• Loving Vincent

9/1/26 (Mon)

A gorgeous design weighed down by a pedestrian script. The 2017 animated film is a mystery story of sorts as the son of van Gogh’s friend, entrusted with delivering a letter found after the artist’s passing, comes to suspect that the death was not a suicide as reported. He seeks out numerous people with a connection to the artist and his activities in the French countryside in the final months of his life. Each offers information that casts a different light on the facts to that point. In the end, he achieves no clear answer, which takes us back to where we started.

The script relies heavily on a recent theory that van Gogh is unlikely to have shot himself in the stomach given the angle of the wound, the disappearance of the murder weapon and other evidence, his disposition at the time, and other speculation. The idea has not gained much currency among experts, but it makes a nice excuse for a film. It’s just unfortunate that the cookie-cutter effort sounds like it was spit out by AI. The dialogue was flat, the characters familiar, the reactions predictable. The writers are British and Polish, but they’ve obviously been watching a lot of American television. In any case, I had been hoping for a story that would explore the artist’s psyche as a means of better appreciating his paintings. Viewers would be better off with Lust for Life. This is just a run-of-the-mill mystery that relies on its unique animation style to stand out.

But what style. Artists took a fully acted film and painted over it in van Gogh’s style in a process known as rotoscoping, making it a stunning cross between live action and animation. It is called the first fully painted feature film. It’s as if van Gogh’s pictures came to life. Many of his iconic images appear, such as the room in Arles, the portraits of various personages (backed by the images in the actual paintings, like the ukiyoe paintings on the back wall in one portrait), the fields of hay, the horizon. The artists who worked on this – apparently numbering 125 drawn from around the world – were clearly intimately familiar with the painter’s singular style and recreated it in breathtaking detail. They hand painted each cell, so the images shimmered even when the scene itself was static. Recollections by the characters were shown in black and white images, while the present was in the colors associated with the respective paintings. It was a visual treat from start to finish.

It recalled the later They Shot the Piano Player (2023), also an animated film exploring the death of an artist (musician), but that was in a flatter, more dynamic style reflecting the bossa nova and jazz setting. This was strictly a van Gogh world. Obviously it helps to know the paintings that are reproduced throughout – the story itself is basically an excuse for the images. I wish they had gone further and examined why or how the artist saw the world as he did.

The work fails as a film but is an interesting experiment. Its phenomenal animation makes it worth watching. I just wish there were a 30-minute version, which would have been enough to get the idea across.