La Casa Lobo; The Wolf House

Recommended by Casey

Reviewed by Noël

A fascinating stop-animation & multi-media artfest, about a runaway girl and a new home and family that she crafts for herself. 

At the start of this film, the heavy paint style and raw construction constantly morphing and disintegrating was really overwhelming. While it’s obvious that a ton of work went into this (as well as a ton of paint) the sheer volume is crazy. After a long work week and many many horror movies this month, I was drained and felt like I was going to fall asleep, faced with this assault of shifting scenes and figures. The quiet voiceovers were oddly lulling and at odds with the visuals, and described in sparse poetic terms the thoughts of a girl named Maria, a runaway, fleeing from a wolf. I was like, ok, this looks really cool but I am NOT going to last through this over an hour of this. 

About half way through though everything just started to creep up on me though until it was suddenly REALLY sucking me in. Maybe it was that the shifting artwork reached a new height of production, or maybe my brain just needed time to shift into the ability to intake what I was seeing. Where I had thought there was no rhyme or reason before, there was now a thoughtful merging of fairy tales and perhaps biblical parables into a totally engrossing story of innocence and belonging. The heavily propogandic ending had me and James talking at great length about WTF we had just watched once it was all over. 

Story content aside, the movie production really IS this story. The movie is all about the strings that are holding up the puppet head, it’s the suddenly thick coat of black paint that covers a room set, it’s the weird way the color and figures are literally painted as moving on while the physical husks of the puppets and the rooms are left behind. I have no way to adequately describe this. It is about the marks we smear upon the the world through our actions; our indelible fingerprints making a mess of our best laid plans. Thought, movement and then decay. Repeat.

When James and I were discussing at such great length The Wolf House after viewing, I brought up the fact that many fairy tales were a way to caution young girls about the perils of the world and specifically to be careful of men. Don’t let the “wolf” in- protect yourself. James interpreted other content as specific to Chile and its messy history and politics. We both agreed there was something weird going on with some animals that evolved into blonde children. Why always blonde??? I said. James claimed They were never really pigs! Just other children. Finally this article shed some light on the inspiration behind it all, and weirdly enough all of our assessments were somewhat valid (James really hit it on the head about the piglets though.) I won’t disclose the back story for those who haven’t seen the movie yet, but it is even more fascinating and upsetting than the movie itself. Additionally, this article has some great info on the behind-the-scenes creation of the art and the principles that the directors created for themselves. 

Thanks to Casey, for a great ending to this month; a very intriguing piece that challenges the current concepts of stop motion film, story telling and horror.