THIS MAGNIFICENT CAKE! and the New Stop-Motion
“A puppet is not a miniature human. He has his own world.”
- Jiří Trnka
What does Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer have in common with The Terminator? Strange relations they may be, but each employs the filmmaking technique known as stop-motion. The process has been around since cinema’s early days, and has had many applications, appearing in works ranging from the famous 1902 silent short “A Trip to the Moon” to Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. It’s also the medium for the spectacular 2018 film This Magnificent Cake!, which draws its power and poignancy, in part, from the odd, contradictory qualities of the form.
A 45-minute dark comedy set in the colonial Congo, it’s not exactly the most marketable concept on paper. Yet This Magnificent Cake! has collected awards and accolades at film festivals around the world, and was declared by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk) to be his favorite film of 2018. Moreover, it stands as representative of a recent wave of thoughtful and ambitious stop-motion films.
The stop-motion process entails photographing physical objects frame-by-frame, moved in minute increments between each shot. Layered in rapid succession, the sequence of images creates the appearance of movement. In the days before CGI, it made King Kong swat planes out of the sky, assembled an army of skeletons to fight Jason and his Argonauts, and gave the Terminator (sans skin) its relentless robotic stride.
But stop-motion has a long tradition as a form unto itself as a medium for animated film, bringing to life entire worlds. Such an approach brings additional layers of complexity to the already painstakingly detailed process of animation. “A shirt has to be suspended in multiple positions in space as it is tossed toward a bed. How does it tumble as it’s tossed? All the different types of animators need to understand that trajectory, but only stop-motion animations have to make it tumble in a real, albeit tiny, room onto a real, albeit tiny, bed,” wrote Charlie Kaufman, co-director of Anomalisa. “If the object tossed onto the bed is heavy enough — a suitcase, a person, for example — the bed has to react to the weight. Maybe the object has to bounce a little after it lands. How would it bounce? Straight up and down? Off at an angle? The animator must know.”
Conventional special effects endeavor to present the amazing and fantastical as if they were present and tangible. By contrast, stop-motion animations cannot and do not pass themselves off as reality captured by the camera. The viewer is always aware of the artificiality of the image. This contradiction — a visibly unreal world that imitates the behavior of the real one — is baked into the medium, and, by this quality, attracts particular types of stories.
Much of the medium’s work can be divided between two camps. One draws on the toy-box quality of stop-motion’s miniature worlds, effecting a playfulness and whimsy. Here dwells the famous reindeer, along with Gumby and Wallace and Gromit, among others. The other camp is engaged with the bizarre and otherworldly, embracing the medium’s strange-yet-familiar quality. Whimsy and weirdness are not mutually exclusive, of course. Indeed, many of the medium’s most prominent works — I’m looking at you, Jack Skellington — straddle this boundary.
However, a third school has begun to emerge, even achieving a measure of mainstream exposure. In recent years, a wave of stop-motion features has tackled more mature stories, grounded in complicated thematic territory. Some, like Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Isle of Dogs, marry a sense of whimsy to a sophisticated sensibility. Others, like Anomalisa, have tackled serious issues like loneliness and depression, placing their puppets in decidedly adult scenarios. This is to say nothing of many stop-motion filmmakers around the globe working in the short film format. These works share a common dynamic, playing off the disjunction between the dollhouse quirkiness of their presentation and the character of their content.
This Magnificent Cake! is of a piece with this trend, but unique in its historical focus. Belgian co-directors Marc James Roels and Emma de Swaef confront an ugly episode from their nation’s past — the colonial exploitation of what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, an enterprise that brought tremendous wealth to Belgium and untold suffering to the Congolese people.
Over a series of linked vignettes, we follow a cast of European and indigenous characters through a series of increasingly bizarre exploits, set largely around a luxury hotel at the edge of the jungle — “the first stop for new arrivals from Europe, so comfortable that most of its guests never left,” the narrator tells us. A meeting of the royal cabinet is brought to a halt when the king develops the hiccups. (“Try suppressing it with your willpower, your majesty,” an adviser unhelpfully suggests.) A corrupt businessman finds companionship with a giant snail, whom he styles after himself, outfitting the creature with his own toupee. For a film of its subject matter, it is incredibly funny, even if that humor has a jagged edge. “We wanted to find a good balance of drama, comedy, tragedy, absurdity, and plain stupidity,” de Swaef told Animation World Network.
As a work of craft, This Magnificent Cake! is remarkable. Roels and de Swaef favor fabric materials for their figures and sets, often finding creative ways of evoking their locations. A bundle of threads becomes a spout of water. Craggy boulders are constructed from rough wool. The resulting appearance feels charming, almost precious — a sharp contrast to the arch sense of humor and suggestion of nearby strife.
“Humor is a way to disarm people and make them open to seeing something beyond. Because when people spontaneously laugh, they feel an emotion straight away, but they are also confronted by a very hard reality,” Roels noted. “Humor makes people a lot more aware. You laugh and then you ask yourself a question: ‘Wow, why am I laughing?’”
The title of the film is taken from the Belgian King Leopold II’s declaration, “I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” This statement, with all its sense of cheery adventure, is emblematic of Leopold’s obliviousness and indifference to the harsh realities of his occupation. More than a retelling of history, it is this sense of disconnect that is This Magnificent Cake!’s central theme. As a visual experience, as a provocation, as work of cinema, it shouldn’t be missed.
This Magnificent Cake! plays at Bryn Mawr Film Institute on Wednesday, July 17, presented alongside the stop-motion shorts “Oh Willy” and “The Burden.” The program is recommended for ages 13 and older. Visit our website to learn more and purchase tickets.
See you at the movies!
— Jacob Mazer, Special Programming Manager, BMFI
