Summer rewarded animation (Inside Out 2 leads the Italian box office with € 46,133,500 and with $1,668,469,176 worldwide, ninth place of all time) and while in theatres Cattivissimo Me 4 perpetuates the myth of Gru and his Minions, animation is also celebrated in Venice in all its potential and techniques. Tim Burton opened the dances, going back to his origins in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, with a stop-motion flashback narrating the departure of Glenn Shadix (in the first film, he was played by Jeffrey Jones, who could not be recalled to the set due to legal problems), here transformed into a plasticine puppet. At Venice Days, Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass marks the return of the Quay Brothers twenty years after their last short film. They stage writer Bruno Schulz’s tale, a spectral journey where animation and live-action merge in a refined stylistic homage to masters such as Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica and Jan Švankmajer. No less attractive is Alessandro Rak’s FII – Lo stupore del mondo, an animated short presented at Orizzonti to celebrate the 800th anniversary of the oldest public university in the world, which combines animation with an outstanding vocal performance by Massimiliano Gallo to give voice to the revolutionary spirit of Frederick II.
That might have been enough, but the surprise hit came from Todd Phillips, opening his very black and very dark Joker: Folie à Deux with a cartoon that, right from the musical cue, evokes Warner’s sunny Looney Tunes to stage a bloody duel between the Joker and his shadow, a theme that is a symbolic synthesis of the film. Not only that, Phillips entrusted the direction of the short to Sylvain Chomet (Rendezvous in Belleville) because, between film masters, there are no barriers of languages and styles: only art counts and, as Guillermo del Toro says, ‘animation is the purest form of art’.
