God bless Kanopy. Where else can you find weird Hungarian animation for free with your library card, let alone one the platform calls ‘One of the great psychedelic masterpieces of world animation”? As per usual I had never heard of this until I sat down to watch it, and also as per usual I’m shocked I haven’t come across this before now. It’s a beautifully rendered animated folktale epic. That’s my favorite thing!
For the record, the version I watched “has been restored in 4K using the original 35mm camera negative and sound elements by Arbelos in collaboration with the Hungarian National Film Institute – Film Archive.” So if you you watch this on my recommendation and find it worse or jankier than I described: it is neither my fault nor the fault of the Hungarian National Film Institute.
I gotta start with a disclaimer: I don’t think I understood this movie. That’s okay. We have to watch movies we don’t understand sometimes or else our brains turn into oatmeal. It starts with a dedication to the nomadic peoples of the steppe, and wikipedia tells us it was based on an epic poem from 1862, though wikipedia also tells us similar tales exist in various languages across the region. So there’s less nationalism to worry about than in other such cases, though one always must with folklore. As I know almost nothing about Hungarian history or the socio-political situation in Hungary in 1981, I can’t quite do my normal in depth analysis, but there are a couple things I still want to talk about.
First: I love how bodily this movie is. The mystical tree the mare nurses Treeshaker (our titular folkloric hero) under has an opening that is deliberately evocative of a vulva, and that yonic imagery comes back over and over. Treeshaker’s sword hangs down between his legs in some wonderfully unmistakable phallic imagery, especially since he needs it to ‘penetrate’ the literal hole that opens into the underworld. This sword then dramatically shortens during his trials, adding a complication to that image of male powress, especially given that he must give up the sword in the end. The three headed dragon (‘dragon’ is used loosely here, but more on that in a minute) has big pendulous testicles. There are mountains that look like spread legs, one princess with her tits out and the other who’s legs are permanently spread into a portal that her evil dragon-husband pulls a table cloth out of, rocks that form two faces who are almost kissing.
I love this because folklore is like this! I don’t think a lot of people who don’t spend a good chunk of time collecting folklore collections are aware of this but old, weird, unsanitized folktales are full of gentiles and body humor and sex and just–the body existing, and it really really delights me when a work based on folklore honors that, because so much doesn’t.
There is a heavy theme of sacrifice here I would like to try to puzzle out. The titular white mare has to suckle Treeshaker for fourteen years, until he can pull the cosmic tree up by its roots. And this kills her. Later, to return from the underworld, Treeshaker has to cut off his leg and feed it to the griffin who is helping him as a reward for saving her babies. There is Something connecting those two moments, but I can’t quite figure what it is.
But now it’s time for dragons. The dragons were released onto the world by women being nosy because this is a folktale and that’s what happens in folktales. It is hard to be mad at misogyny in a folktale, and in a tits-out old school animated movie, mostly because you expect it to be there. But I digress.
The design of the dragons was what interested me most, here. Because they are using ‘dragon’ the way French folktales use ‘ogre’. This is not the scaly lizard thing of mass market fantasy, it’s a catch all term for a monster who steals a princess in a Story Like This. And as such the designs are super variable.
The first dragon is the Thee-Headed Dragon. He is basically a square rock with three carved heads, big balls, and a club made of rock. He is exactly the kind of monster you expect in this kind of story. Which is why the second two dragons floored me.
Because the second dragon is the Seven-Headed Dragon. He is a tank, with each head a machine gun. And his club is a nuclear warhead. And the last dragon is the Twelve Headed Dragon. And he is a vast city scape, with every head a skyscraper. I admit I forget what his weapon was, but it certainly made a mushroom cloud when thrown.
So you can see where it is easy to see each dragon as a period of history: Pre-industrialization, the war period, and postwar modernity. Treeshaker has to defeat them all in order to free the princesses and right the world.
And yet–I’m not sure he does. Because the last shot of the movie, the one the credits roll over, is Treeshaker striding across a bleak, black cityscape that looks a whole lot like the Twelve-Headed Dragon. The beautiful cosmic queen tells us they all lived happily ever after in bliss and love but then–that image. Is it meant to imply an endless cycle, where the women forever free the dragons and Treeshaker and his brothers are forever born of a mare and sent to free the world?
I don’t know! And truly I am glad I don’t know. I want to not have all the answers sometimes. I want to watch some beautiful images and be left with more questions than answers now and then. As should we all.
So I do recommend this. You can already tell if this is the kind of thing you’d like or not. And I’d recommend it even if not. Because again: the alternative might be a brain of oatmeal.
Signing off,
Marlowe
Marlowe Writes 