Loving Vincent is a hand-painted, animated movie about Vincent Van Gogh. It’s at times quite beautiful, but I found myself more often taken aback by the amount of work it must have taken than by the actual results, several times thinking, “There had to be a better way.” There’s much to be said for using unproven, arduous, and unconventional tools to try and expand what a medium can be capable of. But here, tethering an unlikely tool to a well-established, heavily-worked art style limits the film’s ability to explore the new possibilities the unconventional tooling might afford. Meanwhile, the style is hampered by a lack of commitment to the bit, with much of the film taking place in flashbacks that shift from impressionism to a kind of soft-focus black and white that looks more like old film, or less charitably, a novelty wedding photographer. These scenes, of which there are many, are nowhere near as striking as the rest of the film, but in total the movie’s not a completely failed experiment. A lot of the wider shots bring on a deep, quiet reverence and I never got tired of seeing the brush strokes moving across the scene, a reminder of the invisible human hand absent in most animated works these days. Visually there is something to recommend here.

The story’s appeal, on the other hand, is a bit more elusive. Loving Vincent is about a guy who’s trying to deliver a letter to Vincent’s brother after Vincent’s death. After learning that the brother is dead too, the guy pinballs between different people who were familiar with Vincent in the last days of his life. These interactions all play out in the same way. He says hello, then maybe asks a vague question, and the interviewee launches into an uninterrupted flashback-assisted monologue. The minimal lead in to these flashbacks reminded me of the end-of-season “flashback episode” format on sitcoms, or a video game where idly clicking a prompt would lead to a long un-skippable cutscene.

Through fits and starts the film slowly turns from being a portrait of Vincent’s last days into something of a Marlowe-themed investigation into whether he killed himself or was shot, complete with unnecessary foot chases and three-on-one fist fights. Most of the later scenes consist of the lead character grilling people as to whether Vincent was really unhappy in the last days of his life or if something more nefarious was afoot. The evidence for his mood improving was, he was doing lots of painting and his paintings were taking on a sunnier disposition. The evidence against (barely advocated in the film), was that he was obviously mentally ill, broke, and seemingly refused medical treatment while he slowly died for two days. A criminal investigation into whether working hard on your craft is enough to make yourself happy would be an excellent question for someone working on an animated film where every frame is painstakingly hand-painted. A movie where the main character pointedly grills acquaintances and friends of someone who just died directly or indirectly by their own hand is extremely tacky.

Loving Vincent doesn’t work as movie, sort of works as an accidental documentation of it’s own creation, and definitely doesn’t work as a portrait of Van Gogh (who from the film I gathered to be some kind of painting goblin). The animation can be extremely beautiful but is as often wildly ugly, with the worst character design inexplicably belonging to the character we spend the most time with. However it’s an undeniably unique film, so I really don’t think I can knock it too severely. It’s a slog, but there’s something there.

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1. Typical rant about my usual topics

Over the last 15,000 years or so, countless artists have lived difficult, thankless lives all over this planet. Many of them made work that was good, some even eternity-level. Almost all of that’s all gone forever now, mostly without any possibility of “rediscovery;” nobody will ever know who those artists were, or what they did. But that’s fine, that’s everyone and everything else too. Look at literally anything in the built material world and you can see somebody’s worked hour. But whose?

Wouldn’t it be nice if it turned out that all of our little projects nobody believed in or cared about came to be beloved by millions of people, and worth tons of money, guaranteeing our vicarious presence in culture for hundreds or even thousands of years after our small deaths? For this fantasy we have canonical artists, whose lives and work fold together to present an afterlife (“I won’t be forgotten”) that’s also a kind of revenge (“I’m dead, but I was right, and now everyone will have to look at my stuff forever”). The wish for this fantasy to come true is expressed by rubbing the Buddha’s belly of Famous Artworks, by for instance taking a photograph of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” at MoMA. Meanwhile the planet continues to seethe with new activity, new stuff, and new artists living new insane lives, all of whom could use the resources and the attention.

I get that even despite everything wrong with how they’ve historically been defined, canons are meant to serve as some kind of helpful entree to some aesthetic form. My problem with this is that no matter what they consist of, they mainly serve to withhold permission to figure out what forms could be for yourself, by claiming to conclusively pre-define them. As they are, western art canons also tend to reinforce this idea that “The [Insane] [Under-appreciated] [Etc.] Creative Genius” is some kind of rare figure who occasionally occurs in history, and is the kind of person that Great Art Comes From. Both of these ideas are categorically untrue: Geniuses are common, and great artworks are commonly produced when communities of geniuses are given space and resources to congregate. The idea that artwork “only” comes from lonely genius at war with the world, and in spite of the world, denies the world the extreme possibilities it could be enjoying if it were to simply value artists and permit them to freely work without constant concern for, say, being broke, mentally ill, freezing cold, or in need of medical attention.

And art itself’s never been “about” Geniuses, or about revering some specific individual or instance of a form as being “the best.” That’s just boring connoisseurship. What art IS about is openness to an extreme plurality, about being granted something unknown but recognizable about being from the alien creativity that lives behind everyone’s minds. It’s produced at a high cost to do something beyond the boundaries of this world or the basic stuff that’s already constantly swarming around in it. It’s exactly as valuable, and as transferrable to market terms, as looking at a distant horizon.

All this brings me to Loving Vincent, a work of canon-worship focused on “the artist who cut off his ear,” Vincent Van Gogh. I’m not hating on Van Gogh’s paintings here – many have interesting or instructive color ideas, some have great compositional ones, and as an admirer of hand styles, I gotta say much respect. But there’s a lot more going on out there right now – literally right now – that’s more specifically interesting and useful to me, and honestly I suspect to everyone, than yet another feature-length pause to once again consider Van Gogh.

2. Loving Vincent

Loving Vincent‘s conceit is that it sets most of its action “inside” of Van Gogh’s paintings, with that action physically repainted frame by frame into reproductions of those works. Sometimes liberties are taken with the source material, for example to accommodate the scene’s time of day, or to keep the movie’s aspect ratio consistent. Formally, if nothing else, I think this makes the movie one of the most costly and excruciatingly-produced pieces of fan art ever made.

125 painters painted 65,000 cells for the movie, at 12 frames per second; the process involved scraping away parts of each painting between each cell, so few of these individual paintings survived. These painters weren’t animators, and the producers weren’t trying to make a cartoon per se – there are very few sequences of true full-frame full-color animation in the movie. When these appear, in strange, short bursts – such as in a scene where the main character runs to catch a train – visual logic drops to zero with the “falling in sleep” feeling and the movie blooms like a corpse flower, extravagantly and briefly. But otherwise, as animation, it’s a gimmicky and frequently drab movie. The characters depicted in the paintings are moving – gotcha.

I like the idea that movies could be storyboarded entirely using existing paintings – either all from one artist’s oeuvre or not – and I think it would be fun to see this done well. But this movie doesn’t even accomplish that; it interpolates black and white scenes in flashback that do not use Van Gogh paintings as source material. These scenes account for about half of the movie’s runtime and are super dull compared to the ones that take place in paintings. Yet for some reason they were hand-painted too.

In a Facebook post (of course), the producers write:

For some scenes in the film, like Vincent’s early life, there obviously weren’t any paintings of his we could draw from. So we decided to paint these flashbacks in black and white, in the style of photographs from the era.

But… why paint “in the style” of imagined old photographs? Why not use actual old photography techniques, if process is so important? Or why not write a more clever script that’s able to take place fully within the paintings?

And why did all of those artists have to do any of this painting at all? Thru its conceit, the movie shows a deep misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of labor as it relates to the creation of artwork. 125 painters producing 65,000 Van Gogh-esque reproductions to make a not-great animation is proximate to abuse, and certainly bad process. I don’t make oil paintings because of some attachment to “the idea of painting,” I make them because oil paint applied in layers to a support does optically crazy things when light shines thru it and bounces back that no other image-making media can touch. It’s this unrivaled potential for surface qualities like depth and movement that keeps people working with oil paint. If these qualities didn’t matter to me – or if I cared about them less than the extent to which working with oil paint presents significant logistical challenges – I’d just be working digitally. Paintings aren’t “better” than digital images because they’re more laborious to make, they merely have additional qualities that can only be beheld irl. Movies don’t have a surface or fixed object presence. So why didn’t the filmmakers just work digitally?

At one point the movie itself comes close enough to all of this to embarrass itself: a character describes another character holing up trying to copy finished Van Goghs, because he knew the Van Goghs were “great” even at their most throwaway, and that his duplicates were not. Well, yeah. That very same energy of tryhard, unoriginal emulation permeates the entire movie.

3. Some stragglers

– Why does the movie force itself to pretend that the story it’s telling by coopting the paintings has some valid or necessary relationship to their painter, by making the story about him? Why not invent a more interesting fiction to place inside of these images? This is what we do in the 21st century, after all, we sample. This would have also made it easier to write an accommodating script.

– I know we’re constantly talking about script declamation choices on this blog, but I expected “the world’s first fully-painted feature film!” to have… painterly attention to its production details in total. The last one I’ll rag on here is, the movie takes place in France, yet it’s an English language script, delivered mainly by British actors.

– I’m taking huge liberties with how far over wordcount I’m going here (and with how long it took to get this post up) because I was triggered by this movie so hard, but I’ll add that for “death meditations and the canon” in feature films, I like Gus Van Sant’s Last Days (2005). For a positive example of “hero worship and the canon,” consider Bach authority Teri Towe handling a Bach manuscript, conjecturing about “Bach the person” and crying (Towe rules). And for movies that take place inside of a Van Gogh painting, Kurosawa’s Dreams (1990) has a sequence that does this that’s better than Loving Vincent.