Visionary in style and puerile in content, the
Hungarian cartoon musical The District! proves the limitless potential of the
animation medium, even as it struggles to overcome the limits of shock value.
Director Áron Gauder and his team of animators combine photorealistic
heads—traced over actual digital photos—with exaggerated comic-book
bodies, in computer-generated sets that have a diorama-like dimensionality. And
what happens in these stunning tableaux? Well, when pigeons flock around a
window, some of them engage in spirited humping; when a dog walks into the
scene, he promptly urinates. A lot of viewers will undoubtedly find Gauder's
attention to every gross detail clever, but in a movie packed with crudity,
each new dirty joke has diminishing impact.
The same could be said of The District!'s version of political
satire. The movie opens with a chaotic half-hour in which school kids and
street gangs riff on the problems of drugs, prostitution, and police violence
in one of Budapest's poorest and most multi-ethnic neighborhoods. Then one of
the kids comes up with an idea. Using a homemade time machine, he and his
friends travel back to the caveman age and bury a herd of wooly mammoths under
the future site of a vacant lot, so that when they get back to the present,
they'll be sitting on one of the richest oil supplies in the world. Mostly,
this gives Gauder and company the chance to introduce broad caricatures of
world leaders, making the penetrating point that, wow, those superpowers sure
like oil.
And yet even though The District! fumbles for something to
say that isn't obvious, profane, or both, the movie lays down a lively,
original rhythm, keyed to the frequent rap interludes and to the way the
characters' faces look alien, yet extra-human. Even if The District! weren't set in a
hardscrabble community unfamiliar to most Americans, it would still seem like
it was taking place in another dimension, shadowing our own. The film's best
sequence is the bizarre time-travel interlude, during which our adolescent
heroes eat psychedelic mushrooms and live out the pop-culture fantasies in
their heads. It's a rare moment of hopeful lyricism in a cartoon too often
preoccupied with being bad-ass.
Key features: An enjoyably lo-fi half-hour making-of
documentary, and scenes from a series of early Gauder TV sketches featuring the
movie's characters.