Luisito Adrenalina: Luisito @ Tel Aviv

Screened at Animics 2012, Tel Aviv.

11 International Festival. Animation, comic, and caricature.

Director Statement

“Luisito Adrenalina” is a short film that hides great drama under small characters. A passionate story, adequate to great heros that hides inside a 6th grade classroom. In just 5 minutes the film can create a strong empathy, that puts the viewer to a deep spiritual journey which worth experiencing.

The animation, StopMotion with plasticine figures, is ideal medium to make a journey back to childhood. The movie was made with the materials identical to the childhood it aimed for. The animated figures gets a complex psychological depth ( “psycho” is spirit in greek language). Idole figures comes to life and with empathy, sends the audience into the journey. When Andy steals from Morsi the attention of Luisito, Morsi feels confused, helpless, jealous and angry. In difference from the escapist cinema, the characters in this movie are not good or evil but human. The drama isn’t coming from good and evil perspective but from the humanity that lies inside the characters.

Morsi and Andy throw their desires and will on Luisito, a simple fish. Morsi, the shy and suppressed boy, is empathizing with Luisito due to his loneliness’. thus he stays with him in recess, joins his company and entertains him. In a very different attitude, Andy, the active and successful boy’ trapped due to his broken leg which prevents him from playing football outside’ offers Luisito an experience filled with action and with the release of adrenaline, something that Andy misses deeply. The complexity of the psychological relations of the characters, sitting on the grid basis of a simple, clean and childish esthetics, that emphesize the contrasts of content and figure, and enables to infer very strong emotions like: jealousy, betrayal and vendetta in an age that mostly refers to innocence.

The clarity and minimalism that chracterize the visual look of the movie keeps the viewer on the important things and event in the story, which are the interactions between the characters and their emotional development. The world that the movie is based on, a classroom in limbo, emphasize the sensation that that event that happened 20 years ago in Argentina, could happened in any other place or time, an adequate choice for the universal issues that the movie deal with. The same limbo stimulates the very relevant question to the narrative: “What are the boundaries?” the boundaries exists only through the interpretation of the viewer that takes notices of clues like a door or a charcoal board that hangs up in the air. There are no walls or ceilings to close and define the space. Defining boundaries is a dominant issue throughout the film: What is the boundary of jealousy, frustration and helplessness?

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Luisito @ Tel Aviv