Psiconautas (Official Title - Psychonauts: The Forgotten Children)
Psiconautas is a movie which I would never have even have heard of, let alone watch, if not for its placement with the festival schedule. For those who don’t know anything about this movie, which I imagine is most of you,
Psiconauts is a 2015 animated Spanish film directed by Pedro Rivero and Alberto Vázquez. It is a direct sequel to the 2011 Short Film ‘
Birdboy’. I wasn’t aware of this going in to see the movie, but it turns out that
Psiconautas recaps the most important elements of the short anyway. Still, you can check out the original short here
https://vimeo.com/34658195 to give you some indication of the directorial style of the feature film.
Psiconautas itself is far more polished and refined than the short, almost everything has been improved from the character designs to the background art to the composition and you can see how much of a step-up it is from this trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HeRwcDxCbI
All the characters on
Psconautas live on what was one a thriving island. An industrial accident some years ago destroyed the island’s factories, killing many of its inhabitants. The remaining population have no choice but to struggle through the collapse of the islands economy however they can. Some, the titular ‘Forgotten Children’ fight and kill each other for scraps in the ruins of the Island once great factory district. Others, including our protagonist Dinky, are looking to escape the crushing poverty of the Island however they can. Meanwhile, the mysterious Birdboy struggles to overcome his inner demons.
I was very pleasantly surprised by this movie. I went from having no expectations for this movie to thoroughly enjoying it every aspect of it. This film continuously surprised me, whether it was its black comedy, it’s depictions of drug abuse and mental illness or its social commentary (which is something a number of reviews I read seemed to have missed).
The direction of the movie is constantly designed to put you in the headspace of its variously damaged characters through a subjective and emotional lens so there’s lots of unusual cinematography, dreams, visions and hallucinations. Stylistically, the art design is very, er, European in a manner that I cannot adequately explain because I experience of European animation and art.
The script is equally important here because, like the short Birdbody, the tone of
Pisconuats is very oppressive and unforgiving. The writes did a really great job balancing the movies very bleak tone and unhappy characters with moments of genuine levity, humanity and hope in a way that means you don’t feel like ending it all as the movie draws to its inevitable conclusion.
Now, I briefly mentioned social commentary earlier and that was perhaps the most striking thing about this movie. The movie has only been touring the festival circuits so there’s not a lot of reviews out there, but some describe the scenario depicted in the movie as being post-apocalyptic. While that is somewhat accurate I think what the movie is more clearly depicting is the country of the filmmakers origin, that of Spain. Spain, after all, is a country with a 42% (peaking at 56% in 2013) youth unemployment rate. A country where a generation of young people literally had their futures taken away from them. The 'Forgotten Children' This, then, is a movie that deal with their lives. Their mental illnesses. Their pain. Their drug addictions and other coping mechanisms. Their search for an escape from a collapsed economy. Their hopes that, despite everything they see around them, that there will be a future. Understanding this is crucial to understanding
Psiconautas.
Please, please, watch this film if you have the opportunity to catch it in a festival screening.