Final Rating: 4/5
I’m not sure where I heard this before, but it’s been described to me that with the advent of cameras and eventually film, live action filmmakers were seeking to portray an objective truth – capturing a moment as it happens to be preserved for the future. Even in cases where the way a film is edited or different perspectives can show a different truth (such as in Kurosawa’s Rashomon or in the recent Kore-eda film Monster), we as an audience take the reality of the live action world created on screen at face value.
It’s why studios have invested billions of dollars in developing their CG animation VFX to appear as lifelike as possible so as to keep that “objective truth.” In contrast to live action’s objective truth, animation instead seeks to capture the emotional truth of the narrative presented. Ranging from more abstract animation such as Disney’s Fantasia, to Hayao Miyazaki’s fantastical worlds such as in The Boy and the Heron, to even stop motion animation such as Studio Laika’s Coraline – because these films are not constrained by the limitations of what a live action actor can or cannot do, directors and animations can construct the entire heightened ecosystem of reality to suit their needs and present the exact emotions they want you to feel.
Earlier this year I did an episode with Dakota on Filipino cinema (254: Celebrating Filipino Cinema) and highlighted live action films that erred on that “objective truth” side of things; after all when certain politicians claim that martial law and extrajudicial killings weren’t that bad, it’s kind of important to document the effects thereof in your movies as realistically as possible.
That said, it’s not as though Filipinos have no experience in animation. As with many things, the Philippines serves as an outsourcing hub for many Western and Eastern animation studios – Japan’s Toei Animation has a Filipino Branch, and for a while, Hanna-Barbera had a subsidiary based in the Philippines as well. Even my nephew at one time worked on the My Little Pony movie as an animator.
Beyond that, there are many Filipino animators who have gone on to work in Hollywood – most notably perhaps Ronnie Del Carmen who was co-director/screenwriter for Inside Out and Ruben Aquino who worked on many hand animated Disney films from Beauty and the Beast up through their recent Once Upon a Studio short.
That’s not to say that all Filipino animation is for foreign studios – the first feature length filipino animated film was 1997’s Adarna: The Mystical Bird. by Gerry A Garccia. In 2016, Save Sally was a mixed animated/live action romcom from first time director Avid Liongoren, which I saw at the New York Asian Film Fest. And most recently, the Philippines’ submission to the Oscars this year was the animated film Iti Mapukpukaw (The Missing) by director Carl Joseph Papa.
The film follows Eric, an animator in Metro Manila who for some reason appears to have no mouth (we’ll get to that). He has a bit of a crush on his coworker Carlo, and after a long night at the studio, he is asked by his mom to go check his uncle’s house since she hasn’t been able to get in touch with him. Eric and Carlo go, only to find his uncle dead. As if that wasn’t enough, when Carlo goes to get help, aliens come and abduct him.
Now if that sounds a bit out of left field, it was somewhat jarring at first. However, as the film progresses, not only do we learn about these “aliens,” but also start to unravel the mystery of why Eric has no mouth. This is where the emotional truth of animation really comes into play. The film itself is actually rotoscoped over the performance of the live actors, with the various “special effects” such as the missing mouth done through the animation.
The use of animation (which is Papa’s preferred medium) both has the practical effect of being able to execute these special effects while also treading that line between the objective truth of a live action performance against the more emotional truth that animation can provide. For example, in the sequences with the “aliens,” those lean much more into the animated side of things versus Eric’s day to day life. There is one particularly memorable sequence where the aliens are trying to find Eric and they end up using their tractor beam on his hand, leaving only a photoshop-esque transparency effect where his hand would be.
We even go full animation with flashbacks portrayed in what appears to be a child’s (presumably a young Eric’s) drawing style, with simplistic backgrounds and certain blocked out memories scribbled over in black marker (which hint toward exactly what childhood traumas he must grapple with over the course of the story).
Of course we can’t discount the live action performances of Carlo Aquino as Eric, Gio Gahol as Carlo and Dolly De Leon as Eric’s mother – even if they are “masked” by the rotoscope animation, they still carry through with all the subtlety to provide a solid base for the animation. Aquino’s performance in particular, which is mostly nonverbal (due to his lack of a mouth), shines through as he covers all possible emotions of someone grappling with trauma from his past.
While I could say that narratively this feels like a weird combination of Godzilla Minus One and the Oscar nominated animated film I Lost My Body, (ie a story about dealing with trauma told by way of an animated story about missing body parts), this really is its own film with a uniquely Filipino take.
For better or worse, there is a tendency within FIlipino culture to bottle up trauma and repress it and pretend that things are okay. Add to that a relative lack of infrastructure or acceptance of mental health resources alongside a pervasive sense of filial piety to respect one’s elders no matter what, and you’ve got a cocktail for intergenerational trauma that can require a lot of healing.
While The Missing isn’t a manual in and of itself on how to start working to tackle past trauma, the fact that it is a story about taking on that trauma is powerful. After all, even if perhaps the alien world that Eric faces down isn’t always the easiest to parse on screen, the emotion of that world and of what Eric feels is what’s important, and there certainly this film succeeds.
Thank you to Accolade PR for the screener.
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