'Olivia & The Clouds' Is An Animated Film Like No Other

This dizzying Dominican feature premiered at Locarno today.

Clouds are shape-shifters, always moving, a gentle parade of forms that look like one thing to you and another to me. There is much in them to interest animators.

Olivia likes clouds. She is also like a cloud: just when we think we know her, she transforms. She is a girl in a field, contemplating the sky, and an old woman in an apartment, lamenting a lost companion. When she dances, her colours brighten; when she kisses, she is only lines; when she makes love, she softens to clay. A man, obsessed with the sight of her, believes she has been reincarnated as a plant growing in his home. He may be right.

I’m describing Olivia & the Clouds, the first feature by Dominican filmmaker and artist Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat, which premiered at Locarno today. The film is like no other. It understands the protean nature of animation and exploits it beautifully. I’ve been enchanted since I saw it. I hope that, by writing about it, I don’t break the spell.

The narrative is composed of a few stories, which are told tenderly and humorously, and threaded together with a gently funky score by the director’s regular collaborator Cem Mısırlıoğlu. As a girl, Olivia picks plants to give to an unseen person living under her bed, who hands her tufts of cloud in exchange. In her old age, she pines for this person. It could be Ramón, who, in a different time and place, carefully cultivates, and falls in love with, a talking plant which he baptises Olivia. Ramón ends up in trouble with his partner. In another story, Olivia’s son Mauricio faces his own relationship issues.

There are hints that these events may be dreams, or reminiscences disordered by cognitive troubles, or even a film within the film. Crucially, none of this is ever made explicit. The term “magical realism” is overused, especially when it comes to Latin America, but here it fits: when fantasy seeps into this broadly realistic world, the characters are hardly fazed, even if Ramón initially scratches his head over the talking plant.

Characters reappear from one story to the next and in transitional scenes in between, transforming as they go. Is it a coincidence that Olivia is reading a book with the word “mutant” in the title? Her age, personality and appearance are always changing. Is that dreamy girl who picks plants the same person as the vibrant young woman at the market who tells her friend a story about a dying old woman? Is the woman at the market imagining herself in her later years—the pious mother we see gently moralising her son? Mauricio, for his part, is a selfish twenty-something shown as a simple cartoon figure with a thick outline; but when his life starts to collapse around him, he is suddenly a cardboard puppet in free fall.

This is a kaleidoscopic approach to character. We don’t see these people develop from A to B to C. Instead, we are presented with varieties of the person, which are sometimes contradictory. There is a sense that how someone is depends on who is looking: Olivia is only a plant to Ramón—no one else is around to verify this—and the Mauricio puppet, we learn, is an expression of how his exasperated girlfriend sees him. (The image sometimes subdivides into multiple frames, dramatising the very idea of differing viewpoints.) But there is no clear hierarchy of reality between the scenes, and we are left to marvel at the multitudes that a person can contain.

I’ve hinted above at the film’s multifarious visual language. Pichardo-Espaillat varies the design and technique from one sequence to the next, apparently giving his animators and artists considerable freedom to impose their style on the scenes they’re handling (and thus convey how they see the characters and events). There is 2D, cut-out, puppets, rotoscoping, clay, paint and more; characters abruptly lose their colour or outline, then recover them; faces and textures change from one shot to the next. This kind of graphic openness is always an option in animation, and some filmmakers use it brilliantly: Masaaki Yuasa did so in Mind Game (2004), an otherwise very different film. But few dare take this approach, and even fewer push it as far as in Olivia, which is why the film feels so fresh and exhilarating. The diversity of a person is revealed through the diversity of perspectives on her.

A film this interested in the different guises a person can take is also, perhaps naturally, curious about essences—the irreducible elements that lie beneath shifting surfaces. Imagery of seeds and particles abounds. As a couple start kissing, there’s a cut to an abstract dance between sperm-like figures. The Olivia plant seems to be generated from molecules in the human Olivia’s spit, which then undergo a kind of genesis in which grains and leaves rush past the camera as in Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963). At moments of high emotion, bodies dissolve into colourful dots and squiggles, as if a basic life force has been let loose. Several times, we dive into the gritty soil (which looks like the starry sky). Clouds shed their water as rain.

Dizzying stuff. Olivia & the Clouds can be disorienting—it moves at a real pace—but it is always interesting. I’ve written about how the instability latent in animated forms can be exploited for horror. Here, it is turned into a sensuous vitality.

On one level, the stories are all about love and loss. But love is in part about seeing someone in a certain way, and feeling oneself change through the way they see us in return. This is the existential level on which Olivia & the Clouds seems to unfold. The film leaves me thinking: we are this, we are that; we change. What do you see?