½*/****
starring David Choe, Stuart Mahoney, Halleh Seddighzadeh, M dot Strange
written and directed by M dot Strange
by Alex Jackson
"Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
-Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) in Jurassic Park
While it is perfectly normal for a student filmmaker to be preoccupied with the "could" questions over the "should," the "should" questions need be asked and answered to at least some extent before one attempts to make something for display to a general audience. I suppose I could say that We Are the Strange is an exercise in style over substance, or that it breaks away from traditional forms of narrative, but that would imply that writer/producer/director/animator/composer M dot Strange had actually made choices with regards to substance, narrative, and the lack thereof. The film is an artistic failure on the most rudimentary level; it seems that Strange never got past the idea that it would be cool to make an animated feature. We Are the Strange has something to do with a beautiful woman named Blue who is kicked out of a brothel by her pimp for being "ugly." She then meets the living Buddy doll Emmm, who asks her out for ice cream. Soon they discover that the ice cream shop has been taken over by "evil forces." All of this is set in a video game or an alternate universe composed of video game graphics or something.
Strange doesn't have a lot of regard for his storyline or characters–it's really all a means by which to try out his new style of animation, which he calls "Str8nime." His principal influences are 8-bit video games and anime, you see, and when you combine those two words with "strange" you get Str8nime. Strange betrays little grasp of either the anaesthetic cleanliness of computer-generated imagery or the abstract inexpressiveness of stop-motion animation; for all his purported love of video games, it's curious that his film has so much hatred for them. When he partially appropriates mythological archetypes for the film's battle between "good" and "evil," it feels like he's mocking the very idea of them through the aggressively artificial graphics and tinny soundtrack. I find it particularly odd that the film explicitly condemns the format in the beginning for standardizing ideals of feminine beauty and then later for socializing boys into an aggressive male gender role. Is he actually buying into this hokum or is he sarcastically bringing it up in order to rub the film's intellectual bankruptcy in our faces? We Are the Strange is so embarrassing that I would almost feel sorry for the guy if his movie didn't flaunt such a callow disregard for art. To compensate for the fact that he has nothing to say, Strange hides behind both festival audiences' tolerance for avant-garde (or, at least, their fear that they'll be exposed as unsophisticated for admitting they don't "get it") and glib cutesy-poo sarcasm. On that level, We Are the Strange is utterly reprehensible.
