Fantasia Review: Maya gives titles, Michel Gondry gives whimsy

Michel Gondry is an auteur who's hard to capture in words, whose work is so bountiful and playful that it seems a disservice to try to summarize neatly. He's worked in many worlds, cutting his teeth oh. music videos, working in film and TV and documentary, live-action and animation. So much of his work has a charming crafty quality to it. You can feel his fingerprints, the love and invention, the humanity within the whimsy. I've certainly felt it in his feature work, which is what I'm most familiar with. Movies like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (one of my all-time favorites), The Science of Sleep, Be Kind Rewind, and Mood Indigo have boundless visual invention, scrappy spirits, massive bleeding hearts. He's a generous and whimsical filmmaker.

That's certainly the case with his second foray into feature animation (following 2013's Noam Chomsky project Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?), a familial collaboration called Maya, Give Me a Title. The film, playing at Fantasia this year after hitting Berlin and Annecy earlier this year, finds Gondry living in America wand wanting to connect with his daughter Maya, who lives overseas. He comes up with a clever conceit: Maya provides titles, which he then uses as inspiration to make animated shorts, mostly using paper and stop-motion techniques. 

Since she's a kid (we see her grow up throughout the course of the film), many of Maya's titles center on herself: Maya the Mermaid, Maya the Police Officer, Maya in the Sea with a Bottle of Ketchup. As she ages, some of her titles shift away from herself: Mom's Going on a Trip, Magic Animals. It's a look at the way kids' imaginations expand, the way their worlds get bigger, the way they realize how much there is beyond them. Curiosity grows, as does empathy. 

Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, because I don't think this movie honestly has too much on its mind beyond being a fun and creative way for a father and daughter to connect. Gondry takes Maya's titles and spins them into free-wheeling, extremely silly little tales. None of them go where you expect them to, which is apt for stories being spun for one's own daughter. How fun is it to tell a kid a story, to get to take it any- and everywhere, to make it so silly and strange that it would come across as utter nonsense to anyone else. Of course an earthquake is being caused by a drum set being played underground, and by playing the drums backwards (whatever that means), the damage can be undone. Of course.

The format of the film means it ends up feeling like a parade of amuse-bouche, lots of delightful little appetizers. Of course, there's no main entree here to follow them. Instead, it's just more small stories, some a little longer, sure, but nothing too major, or too developed. And the whole package is just over an hour long, meaning this is barely even feature-length. Which I don't mind. It's easy-breezy, a quick little buffet of tasty snacks. Nothing too filling, too challenging, too impactful.

But it's certainly a fun watch, mostly because of the charming animation. Gondry's handmade feel has never been as pronounced as it is here, with so much handwriting, rough cut-outs, silly animated flourishes and twists. It's a pleasure to look at and listen to, too, thanks to wonderful narration by Pierre Niney.

If I don't have a lot to say about Maya, Give Me a Title, it's because it just is what it is. There's not a ton to unpack or mull over. It's simply a sweet personal project that we're being let into, and one that has another edition on the way. I'll certainly tune in. I like being in Gondry's worlds.