Animated madness from 2020 Poland that may or may not have something to say about that country’s political situation. Specifically, it recalls the 1960s and 70s, when Poland was under communist rule and the film’s creator, the veteran animator Mariusz Wilczynski, was growing up in the city of Lodz, which was then an industrial haven.
Animated madness from 2020 Poland that may or may not have something to say about that country’s political situation.
KILL IT AND LEAVE THIS TOWN (ZABIJ TO I WYJEDZ Z TEGO MIASTA), Wilczynski’s premiere feature length film, was an eleven-year labor of love. Done in deceptively primitivistic fashion with scraggly lined animation—in black and white with splashes of color—it consists largely of the filmmaker’s memories of his hometown, a bleak environ marked by ugly smokestacks, trains and boxy apartment buildings.
Amid mundane and often nonsensical dialogue a number of visual motifs are continually recycled: a batch of severed fish-heads, a boat, a spider scuttling across a floor, a train and an old man’s corpse. As the film advances these motifs are mixed together and substituted for one another, with human corpses in place of fish being beheaded and carved up by a butcher, people being led around on leashes and sniffing each other’s asses, and fish heads appearing in a tenement ceiling.
…a batch of severed fish-heads, a boat, a spider scuttling across a floor, a train and an old man’s corpse.
The characters include Janek, a young boy, along with his mortician mother (voiced by Poland’s top actress Krystyna Janda) and father. There are also a retinue of train passengers who include a bird-faced sailor and a newspaper reading old man, who’s on hand to recall his memories of Nazi-occupied Poland (and was voiced by the late Polish filmmaking legend Andrzej Wajda, through dialogue taken from a documentary). Mariusz Wilczynski himself is also on hand, portrayed as a hulking creature who never wears clothes, and who often assumes the status of a literal giant (or, in the final scenes, a sea monster), along with his alter ego (voiced by archival audio from the late actor/filmmaker Gustaw Holoubek) and elderly parents.
There’s nothing resembling a story, with the narrative extremely discordant and impressionistic in nature. The fact that it’s comprised largely of memories isn’t mentioned anywhere, with the extremely specific milieu and highly naturalistic sound design (the ambiance heard throughout is how a late Twentieth Century industrial city would actually sound) only adding to the strangeness of a film whose primary lure is an artful puzzlement akin to the work of David Lynch.
Vital Statistics
KILL IT AND LEAVE THIS TOWN (ZABIJ TO I WYJEDZ Z TEGO MIASTA)
Bombonierka/Extreme Emotions
Director: Mariusz Wilczynski
Producers: Ewa Puszczynska, Agnieszka Scibior
Screenplay: Mariusz Wilczynski, Agnieszka Scibior
Editing: Jaroslaw Barzan
Cast: Krystyna Janda, Andrzej Chyra, Maja Ostaszewska, Malgorzata Kozuchowska, Barbara Krafftówna, Anna Dymna, Marek Kondrat, Gustaw Holoubek, Irena Kwiatkowska, Andrzej Wajda, Tomasz Stanko, Tadeusz Nalepa, Mariusz Wilczynski