This past March I did a first for the blog by reviewing a non-Japanese product. To be specific, I wrote about
Fehérlófia/
Son of the White Mare, the 1981 animated movie from Hungarian auteur Marcell Jankovics, who some have called "The Walt Disney of Hungary". I wrote about that film on that month because that was the month that had the National Day celebrating the 1848 Revolution the Hungarians had against the Habsburg monarchy. In turn, today, October 23, is the second National Day for Hungary, this one commemorating the start of the
1956 Revolution against the Soviet Union, one which prompted Time magazine to name the 1956 Man of the Year the "Hungarian Freedom Fighter". Much like
Fehérlófia, the subject of this B-Side review is another Marcell Jankovics animated film that was started during Soviet occupation, but unlike that film, which only took two years to make, this film took much longer to finish & is now looked at as the magnum opus of Jankovics' catalog. Too bad Hungarian film is next to unheard of in America, because this could very well be a true cult classic over here.
Imre Madách's
The Tragedy of Man, or
Az ember tragédiája (Uhz Em-behr Tra-gay-dee-ai-uh) in Hungarian, was first published in 1861, and is generally considered one of the most epic & lengthy plays ever written. It's commonly compared to John Milton's 1667 epic poem
Paradise Lost, as both focus on the biblical Adam, Eve, & the Fall of Man, and in its home country Madách's play is apparently as much required reading in school as something like Shakespeare is over here; at least, my mother recalls reading it back when she was in school in Budapest during the 60s. The play has been staged in countries like Germany, the Czech Republic, & Poland, it's been adapted into two different operas by György Ránki & Clive Strutt. The only known live-action cinematic adaptation came from 1984's
The Annunciation, a Hungarian film that was cast with nothing but child actors & done in the style of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Marcell Jankovics decided to make an animated adaptation in 1983 & started animating in 1988, with an expected six year production timeline, but a year later Hungary became a free country, and with that came a completely different production model for how movies were funded; under Soviet rule, movie production was fully funded by the government. Because of that, Jankovics looked to any bit of independent funding, making a new portion of the film whenever he had the money; since the play was slit up across 15 segments, this worked out well enough. In the meantime, Jankovics would showcase completed portions of the film throughout the years at film festivals, and in 2008 received a notable amount of funding by allowing his 1974 short film
Sisyphus to be used for a GMC car commercial during the Super Bowl. Finally, in 2011 the production received enough funding from the Ministry of Natural Resources to allow final completion, putting the end to a 23-year development cycle & resulting in a total budget of 600 million forint, or ~$2.5 million. In fact, fitting for such an epic play, the final runtime is 159 minutes, or 2.65 hours, which may make it the third-longest animated film in history, behind 1983's
Final Yamato (163 minutes via 70mm) & 2010's
The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya (164 minutes); oddly enough, no one's apparently ever made a proper list of longest animated films. In fact. the theatrical release in Hungary needed an intermission, which bumped screenings to a solid three hours... And we complain that movies
over here are getting too long.
So, was the wait worth it? I've imported the Hungarian DVD (there is also a Blu-Ray, but I can't play Region B BDs), which does include English subtitles (done in archaic English at points, at that!), so I'm going to take the plunge into what may be one of the most ambitious animated films in history. I might need to take an intermission myself, if not two...
