There’s been a lot of terrible in the world recently. In my community specifically – if you count my community as the people I’ve gathered to myself and allied myself with digitally especially. So I’ve needed escape, often a mindless one. I could rely on something I’ve seen before, but it couldn’t be something that required my full attention at every frame (which disqualified my incremental rewatch of the basically perfect TV show Dark, because I’m trying to catch every little detail and scrap of mystery that the creators sprinkled throughout).
Last week I picked a film. It was one for which I had absolutely no expectations the first time I pushed play, and maybe that’s what makes it one of my favorite movies of all time104. Because I went into it blind to the history of its source material (it was a manga, then anime, and now this Chinese movie adaptation) and to what kind of movie it was (wunderkind statistic modeling is not something I look forward to in any medium), I absolutely reveled in its excesses and marveled at its successes.
The reason that I wanted to write about it now, in particular, was catching sight of a stray detail in set design that I’d missed previously. Above a literal life-or-death struggle between desperate gamblers, there’s an illuminated quote in German105 that goes unremarked and unattributed but belongs to Nietzsche: “Alle Vorurteile kommen aus den Eingeweiden,” or: “All prejudices come from the guts.” Which is wild.
What’s even wilder is that on one side of the same marquee that provided the above, there’s another, shorter quote: “‘Glaube’ heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist,” or: “Belief means not wanting to know what is true.”
That’s sitting in the background. Waiting to be noticed. And it, like everything in this movie, is worth noticing.
104I had the suspicion that it had slipped into that upper echelon when I first finished it on my phone in the passenger seat of a ride back from visiting my wife’s family, and after this, my third viewing, I’m almost certain that it deserves that recognition.
105In – again – a Chinese movie that makes occasional use of English.
What Works Best
The opening fever dream sequence of Animal World is a proof-in-pudding moment. It’s the screen manifestation of the abominably abusive phrase “If you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best.” But, rather than being an abuse of the senses, the sequence – in which the protagonist, togged out as a vigilante clown, assassinates a train carful of monsters – is a visual and rhythmic feast. This is the film at its most surreal, its most kinetic, and its most demanding110. Shockingly the audience’s brain is not working hardest during the barrage of statistics and probability that breaks in waves throughout the middle two thirds of the film. Because this fantastically unlikely opening is – as much as the sequences having to illustrate logical leaps for the audience – lavished with care for every detail, this is Animal World at its best.
The special effects in this film – particularly the caricatured monstrosities that result when its protagonist, Kai-Si, is most mentally fragile – are the kind of realistic that defy perfect description. They are intentionally cartoonish. Electrically bright blood explodes out of comically slashed corpses. The proportions of the beastly monsters hiding under men’s skin110 should not support their own movements. But exaggeration does not sacrifice realism. A knifepoint balance is achieved in Animal World’s perfectly rendered fluid and skin, motorcyclic explosions, and vacuum coldness that eludes so many projects that tout cartoonishness as expressionism.
Animal World is cool. And, given the prompt of a mathematics savant who’s thrown into a fight where the difference between rock, paper, and scissors is the difference between life and death, that’s no small feat. This film is brimming with the kind of strange specificity that elevates it beyond a Hollywood heist or art passion piece. It is singular.
110It is never clarified whether Kai-Si is hallucinating monsters shedding their human disguise or if he is imagining humans becoming the monstrosities they were always meant to be, and that seems intentional. Realizing the film student trap of over-reliance on metaphor, theme, and allusion, I genuinely believe that this is as straightforward and unanswerable a question as the writer-director HanYan presents it to be.
What Works Worst
It’s not difficult to find what doesn’t exactly “work” in Animal World. If you don’t buy a hundred percent into the premise – that this mentally unstable individual is the victim of unshakable, overpowering hallucinations when subjected to stress – then you’re going to be put off by the frequent occasional sequences. It especially hurts the case of the movie if you come to the film as a fan of its source material, which boasts exactly zero vigilante clown appearances. That device is entirely the device of this version’s writer-director, HanYan, apparently based on his own obsession with clown imagery111. It seems singularly selfish to insert it into this film, given how unnecessary it is to the actual plot, so if the particular device bothers you112, you’re not going to have a great time with this movie.
And how likely is it that this random loser is pulled out of a dead-end job into a life-or-death game of rock-paper-scissors in which he excels because he’s a statistics prodigy? Yes, the audience is eventually let in on the background that his (absent — dead?) father was a math teacher. But that information comes too late to set up any triumphs Kai-Si accomplishes in the first half of the film. The only setup we have for our supposed protagonist is that he’s a mentally ill young man doing next-to-nothing to support his comatose mother, save occasionally tease – and sometimes abuse – his childhood-sweetheart-turned-nurse. It’s simultaneously bold and stupid to force this unlikely, unlikable hero into danger of life and limb, because choosing to risk his life is not heroic – all his options, including running, are unavailable – and if the feared danger befalls him, he is not a sympathetic figure.
So the film, mired by tangents and antiheroism, must rely on unrelenting spectacle to win its audience.
111And – if I had to guess, based on his status as a creative and, particularly, a visual artist – frequent daydreaming.
112If you couldn’t guess, I’m one of those one hundred percent behind it. But I have a pretty solid history of being able to entertain the complaints of others about my favorite media.
What Sticks Out
What I admire most about a movie – or TV show, or comic book, or book book, or pretty much any storytelling medium – is when it commits. Maybe it commits to having only two characters and one location, like A Dark Song. Maybe it commits to every shot in the film being a full reel long, like Too Late. Maybe it commits to a strict nine-panel grid, like Watchmen. Maybe it commits to chapters opening with inexplicable-on-the-first-read metatextual excerpts, like Dune (and so many that copied it, like Ender’s Game).
If Animal World does anything, it’s commit.
The film’s lone Western star, Michael Douglas, hands in perhaps the most over-the-top performance of his career. Part of that is necessity, because he’s in the unenviable position of having to elevate a rulebook’s worth of explanation as to how the game is played. If he didn’t go to the extreme with every syllable, it would be impossible to pay attention for the performer or audience. But part of it is providing an entry point into the over-the-top world that is soon to suck the protagonist under. Kai-Si might work his square job in a clown costume roving an arcade of flashing lights, but nothing is as flashy or surreal as the ship Destiny. This is not a casino; it’s a circus, complete with roving, hungry tiger.
Little details like that – and the circuitboard-tattooed goons and the steampunk-bemonocled referees and the German marquee mentioned in Day Seventy-Three – are what set Animal World apart from other gambling movies, other action movies, other movies dealing with mental illness. Everything about Animal World hints at a deeper history to the world, and one that the characters are disinterested in knowing, because coming closer to answers means coming closer to danger. The audience can comfort itself with what feels like a safe distance.
I’m not the inventor of the phrase “If you’re going to go, go all the way.” But I’ve said it a lot over the years. I firmly believe it. And few commit harder or go further than Animal World. And, for that, it has my respect113.
113Obviously.
Alex Diamond 