I loved these twisted little animated films. The makers created some sort of strange, spare post-apocalypic world that involved small evil robots skittering about a dark stone industrialized building of some sort.
Hounds of Flesh opens with a blind robot wearing shades and carrying a walking stick being followed by a robot dog. I thought he was his sweet, innocent little servant dog until he steals the blind robots cane and runs away. The blind robot walks down industrial looking stone corridors, lightbulbs flickering, and we hear the tapping of his stick as he rattles down steep staircases.
These were black and white animation–no colors, mostly shades of grey. It felt cold, dark, spare, and scary. And also humorous, which put a unique slant on things. One minute you see what you think is a cute little robot, but then as the camera pans out you see he’s hanging from an iron chain from the ceiling being tortured.
It takes a minute to register, but you realize you see another shape that is a TV that’s been stabbed to death. It has a knife stuck in it and there’s blood spray on the floors and walls, which the robot dog laps up.
There are such interesting details and creative choices. There’s no dialogue, and very spare audio, so it’s definitely a “show don’t tell” approach that leaves the audience to figure out what’s going on. The lightbulbs flickering and flashing lending an air of something sinister in the works.
Every tiny sound echoes, like a pin dropping. Lots of shadows and light. The “camera angles” change quite a bit keeping things visually interesting. They are low and then high, close and then wide and we feel like we’re viewing things from a lot of different perspectives. The way the viewpoint panned around had such a cinematic feel to it. It’s hard to believe it’s not an actual camera creating the well composed shots.
Parts of it were really beautiful too–like the birds swirling around in the wind, with the grey hazy sky in Pizza Sangre.
I felt really curious about how they made this film. It was so visually sophisticated, yet unique and not ‘high budget’ looking. That felt inspiring to me.