Review: Time and space are just steps away in dazzling Magic Atlas

Every movie is a cultural artifact, a piece of art we can look back on in the years and decades and centuries to come to know something about the world in which it was made. Maybe we can read into the political and social movements that at work at the time, or understand what the major thematic preoccupations of the moment were. At the very least, any movie is a time capsule of a sort, a thing we can look at and know dozens or hundreds or thousands of people spent time working toward creating something and then put it out in the world to be seen, discussed, criticized, mulled over, maybe hater or forgotten.

The product of over ten years of work by filmmaker Sun Xun, Magic Atlas lets us in on a bit of the behind-the-scenes flag-planting of its own coordinates in the grand history of art and cinema. As the film comes to an end, text appears on screen talking about the process of the making the film and thanking some of the people who helped it come to fruition. Most interestingly, it talks about one of the film's many memorable sequences, and maybe its most colorful. It looks like it was animated using commonly available art supplies like markers, colored pencils, maybe even crayons. It ends up that this was a bit of a crowd-sourced sequence completed during the covid shutdown, in which Xun invited people from all over the world to help contribute to the film's animation. The result is chaotically beautiful.

And it's indicative of Magic Atlas's larger artistic abundance. The film is a dazzling, dizzying cacophony of mixed media, a disorienting and hopeful journey through time and space. It dreams of better worlds, better times, that we might discover if we just bother to look, and to boldly take steps into and through them. As a narrative, it's quite slippery, which feels right. It has a dreamlike quality to it, where the connecting fibers feel tenuous, strange. I watched the movie yesterday, and when I think about it, it feels like a dream I can only half-remember. Not in a bad way, like the movie didn't stick. But in that watching it feels like floating through a world that rhymes with ours but clearly isn't ours. It makes sense only if you don't stare too hard at it.

While it isn't the easiest movie to stay in lockstep with, the basic bones of the story are easy enough to grasp. The film mostly takes place in the kingdom of Luocha, where the common people are forced to work in coal mines and factories for the elite class of anthropomorphized animals. The laws are strict, human rights few and far between. When a magician arrives in an airship, it causes panic for the ruling class -- flying is very much not allowed -- so the magician is captured and imprisoned. He manages, however, to hand off his Magic Atlas to an orphan named Xiao Zhi who often causes trouble by virtue of being curious. 

The film's class commentary is pointed, anything but subtle, and most effective. The ruling class is only interested in things that have utility. There's no room for frivolity, pastimes, indulgences. When they see a cat, they're baffled. Years ago, they wiped out rats, which means cats also shouldn't exist anymore. What use is a cat if there are no rats for it to hunt? Imagine a world where everything had to be useful to exist -- in such a joyless place, you just know that movies and other forms of art will be among the first things to go. Unless they're propaganda or something. With the Magic Atlas, Xiao Zhi has the chance to leave the dire monotony and misery of Luocha behind. He has the freedom dream of far-off places and times and then to actually venture to them, like an artist dreaming up new works and having the power to bring them into being. The ruling class of Luocha intones that they have no shortage of emperors, ever-ready to put a new puppet into power. But the Magic Atlas has no shortage of worlds, and hopefully some of those have no emperors at all.

Whether or not the film's theme and story connect with you, I think just about anyone would be dazzled by Magic Atlas's animation, which draws from many sources and styles, and is consistently stunning. The bulk of the film uses a woodblock animation style, with bold line work and satisfyingly hard movement. From scene to scene and sequence to sequence, though, the film delves into other mediums, sometimes briefly entering worlds of color and very different styles, further enhancing the feeling of moving through a dream. At one point, German newspapers are flashing past as the background behind some characters having a conversation. It's heady, creative, explosive. One of the most eye-catching movies of the year.

And one of the most head-spinning. There's so much to Magic Atlas that it's hard to take it all in. The film's strange world, provocative themes, and visual inventiveness combine to make a movie that is easy to watch but difficult to grasp. It leaves you with a lot to think about, to wonder about. It made me think about how every movie is a set of coordinates to be read in the future, and can help us to position our very humanity in a the arc of history with some level of precision. This is what it was like to be alive back then. This is what it was like to feel downtrodden, like a cog in an uncaring capitalist machine. This is what it was like to watch a bit of challenging animation and feel more alive for having done so. Trace your finger along the x-axis. Now the y. There I am, hopeless, hopeful, curious, creative, craving.