and at another Ramon, who’s an accountant, is rendered as a kind of origami aggregation of invoices—and don’t have to make sense to draw you in. Olivia & the Clouds has imagination to burn. 

In Spanish with English and Japanese subtitles. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

Olivia & the Clouds home page in Japanese

photo (c) Cine Chani/Historias de Bibi/Guasabara Cine