Visions de Réel Review: Normal Planet finds the intersection of the mundane and absurd in a virtual art museum

I love the subgenre of documentaries that are filmed within video games and virtual worlds. Last year, Grand Theft Hamlet was a definite highlight, and a couple years before that, I loved Knit's Island, in which a group of filmmakers embedded themselves in the post-apocalyptic game DayZ. Filming within these virtual spaces are often just as illuminating (or even more so) in the way they explore and reveal human nature. Maybe there's nothing more telling about us than the masks we put on to move through the world, real or online.

The filmmakers behind Knit's Island -- Ekiem Barbier, Guilhem Causse & Quentin L'helgoualc'h -- are back with a shorter piece, the 30-minute documentary Normal Planet, which premiered today at Visions de Réel. Animated using VRChat (itself the setting of another good doc, We Met in Virtual Reality), the film is a thought-provoking intersection of the mundane and the absurd, or "high" and "low" art, of reality and un-reality. It's an entrancing piece, one that gives you a lot to mull over in its brief runtime, and one that I'm excited to watch again.

My understanding of the film is that it uses real conversations recorded between visitors and staff of the Musée Fabre in Montpellier, France. The filmmakers then created various animated avatars to match up with the voices, with a lot of very creative designs. There's a trio of young women who are represented as anime characters, while the security guard at the door is a bipedal frog. The guards in the various rooms are represented by giant, floating green heads. If you've ever spent time in VR worlds (or, like me, watched movies about them/filmed in them), you know that this diversity of character is very accurate to how people exist in these spaces. 

We watch as these various characters exist in the space of a re-created art museum, which is full of pixellated versions of famous artworks. It's a brilliant bit intersection of the absurd and the mundane. I wouldn't particularly care to watch a documentary where you simply watch people looking at and commenting on art (unless, of course, we're talking about Frederick Wiseman's National Gallery, which this would pair well with). But because we're watching these interesting-looking characters moving through this facsimile of a museum, there's an added point of intrigue, which in turn lets you tune in more to what they're saying. Like, random commentary from museum attendees often will be interesting, but we might not even give it a chance to pierce our minds if not given a reason to. And here, we are.

Seeing these notable artworks in a setting like this is a bit of a hoot, and a thrill. It made me think of the museum in Animal Crossing, where famous artworks you dig up from the ground (or buy from the mischievous fox Redd) end up adorning the walls. Video games have long been a point of contention in the art world. People love to debate whether games are art or not. These days, I think most people understand games are art, a quintessentially modern art, but it still feels like a fun middle finger of a sort to present paintings and sculptures from the real world in a virtual world that art snobs might scoff at.

I also love the bookends of this film, which show us all sorts of other virtual spaces and, finally, the avatars we've been following as they go about their day-to-day lives (working as a cashier, window shopping, eating at a fast food joint). It really hits home how vast the world is, or rather, the worlds are, both ours and the world of VRChat. How special it is to carve out some time in this specific little corner the filmmakers have crafted as a reflection of something real. They've made something arguably just as real and valuable, in its own unique way.