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Sky Blue And Tree Of Palm At The Alamo Date: 2/10/2005 |
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Don't miss these exciting new anime titles - A TREE OF PALME and SKY BLUE - in glorious 35mm - only at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema! get your tickets now at www.originalalamo.com A TREE OF PALME FEB. 13, 15 & 16 at ALAMO DOWNTOWN "a dazzling allegorical science-fantasy tale" (FPS Magazine) "It is a serious anime that can change not only your perception of anime, but also of the meaning of your life." (Victor Eisenberg, Big Apple Anime Fest) An animator whose credits include the anime essentials AKIRA, NAUSICAA, NEO-TOKYO and ROBOT CARNIVAL, Takashi Nakamura spent ten years developing PALME with a crew of 500 and a mix of 2Dcel and 3D animation. In this dark retelling of the 'Pinocchio' story, Palme is a puppet made out of a special wood called Kuroppo wood, and given life with a mystical sap that works as blood. Initially created to care for his makers ailing wife, Palme becomes despondent and eventually lifeless when she dies. One day a madwoman from the Underground City of Tamas shows up at the cottage and charges Palme with returning the sacred Egg of Toutoback to her homeland. Mistaking her for his dead mistress, he springs to life to carry out her wishes. He starts off on a perilous journey that sees him team up with a rag-tag group of orphans that he rescues from the slave-trade. He meets the abused waif Popo and falls in love with her, and is determined to become human to win her affection. But Palme is naive and too socially inexperienced to handle matters of the heart responsibly, and succumbs to anger and resentment over his inhuman condition. Worse still, he does not realize that the Egghe is carrying is a tool of mass destruction. The animation is top notch, with vintage character design and impressive landscapes that recall Mamoru (ANGEL'S EGG) Oshii's work. Alternately poignant and horrifying, Palme's existential crisis soon supplants his original mission, and he is willing to destroy himself and the underground city to become human. Ironically, this tendency toward destruction is his most human quality of all. (Kier-La Janisse) SKY BLUE (AKA WONDERFUL DAYS) D. Moon-saeng Kim South Korea 2003 English Language 35mm 90min. PG STARTS ALAMO SOUTH LAMAR MARCH 4th! It's the year 2142 A.D., and the collapse of human civilization in the wake of ecological catastrophe is already a distant memory. Whats left of our species is confined to its holdout in the South Pacific, though you wouldnt know it from the eternal rain, cold and darkness. The lucky ones live in ECOBAN, a hermetic, high-tech city powered by DELOS, a system that converts pollution to fuel. The others are the Marrians, the outsiders survivingand plottingin the foul shadow of the unattainable ECOBAN. But DELOS is running out of fuel, and the solution will wipe out the Marrians. For a long time, Korea has been the animation industry's sweatshop. Japanese, European and American studios for animated film and TV have used Korean labor to complete their projects, but with WONDERFUL DAYS (now SKY BLUE), a new chapter has begun. Director Moon-Saeng Kim has found a voice and look that's distinct from both Japanese and American styles, and brought it to a solid sci-fi eco-thriller that harbors a tragic love story at its core. (Rupert Bottenberg) |
| Source: Anime News Service |
