Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Imdbidia
Feral is a beautifully filmed short that explores the concept of the noble savage. The animation is a glorious artistic hand-painted 2D with very subdued colors, mostly several duotones, subtle sepia hues, and with some splashes of washed-out colors towards the end. The story is well presented and narrated, and very atmospheric.Sousa, as all the great directors of animation, don't do animation just to express their wonderful skills as visual creators, painters or designers. It is mostly about the story being told and how is being told. No surprise that this little jewel was nominated for an Oscar. It is not the animation per se, it is the whole ensemble: animation, atmosphere, music, story, narrative, and structure.This film is Sousa's exploration of the concept of the noble savage. This has been a subject of great interest and debate since the 18th century. It is based on the idea that humans have an innate good nature and inner moral compass, which shows in primitive societies and indigenous people, but also shows in all of us when some circumstances appear. The concept survived the 19th century and entered the 20th but with the opposition of rational thinkers, anti-primitivists and anthropologists, who say that this an artificial concept that judge how people are or should be, and that civilized people can become like savage animals in certain situations. This theme has been the subject of multiple films, mostly reflecting the romantic primitivism theory, and in a lesser degree anti-primitivism approach. Movies like Tarzan (especially Greystoke and the latest The Legend of Tarzan), The Jungle Book, Nell, The Blue Lagoon are an example of the first case, while the Lord of the Flies is of the second.However, the first movie that came to my mind when I watched this short film was Francois Truffaut's Wild Child (based on the true story of Victor de Aveyron, a boy who was found in a French forest at the end of the 18th century in a savage state after living about 12th years without contact with other human beings and unable to speak). The movie was ambivalent enough to make viewers question who was the real savage, the wild boy of the society in which he entered. Feral connects very well with Truffaut's film, but presented in a more lyrical and tamed way. We see the feral child at ease with the wolves, we see him adjusting to civilization in certain environments and with certain people, but not with city people and society, as society in which he tries to integrate but treats him like an animal, inhumanly. Who is the savage here? Who is feral? Was the feral child impossible to tame, or the methods used totally inhumane?We don't only see the behavior of the boy, we are provided with his feelings and spirit. That is to me, the most beautiful part of the film. To me, his spirit is what we see at the beginning and at the end, pure natural essence, and also during the film when he transforms from his white self to the essence of the wolf and of the able, who are also depicted as ghostly figures. In a way, the animal spirits of the Sioux live in the feral child, as the child seems to be a continuum between his nature and Nature.Sousa incorporates an element that is dear to him and part of his childhood into this movie, the windmill, which is used as a sort of home or protective capsule where Sousa puts the little feral child, a comforting memory of his childhood used to encapsulates the spirit of his character and, perhaps, of his inner child.This is a mesmerizing symbolic wonderful animated film, with a great mood and soundtrack that speaks about the connection between Nature and our nature, and what our nature is.
Robert Reynolds
This short was nominated for an Academy Award for Animated Short. There will be spoilers ahead:This is a visually beautiful and haunting short, told with no dialog. The basic premise, that a feral boy is found by a hunter and returned to civilization, is deceptively simple.The fact is, when you find a child who has essentially lived as a wild animal for a sizable portion of his life, it is shortsighted at best to think, as the adults in the film clearly do, that merely cutting his hair and dressing him as a "proper" boy dresses makes him a boy. For starters, he has absolutely no idea what the culturally instilled modes of behavior are for a human child.He still has the instincts of a feral animal and those will take years to break down and replace with the behaviors installed by years of being raised in the social settings of human societies. That's what this short is about.It has precious little to do with "freedom", as the boy was no more "free" in the wild that he is in "civilization". He just trades the norms he became accustomed to in the wild, which will sooner later mean a relatively early demise (he very nearly dies before the hunter finds him) for the norms of human society. He's in a cage either way, he just traded a cage he's comfortable with for one which is strange and terrifying.An excellent short which is available for download for a reasonable cost and is well worth tracking down. Most highly recommended.
