I immediately started replaying the yodeling rendition of Beethoven’s 9th in my head which plays over the introduction section of Raising Arizona. That’s a movie I find brilliant, but if someone doesn’t “vibe with it”, they’ll probably hate it. Just the fact that they decided to have someone yodel Beethoven’s 9th is wonderful to me in many ways. And it fits the film perfectly.
The Blues Brothers is another of these films. First of all it has the ‘musical whimsy’, in that characters can break out into song and dance at any moment. But it also has a whimsical sense of humor—the Illinois Nazi’s car launching into the stratosphere, the Miss Piggy reference, the pile ups, etc.
Raising Arizona ! Pitch-perfect whimsy!
In fact, Raimi re: The Hudsucker Proxy and other of his non-Coen collaborations gets some credit, he’s pretty well known for it. However, with age he’s gotten to be more calculating, probably as a necessary reflex to surviving Hollywood. Drag Me to Hell was refreshingly fun, but I don’t think it was very whimsical—it established its tricks early on and then proceeded to elaborate on them. I’m not complaining, but it tweren’t Darkman. (You thought I was going to say Evil Dead didn’t you?)
—PolarisDiB
I liked ToB, but couldn’t take Amelie. This review is pretty accurate, imo.
It’s kind of funny, but everything that review says in negative is what I like about it… well, and more.
In terms of the comment it makes about Tautou’s (at this point infamous) moony face, Jeunet said in an interview about Micmacs (I believe in American Cinematographer ) that he has a particular attraction to filming “odd” or “strange” faces. One look at the squash-faced guy who appears in all of his movies ought to prove that one. I think it fits Jeunet’s sensibilities well, as again he’s not aiming for “cute”… Amelie is by far a male wish-fulfillment fantasy, but it’s at least the timid one that wants the perfectly imperfect, as opposed to the perfectly perfect.
Jeunet tried doing the whole character montage thing with A Very Long Engagement , but it didn’t work as well for drama and it looked to me like in Micmacs he’s dropped it. It seemed like a signature he was aiming for but we’ll see.
Amelie also had the misfortune of arriving at just about the time when quirky indieness derived from just simple independent productions. I think it stands apart but its harder to differentiate in retrospect, kind of one of those “Well it’s cliched!” vs. “Well it started the cliches” problems.
—PolarisDiB
Harold and Maude comes to mind, although I don’t really like that film.
Whimsy, to me, is a kind of charming silliness. I think of something like Be Kind Rewind and other films by Gondry. I do think of Jeunet at least in terms of Delicatessen, Amelie and Mic-a-Macs* (a disappointment). There’s some of that feeling in Leconte’s Hairdresser’s Husband as well (which reminds me a little of Jeunet and Caro).
Harold and Maude is satire.
—PolarisDiB
Harold and Maude is satire.
Hmm, not sure I agree with that. Even if it is, would that disqualify the film as a whimsical one?
Harold and Maude is much more than just satire. It’s very touching.
It is very touching.
would that disqualify it
I guess I mean satire is a little bit more pointing than whimsy. I mean, The Triplets of Belleville has caricature, but it’s not so mean as caricature takes. Hal Ashby’s films are like adventures through 70s American social decay, fascinating and lovely, but really dark.
—PolarisDiB
Harold and Maude has elements of irony and absurd humor, but I don’t think it qualifies as satire. Anyway, that film is almost the definition of “whimsy” to me: carefree, silly, embracing the transience and spontaneity of life.
I wouldn’t call Harold and Maude satire because while it satirizes some of its minor characters, it treats the protagonists with more compassion (even while poking a bit of playful fun at them).
Again, I don’t think a film having dark elements disqualifies it from being whimsical. And Harold and Maude has plenty of lightness to counterbalance its darker tones.
“I think of whimsy as carefree, silly, embracing the transience and spontaneity of life.”
That’s a good definition and certainly covers the characters, but I wouldn’t say it covers the themes. Anyway, darkness doesn’t feel so whimsical to me, but that’s okay. This is a discussion to figure out in general what other people see in the idea that I have so that if I follow through in writing about it, I won’t be confusing. And it is true that Harold and Maude has plenty of lightness to counterbalance its darker aspects, but that’s sort of why the lightness is there—to show what’s moving in against the dark. All the stiff upper lip society stuff, from Harold’s mother and uncle and the "saggy… skin… " guy sort of show off what society prefers against the jocularity and friendship of Harold and Maude. Without that backdrop sure, their relationship would be quite whimsical, and I wouldn’t really know what to think about it.
—PolarisDiB
Harold and Maude is both whimsical and dark. By its very nature whimsy, as I see it, encompasses both light and dark, because it is the open embrace of all life in its transience has to offer, including death. But it undercuts the darkness by not taking it too seriously.
Rushmore definitely has elements of whimsy.
Rushmore!
Bottle Rocket even more so, but Anderson has gotten less whimsical. I think he’s trying to return, though, what with Fantastic Mr. Fox . Rumor once had it that HE was going to do Tintin, though that could always happen. After all, Tintin can and should be serialized.
—DiB
Interesting tidbit: Jason Schwartzman prepped for Rushmore by watching Harold and Maude over and over.
The Commitments is whimsy. Because I cannot stand Alan Parker, I deem it shit whimsy.
Part of my problem with many of the filmmakers being spoken of here is that there films don’t just have an element of whimsy about them as those by someone like Bill Forsyth might, but they are aggressively whimsical, relentlessly, insistently and mechanically so. They are the Terminators of whimsy. They make whimsy into a polemic, which all pretty much is an inherent contradiction between the goal and the method. To be sure others may not feel the same way about Triplets, Gondry, Harold and Maude, or others who might be added like Burton or even possibly Gilliam, but for me they are often some of the most painful viewing experiences I’ve had as I feel like I am being dragooned into their worlds. It is all a matter of tone. It’s a very delicate thing, hard to get right without damaging it. Sometimes, like with Peewee’s Big Adventure or with some Wes Anderson films it all seems to go right, for someone like Tati it was an unerring instinct, but more often it goes wrong and the butterfly wing they are attempting to grab turns to powder in their hands and destroys the essence of the thing they were trying to capture.
@ Greg X
✔
Edit: From the OP difficult to explain to someone who just doesn’t vibe with it.
I think that is true too.
To be sure others may not feel the same way about Triplets, Gondry, Harold and Maude, or others who might be added like Burton or even possibly Gilliam, but for me they are often some of the most painful viewing experiences I’ve had as I feel like I am being dragooned into their worlds. It is all a matter of tone. It’s a very delicate thing, hard to get right without damaging it. Sometimes, like with Peewee’s Big Adventure or with some Wes Anderson films it all seems to go right, for someone like Tati it was an unerring instinct, but more often it goes wrong and the butterfly wing they are attempting to grab turns to powder in their hands and destroys the essence of the thing they were trying to capture.
I agree. It’s very easy to miss the mark when trying to capture “whimsy.” I haven’t seen the Triplets and I do quite like Gilliam and some Gondry, but Amelie and most of Wes Anderson’s and Tim Burton’s films feel forced to me. Exceptions: Rushmore, Beetle Juice, the original Batman (although I wouldn’t call the latter two whimsical).
“It’s a very delicate thing, hard to get right without damaging it.”
I agree, and this is why it’s so difficult to delineate as a separate part of cinematic expression. Whimsy in cinema doesn’t seem to translate all that well to any wide audience, because it’s all too easy for the spider web to be broken by someone bumbling into it the wrong way.
So tell me more about Bill Forsyth(e?).
—PolarisDiB
Yes, I can’t think of many directors that employ whimsy that aren’t hated almost as much as they are loved. Whimsy gone wrong leaves a really foul aftertaste as it feels cloying, sometimes to the point of feeling suffocating.
Hmm, what can I say about Forsyth? (No e) He’s one of my favorite directors to have come out of the eighties. His films tend to avoid strong emotions, at least they avoid taking them in at a direct angle, they are dealt with more glancingly, but the compounding of the information we receive about the circumstances of the characters and those more subtly handled emotional states tends to lend itself to an enormous pay off by the end of the film when all the movements come together to total up the film. It isn’t as if the characters aren’t facing some serious emotional issues in his films, but his characters talk about them in ways that are self-protective, not through either aggressive confrontation or by unloading them on to others. They are very much social creatures, confined by the needs or desires of those around them and so they struggle to make peace with the internal needs in the social world. This sort of balancing act prevents most of the big blow ups or emotional scenes one might expect from the stories if they were handled by someone else, and allows for small moments to shine through,
These small moments are things that often seem whimsical, the little things the characters notice, say, or do that help them get through their days. The things that show differences between viewpoints of characters or help delineate place are often shown in this way. The lightness of these moments, works to hold off the full darkness and heaviness of the situations in film and the circumstances of the characters and gives us an idea of how they and we deal with life much of the time. It often isn’t by big actions but by the many small things that lead us to a place where a decision becomes inevitable or has already passed us by without even our noticing it. For me, there aren’t many films with endings as rewarding as Housekeeping and Local Hero for this reason, they feel “true” in a way that is hard to explain because they aren’t clearly laid out or definitive in the way many films are. Whimsy is something of a way to view life as being filled with small pleasures, wryly observed, where there is a slight twinge of pain mixed in with the joy as those moments are often so transient or insubstancial that you see their fading as clearly as you see their coming into being. we cling to those moments in the mind for this very reason, they can’t be duplicated or held on to any other way. Whimsy then is life seen with a sort of half smile, where the impression is greater than the action due our awareness of it disappearing before it can be fully taken in, and that is what Forsyth excels at capturing.
For a more famous moments, think of the scene in Annie Hall with Alvy and Annie trying to corral the lobsters, compared to the moment when Alvy tries to recreate it, or the first play fight in the snow with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell’s in Groundhog Day compared to when his character attempts to recreate the moment. The pleasure of the first event can’t be captured again because it springs from an unduplicable moment in time, where there were a series of small movements and a sort of sympathy of place and time working together to create something magical, that magic can only come from that complex mix of sympathies and unawareness of ones awareness at that time. Focus destroys whimsy, it is trying to see something head on that can only exist in the corner of one’s eye.
PolarisDiB
I ran into a review of Triplets of Belleville that complained, “I don’t know what was going on, what’s the point?” Rest assured I pretty much blew the review off, but there’s always the part of me that wants to explain things and suddenly I realized something. The Triplets of Belleville can be, in its own way, really difficult to explain to someone who just doesn’t vibe with it. It’s surreal, but it’s not surrealism, so going down that route won’t really get you far. It’s intelligent, but it isn’t very deep or making huge thematic statements. It’s really fun, I’ll say that, and I guess for some people it might not be. It’s great animation, but part of the review mentioned that and then said “but the animation doesn’t hold up the jokes or whatever they’re supposed to be” or something like that.
This is not a part of my quiet classics discussion, because it is outright a classic. I realized that the answer to explaining The Triplets of Belleville , if one were pushed to, is to explain that it is very whimsical. However, this puts you into somewhat of an odd situation, doesn’t it? How do you explain whimsy? I mean the film is about a professional biker that gets kidnapped by the mob and saved by his quirky grandmother with the help of a doofy dog and three DIY ex-showgirls.
More to the point, since you can’t “explain” whimsy, why is it so difficult for me to think of many other whimsical movies? I think to Jean Pierre Jeunet and realize something. One of the major reasons why I like Alien: Resurrection and other people don’t, and one of the reasons why I like Jeunet’s movies as a whole, is that they are “whimsical”.
Keep in mind, as opposed to just entertaining, fun, silly, quirky, cute, or oddball.
Whimsy. What the hell do I mean by that?
I mean that as far as cinema goes, you get my attention if you throw all caution to the wind and try to do it anyway. What differentiates whimsy from those other words meaning nearly the same thing is that it’s not nearly so calculated, methinks. Whimsy is where someone sez, “…and a grenade to fish frogs with,” and then makes it fit the story and characterizations, because they can. Indeed, like the reviewer states, it doesn’t follow and there is no point, but it’s intelligent and works. In a way, whimsical are the movies that are easy to follow but brilliant because of that fact, whilst maintaining a very different and unique look.
But there’s still a differentiation to be made. What saves, for instance, referential movies like QT’s, Miike’s, or Wright’s from “whimsy”? Are they not also movies where the makers are like, “Ahhhh, let’s throw an Ennio Morricone soundtrack into this scene! After all, it fits!”
Well, whimsy to me is in specific counterbalance to loving homage or self-reference. If anything, that’s its most important power—the ability to outright be, “Yeah, I’ve got no referent, but you get it anyway.” Whimsy is magical instead of scientific. It pulls from delight instead of desire. It’s a real “Look ma, no hands!” not a “Look ma, I’m on television!” approach, is what I’m saying.
So anyway, this is the beginning of an essay I want to write but before I go further, I need some thoughts, questions, ideas, and more whimsy. By that I mean your whimsy, and lists of whimsical movies.
—PolarisDiB