Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #173: Loving Vincent (2017).

In 1891, a year after Vincent van Gogh's death, postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O'Dowd), finding the death suspicious, asks his son Armand (Douglas Booth) to deliver Vincent's last letters to his younger brother Theo, an art dealer. Armand reluctantly agrees and leaves for Paris. Once there, upon learning Theo himself has recently died, Armand is put on the trail of Dr. Paul Gachet (Jerome Flynn), van Gogh's therapist in his last weeks, and then stays at the Auberge Ravoux inn which had housed Vincent. There after meeting owner Adeline Ravoux, who was friends with Vincent and gives Armand more connections, he crucially meets Marguerite (Saoirse Ronan), Dr. Gachet's sheltered daughter who knew Vincent quite intimately. From here, Armand must untangle a great many threads to uncover who pulled the trigger.

This had immeasurable potential to be pretentious or boring but instead, alas, it had me truly transfixed from beginning to end. A Poland/UK co-production, directors/co-writers Dorota Kobiela (who had the original idea) and Hugh Welchmann employed 125 classically trained oil painters, rather than conventional animators, to bring this fictionalised story of van Gogh's life and legacy to the screen, and the effect is just ravishingly original, detailed and imaginative. But it doesn't stop with the application of van Gogh's own style or the landscapes' executions; the characters are all animated in a rotoscoped fashion. In other words, the cast's on-set performances were filmed and then traced and coloured over by hand. The degree of ambition and technical skill the entire film's visual palette, and particularly that element, demanded is absolutely painstaking, and the for the viewer the result is unshakable.

The narrative itself serves to distinguish this as an adult-oriented animated movie and while there are surely some anachronisms (for a start, as we know van Gogh wasn't famous until decades after his death), following history to the letter was never the point here. That was only to create a semi-original story around his work and to salute his legacy as the father of modern art. One of the purposes of that anyway is to cut a swathe through convention, and this movie sure does that. It also closes with Lianne La Havas performing Don McLean's classic hit Vincent, itself an homage to him. But long before you hear Lianne, you yourself will be Loving Vincent.