Loving Vincent

Year of Release:  2017

Director:  Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman

Screenplay:  Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman and Jacek Dehnel

Starring:  Douglas Booth, Robert Gulaczyk, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan, Helen McCrory, Chris O'Dowd, John Sessions, Eleanor Tomlinson, Aidan Turner

Running Time:  95 minutes

Genre:  Animated, biography

In 1891, one year after the death of artist Vincent van Gogh, postman Joseph Roulin (O'Dowd) asks his son, Armand (Booth), to deliver a letter Vincent had written to his brother, Theo. Armand, who disliked Vincent, reluctantly agrees.  Discovering that Theo himself died  six months after Vincent, Armand continues to the town where Vincent spent his last days, in the hope of finding someone who may be able to send the letter to the van Gogh family.  However, as he learns more about Vincent's troubled life and tragic death, Armand's perspective on him begins to change.

While not achieving much success in his short life, Vincent van Gogh is now recognised as one of the greatest artists of all time.  In this film, the main character Armand is trying to find someone to deliver a letter to,  In doing so he meets a number of Van Gogh's acquaintances, friends and enemies who tell him about the great man's life and personality, and episodes from Vincent's life are depicted in flashback.  The film itself was in production for six years, and employed a team of 125 artists to render each one of it's 65,000 frames as an oil painting on canvas using the same techniques that Van Gogh himself used, and using Van Gogh's paintings as models for each scene and character.  The result is an astonishing achievement, making Van Gogh's art live and breathe.  The film employed a technique called "rotoscoping" in which rather than just supplying the voices for the characters, the actors performed their scenes as if it was live action, and then the artists painted over each frame.  It makes for a striking and slightly disorientating fusion of animation and live action.  At times the film seems unsure as to whether the main focus is Armand's quest or Van Gogh's life, as it begins to become almost a mystery story in it's second half, as Armand becomes convinced that there is more to Van Gogh's death than meets the eye, which threatens to make the film less interesting, as Vincent's friend, Marguerite (played by Saoirse Ronan) says in the film: "You want to know so. much about his death, but what do you know of his life?"  And of course life must always be far more interesting than death.  However, the film dies ultimately manage to pull back from this, and it is a powerful and beautiful experience.

Douglas Booth in Loving Vincent