100 Greatest Animated Shorts / The Man With No Shadow / Georges Schwizgebel
Canada / Switzerland / 2004
Like many great animated shorts this was produced by the National Film Board of Canada in collaboration with the award-winning Swiss director Georges Shwizgebel.
As seen before in this collection the painting on glass technique when used by a good artist can produce beautiful results and in The Man with No Shadow the colours, design and execution lie somewhere between Caroline Leaf’s expressionism and Aleksandr Petrov’s saturated realism. The urban universe is broken down into geometric shapes, allowing for cleverly stylised and fluid transitions between shots, sometimes disorientating but never enough to distract from the story. Between the boxy buildings are colourful, painted landscapes populated by prowling human figures, lending touches of Escher and Dali to the unique atmosphere of a mysterious fluxing world where any attempt to change your situation is fraught with treachery and danger.
Based on Adelbert von Chamisso’s moral tale Peter Schlemihl, this is the tale of a man who starts toiling away in the shadows in a monotone world. After selling his shadow to the devil in exchange for great riches he finds that he is only a shadow of a man without it.
Miserable from being shunned at the exotic parties he now frequents, he decides to go back to the devil and trade back his riches, not for his shadow or his soul but for ‘seven league boots’, a magical element of the original story which enable limitless travel. The hero can now flee the enclaves of self interest and privilege and search the world for somewhere real where he can belong. Eventually (spoiler alert) he finds a home in the far east where he can operate shadow puppets without casting a shadow himself, the only place where his flaw becomes an advantage.
These specific story details may not be immediately apparent from the animation without prior knowledge of the fable, but you certainly get the idea of a man who has foolishly sold a true part of himself in exchange for riches and therefore becomes a lost soul searching the world for acceptance.
Dialogue free, the rhythm of the film instead comes from its musical score. The characters are mostly simply-animated silhouettes, circling, coming together and apart again in an elaborate dance of life. Rather than the more typical animated personal tales with stylised individual characters, this creates a detached and somewhat hypnotic overview of humanity – first the stamped down majority struggling through overworked grey lives, then the decadent rich lounging around with delusions of grandeur. Often the only way to tell the central character from others in the Great Gatsby party world is his lack of a shadow, which makes you wonder if everyone here are similarly lost and sold souls, shunning the hero for his inability to maintain their pretense and self-delusion of happiness and sophistication, like a mirror reflecting back their soulless lack of substance.
The film was included in Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt‘s The Animation Show 2005, a traveling collection of some of the best animated shorts, while Schwizgebel’s 2011 film Romance won the award for best animated short at the 2011 Genie Awards.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome!