Mike D'Angelo reports from the Sundance Film Festival:
Persepolis didn't impress me much as a coming-of-age memoir, but even I, filing one of the few dissenting reviews amidst the tsunami of fervent acclaim, had to admit that its monochromatic animation style was stunning to behold on a frame-to-frame basis. If you, like me, are partial to stark black-and-white drawings, but would rather watch some poor dude being used as an insect incubator than a little girl in a chador singing "Eye of the Tiger," keep an eye out for Fear(s) of the Dark, a French-financed omnibus horror film that provides six renowned artists and illustrators with a forum to explore their personal phobias, using any graphic tool save for color. As with any collection of shorts, quality varies widely; a couple of the entries here are little more than gorgeously baffling, and one amounts to a predictable sick joke. But Charles Burns — he of the aforementioned insect bit — turns in a hilariously grotesque tribute to EC's classic Weird Science/Weird Fantasy line of comics, complete with boldfaced irony and (it was the ‘50s) unapologetic misogyny. And the final segment, animated by Richard McGuire and set in a time-honored Old Dark House lit only by a roving candle and the embers of a dying fire, is simply one of the most eye-popping exercises in contrast ever attempted on the big screen. In a way, it's too dazzling to be scary — it's hard to get nervous about offscreen bumps and creaks when you're marveling at the way McGuire captures a bottle of booze rolling across the floor via only the light that reflects off of its white label. Sundance has buried Fear(s) of the Dark in its little-attended New Frontier section (why not Park City at Midnight?), so you may not see a whole lot of coverage from other sources. But for devotees of innovative animation — and the severely colorblind — this is a must-see.
