Loving Vincent (Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman)

[Mysterious Dude]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3262342/

[Mysterious Dude]

I'm actually disappointed by the animation. It's too real. The Van Gogh paintings really stand out because their style is much more expressionist than the animation. When the actual paintings appear with the characters moving around in them, it looks exactly like actors in front of a green screen sloppily inserted into the image. I'm sure the rotoscoping technique made it easier for the painters, but I think the animation could have benefited from a little more creativity, something that's not just a perfect copy of reality.

The script also lacks creativity. It concerns Armand Roulin, a real person acquainted with Van Gogh, who is trying to deliver a letter to Van Gogh's family, and in the process begins to question the official story of Van Gogh's death. I was curious if the movie would even address the "homicide" hypothesis of Van Gogh's death (espoused in the 2011 book Van Gogh: The Life). In the end, I was surprised at how much attention was given to it, considering it was never (to my knowledge) suggested by anyone who knew the man. Is it so hard to believe that a man who would mutilate himself would eventually kill himself? No one doubted it at the time, and I think it's foolish to invent a story to make it seem like people did. There must be a better way to convey the tragedy of Vincent Van Gogh.

The film is an impressive technical achievement, but not much more than that, and I think I prefer Aleksandr Petrov anyway.

[Spinal]

Isaac nailed it. It's odd that a film brought to life by oil painting can be so bogged down by literalism, but this story gets really dull really fast. It just goes to show that it doesn't matter what technique you use to animate a character, so long as you provide no life in how they are written. Each scene is crafted in almost exactly the same way, with the protagonist interacting with various characters that knew Van Gogh, each providing a small piece of info for a not particularly riveting mystery. Quite honestly, I had to fight off sleep trying to get through this one.

[Philip J. Fry]

Besides what you guys said, what irked me the most about the film was that it's format turned everyone into talking heads and whatever we learn about Vincent Van Gogh is quite shallow. And worse, Roulin isn't particularly interesting as a character to carry the film either.
I mean, if you're gonna do a Citizen Kane-style narrative, why not properly recreate the flashbacks about Van Gogh's last moments (like Kane did with it's titular character) instead of showing the flashback while someone else narrates them? That's lame.