Ada & Zangemann The Movie: Could Be So Much Better!
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This is rare where I can show the film on this website and also talk about it. But this time the movie I am reviewing is made by the Free Software Foundation Europe and is released under CC-BY-SA, the same license as this very article. I guess, please indulge me and watch this short film first, before proceeding with my constructive criticism.
I got excited when a few month's ago they announced that Ada & Zangemann was going to be made into an animation film. I did not expect them to deliver so fast!
In my imagination it was going to be another huge Blender Animation Studio project, such as Spring. I thought that surely they were going to make something epic! Something that will rival everything else. Something with cinematic potential. The end result was rather underwhelming in comparison. More akin to a slide-show, or an above average YouTube info-graphic video. Still though, some memory inside of me, of one similar cartoon or another popped up while watching Ada & Zangemann. It felt like one of those TV movies for kids that dealt with some historical tale. Some tale that was perhaps too graphic to show in any other way, so the filmmakers showed it in this kind of presentational way.
Ada & Zangemann is very heavy on narration. I mean, technically speaking throughout the entire film, there is only one voice, which imitates various characters sometimes, but mostly just reads the narration. Probably it is just the voice recording of the book. Which would not surprise me at all.
The animation is bare bones. It is hard to even call it "animation". As far as I can see, they took the illustrations from the book and used them to form various compositions. Which they cut in time with the narration. Which could be very terrible if only not two very strangely kind of awesome things: The illustrations work! They are very well drawn and they speak on their own well enough to hold a movie; But the second thing, and I believe the main thing why it all works, was that the editor, who was tasked with bringing this story to live, knew how silly his task was, and played a lot with it. There is a shot in the middle of the film, of a car ridding down a road. It needs to make a turn. The editor didn't bother trying to draw the in-between frames of it turning. The editor simply turned the 2D image of the car. Revealing the charmful cheapness of it all.
Seeing the final result I can absolutely see how they managed to make this movie so quickly. Yet. With all the strengths of it, I still can't help but wonder, what could have been? What would the movie be like if it was done by Blender Animation Studio? Let's speculate, shall we? I mean, the characters and the story here are Libre. Maybe we can make another version.
Close your eyes and imagine... wait.. no... don't close your eyes... you won't be able to read. Just try to imagine... Cinema! Big screen. Huge! Wide! A melancholic, happy children's music ( akin to Michael Giacchino's work on Pixar films ) is playing. We see a child at his desk. The camera dollies in slowly. The kid is in the class, at school. He has the papers in front of him. But he's eyes are closed. He is dreaming. There is no narration, nothing. The image speaks for itself.
We see a montage of his childhood. We see how he tinkers with electronics. How he puts computers into various devices to make them do various interesting things. We see him grow into a billionaire depicted in the book. We see him grow into Zangemann. All rendered with pristine, beautiful animation, done by vary talented artists. Every shot is a cinematic marvel. Every second is a masterpiece.
Then we are introduced to Ada and her tinkering. But while with Zangemann's growth it was about progression through time, it was about childish dreams. Ada is at a junk yard. It has a different vibe. A more adventurous vibe. A more punk-like resistance-like vibe. A hacker vibe.
The version we got so far hints at character arks for both Ada & Zangemann. Ada had not a lot of money and had to tinker pretty much with trash to have things that resemble those of other kids have. Zangemann's ark is harder to define. He lacked something. And by the end he found it in an unlikely for him place. In something he despised. In Freedom.
As a whole the story is about Zangemann's ark. It's about him coming to a realization that he was wrong being Steve Jobs. That he should have not restricted people. Because he himself learns to appreciate the wonders of Free Software. Yet I believe that it has so much more potential when given a proper cinematic treatment. The ending ( I'm not putting a spoiler warning, the movie is right up there, go watch it ), the ending has him enjoying the ice-cream that was not designed by him. Which is a revelation. In a way. But it does makes sense, in a way, due to who he was as a child. A tinkerer. To see him look with temptation out of his window at the ice-cream machine and fight his inner demons, not with narration, but visually. With a closeup on his face. With him trying to hide his feelings both from other characters and the camera. With him yielding to the nostalgia of tinkering. To him embracing freedom. It could be so tearsqueezingly good! I want to see this film!
And yet, we got a different film. A film that works. A film that makes you feel feelings. Yet a film that can be so much better.
Happy Hacking!!!
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