…Researched and contributed by Henry George for TDPel Media.
Ari Aster, a 36-year-old director, has earned a reputation for creating brainy, but intensely terrifying horror films with his first two releases, “Hereditary” in 2018 and “Midsommar” in 2019.
With his latest film, “Beau Is Afraid,” Aster has ventured into a new direction that defies easy categorization.
Although the movie is ostensibly a comedy, it follows a bumbling man named Beau, played by Joaquin Phoenix, on a journey to his mother’s house, which is anything but pleasant.
As New York Magazine describes it, the film is “almost unbearably intimate, like being dropped directly into someone’s subconscious at full, rolling boil.”
The three-hour runtime includes a beautifully bizarre semi-animated sequence that contributes to the movie’s unique and strange flat affect.
Filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña are responsible for the sequence’s psychedelic imagery, which transports Beau to a fable-like village full of pure love and abject terror while attending a play being staged in the woods.
Aster brought on the duo after seeing their 2018 stop-motion horror film, “The Wolf House,” inspired by the real-life Colonia Dignidad in Chile.
The animation sequence was created over 18 months by a team of about 20 artists, with León and Cociña working out of their studio in Santiago, while Aster shot the movie in Montreal, and visual effects supervisor Jorge Cañada Escorihuela pieced everything together in London.
The team utilized an array of techniques to create the imagery, including green screens, hand-painted backdrops, life-size diorama sets, and rotoscope animation.
The filmmakers’ goal was to create an animation that was hard to discern how it was made.
They wanted to combine several techniques, with each scene utilizing at least three techniques, which they dubbed a “lucrative and fertile laboratory.”
One of the most challenging elements for Cociña was portraying the lapse of time, which had “seasons changing with, like, three seconds per season!”
Although “The Wizard of Oz” inspired the sequence, recreating the classic movie’s “feeling of a very vast landscape” was a constant challenge.
Aster would demand a “bigger space” even though the sequence was supposed to take place in a theater play, according to Cociña.
Despite these challenges, Cociña acknowledges that Aster was right, saying, “You are in a distorted version of theater.
You are inside the fiction.
You are in a psychological profundity.”