Marc Craste’s Pica Towers Trilogy is truly inspiring. He created an powerful storyline without using narration by incorporating simple animated characters with unique personalities, strong audio to build suspense and create a strong telepresence, and compelling filming techniques to emphasize the story structure.
The characters are simple metal bodies with eyes. They remind me of the yellow minions in the movie, Despicable Me. Pica Tower’s characters are developed as dark creatures in the torture business. Marc uses character development to describe the protagonist and antagonist of the story. The blind man is understood as purely vulnerable and lost because he is wearing sunglasses and walking with a seeing cane that gets stolen by a dog who leads him into danger. The evil character, shown at the end, is a small, demanding woman with cat eye glasses that carries herself as the boss. The remaining characters are the pawns in the story that are portrayed in a lesser role in the sense that they are carrying out orders.
The trilogy is filmed in black and white to emphasize the vital visual components of a horror setting. Light has a strong role. The character’s eyes and faces are lit up like a TV screen. Facial expressions and emotion are easily noticeable. When the first character dies, his face flickers on and off to portray the life taken from him which coincides with the life of the building. The building is dark with limited lighting that flickers on and off. The decision to film black and white emphasizes all of these components.
The characters don’t talk therefore the sound effects are key to the storytelling. The viewer hears footsteps throughout the entire sequence. You can tell the difference between a casual stroll, and short little footsteps from characters shuffling in urgency or fear. In “Hounds of Flesh,” you can hear the blind character fall down the stairs, accompanied by a small shake in the camera, even though the camera is focused on the dog with the cane.
In “Pizza Sangre”, you can hear the truck approaching with the roar of the broken down engine and the music played by the radio. In the background there is a steady sound of bustling wind that accompanies the visual of falling leaves. All is interrupted when you hear the loud crack of a shotgun.
Personally, I think Marc Craste’s decision to not use narration was a risky choice but ultimately very successful. The lack of speech put a strong focus on the elements of character development, filming, and sound effects which were all effectively produced to develop a strong