Review: Olivia & Las Nubes is a dazzling mixed media excavation of the heart, mind, and soul

 The Ottawa International Animation Festival starts next week, and while I sadly will not be there, I'm going to cover a couple of the movies that will be playing there. Alongside awards season favorites like The Wild Robot, Flow, and Memoir of a Snail, there are some smaller/lesser-known movies playing, including the subject of this review.

I feel like I just have to say it, hyperbole be damned: Olivia & Las Nubes (Olivia & the Clouds) is one of the most visually dazzling movies I've ever seen. I would fill a museum with frames from this movie. Multiple museums, even. It is so gorgeous, colorful and surreal and inventive and unique. It feels like a mixed media art project in motion, blending so many media into a strangely coherent package. I say strangely because I feel like this kind of aesthetic boldness could feel like a distraction, an example of style-over-substance. At first, I kind of wondered if that's what I was in for. It's a bit hard to find your footing in this story out of the gate with how dreamy this is, with how frequently the visual presentation changes. But after meeting the characters and getting on the film's wavelength, it's such a stunning journey.

One moment, everything is painterly, a watercolor symphony. The next, there's clay. Then cardboard. Now some Super 8 live-action footage. Now something more "traditional" looking, but oops, now the characters look like they're cut out of paper. It's just really, really cool to watch. It feels monumental. This would be a wild movie to watch high and just let it wash over you. Even sober, it sometimes feels like a massage for the brain. A feast for the eyes, to be sure.

To try to synopsize this movie is an exercise in futility. The logline you'll find around the internet (IMDb, Ottawa's site, etc.) is that it's a movie that explores the effects of love via a Rashomon effect. I think that's as good a way to explain the proceedings as you might find, but that also probably sets your expectation for a different movie that you're going to get. It isn't as concrete as that explanation sounds. The narrative here is so slippery and dreamlike, finding rhymes and symbols from different angles, looping and tunneling into ever more colorful and strange vistas of the heart that I found myself surrendering to it even when I didn't quite grasp what I was looking at.

I think that's a pretty great way to (need to?) approach a movie like this. One that isn't offering up an easily digestible story, one that doesn't clearly state its theses. Love and other emotions are sometimes shown as bold color lines shooting out of our characters, sometimes with violent force, sometimes with curious tenderness, sometimes with something harder to parse. Or maybe love is these little colorful balls forming a blanket for a sleeping woman on the surface of Jupiter. Maybe where I see a wheelbarrow in the clouds, you see something different. That doesn't make either of us wrong. It just shows who we are, the wounds we carry, the worldview we employ, the ways we make sense of the ever-shifting chaos around us.

I really admire the way writer-director Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat forgoes narrative straightforwardness in lieu of emotional exploration, and the way that exercise finds so much truth, whatever that looks like, whatever that means. Even when I felt a little lost, a little confused, I always knew I was in good hands, caring hands. It's such a beautiful film.

Olivia & Las Nubes shows in competition at OIAF on September 26 at 5:00pm (with a Q&A) and September 29 at 3:00pm.