Love, Animation: I Lost my Body (Dir. Jeremy Clapin, 1h21m, 2019)

"I Lost my Body" UK limited release poster

French cinema's fascination with animation leads back almost to the birth of cinema itself: the zoetrope and the projecting praxinoscope, both essentially prelude the birth of cinema proper, whilst the first on-paper animated film, Emile Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908), and the first animated serial Flambeau, chien perdu (1916, also directed by Cohl), were made by Frenchmen. It's not a stretch to call France the birthplace of animated cinema, and since then, has proved itself to be just as much a powerhouse of animated cinema as it undeniably is for live action, adapting its beloved bandedessine, or comics, (particularly the long-running Asterix), and storybooks, particularly in the case of Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince and Jean de Brunhoff's Babar, together with a unique strand of more experimental cinema, including Fantastic Planet (1973),Kirikou and the Sorceress (1998) and The Triplets of Belleville (2003), the most lauded of all French animated films.

The world of animation, of course, rarely sits still, and the years post-Belleville sport a number of exceptional films, including an increasing number of international co-productions with everywhere from Iran to Luxembourg and Japan to Belgium. For now, though, as we close out on this season of animated romance films, where better to end than Paris, with the beautifully hand-drawn story of a young Moroccan man's romance with a young Parisian woman, their slowly developing, and somewhat awkward relationship, and how a severed sentient hand holds the key to his past, and present, in I Lost my Body (J'ai perdu mon corps), only the second French-animated film ever nominated for Best Animated Film at the Academy Awards.

Much of the best scenes of "I Lost My Body" feature its silent co-protagonist, a severed hand

We begin with that central conceit-half of this film is from the perspective of a severed hand; without it, and the flashbacks into its shared past with our human protagonist, Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris in French/Dev Patel in English), the film would be a run of the mill romantic drama. With the adventures of the hand, the film is transformed beginning with an almost abstracted shot of it and its owner on the floor of the room, as a fly-a recurring motif from here on out-buzzes around it, before it is transported to a medical fridge. Soon escaping in surprisingly nerve-wracking fashion, the sketchy animation adding a grit to proceedings, here it begins its journey to reunite with its owner. This narrative, nigh wordless, sees the hand travel across Paris, involving itself in various scrapes-including a quite visceral scene in which the limb, struggling not to fall from a rooftop inadvertently strangles a pigeon, and we see it be chased, attacked by dogs, and have to cross a busy motorway, in its struggle to cross Paris

Juxtaposing this is the early life of Naoufel, with his family in Morocco, his dreams of being an astronaut-another image that haunts the film-and a pianist like his mother, and his days full of recording the world around him-this childhood is practically idyllic, the film often leaping between the hand's journey, Naoufel's early life, and the present. Soon, we must confront this present, together with our protagonist, where he is now living in Paris with his distant uncle and crude, heavy-drinking and partying cousin, working as a pizza delivery boy. One night, whilst attempting a delivery, he encouters, via intercom, a young woman, Gabrielle (Victoire Du Bois/Alia Shawkat), quickly establishing a rapport with her, even though failing to deliver the pizza. Smitten, he tracks her down via her address, and, through the pretence of becoming an apprentice to her uncle as a carpenter, engineers a way of getting closer to her.

Whilst their romance feels occasionally underexplored, the relationship between Naoufel and Gabrielle drives much of the film's narrative

The film shuttles back and forth between Naoufel's work, and his growing friendship with Gabrielle, including meeting her at the library in which she works and slowly, inspired by her interest in the Arctic, makes her an igloo out of wood, juxtaposing this with the journey of the hand across Paris. As this implied-and later confirmed connection between the two protagonists, of limb and owner, is explored, the film delves deeper and deeper into Naoufel's past, into his halycion childhood and the loss of his parents. This curious triptych sits in balance, until the film, uncovers, in desaturated, washed out black and white, the sequence haunted by the image of a deer, the death of his parents. The film drifts around this point, something that, together with his early childhood, is recorded for posterity on the tape recorder that the younger Naoufel carries around, before juxtaposing this sequence with another, just as painful loss, as the film skilfully draws together its past and present, its disembodied limb, and its owner, and the romance between Naoufel and Gabrielle.

There is a genuine charm to I Lost my Body; its rough-hewn animation adding itself perfectly to the film's macabre sensibility. However, it is strongest when the film steps away from its rather hackneyed romantic plot, and focuses on its darker themes. It does, unfortunately, under-use the sinister nature of this curious relationship between its protagonists, that borders on obsession and at points, the flashbacks and the hand's journey seem to be from a different, and much better made film. Nevertheless, it is, at least in parts, an off-beat romantic drama, that only the medium of animation could produce, and brings our season on this subgenre to a satisfactory end.

Rating: Recommended

I Lost My Body is available to stream via Netflix, and on DVD and BluRay from Sony Pictures on import from France. It is also currently available to stream via Netflix in the USA

Next week, we turn from animation to the world of graphic novels, as we discuss the cinematic adaption of Harvey Pekar's cult American Splendor comic.

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