Reseñas de la crítica

[S]ometimes the simplest ideas are the most difficult. Rather than creating a typical animation of Van Gogh’s last days, the creators of Loving Vincent, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, allow us to inhabit the artist’s works. Every single scene was crafted by over 125 painters, to copy Van Gogh’s style and animate many of his most beloved paintings. This resulted in over 65,000 painted frames being used to create Loving Vincent. The result is stunning, lively, and brilliant, as we watch painted subjects, long since gone, come to life to share their stories about the artist.

The film is a fascinating exercise in self-defeating self-justification: narratively simplistic in how it repackages some recent theories about Van Gogh’s death into an Agatha Christie-like who/how/whydunnit, the tortuous method of its creation, more than the final result, becomes its chief reason for existing.

The production techniques and distinctive look of this picture, the first entirely oil-painted animation feature film in history, are perhaps more striking than the story it tells... There are sequences of extraordinary beauty... [and] In the visual poetry of moments like this, the film comes closest to capturing the maverick genius of the artist.

Loving Vincent was clearly a labour of love for all concerned, so I hope it doesn't seem churlish to wish that a Van Gogh biopic some seven or more years in the planning had spent more time at the drawing board.... If the net result seems to want to generate plaudits on the basis of the task itself, Loving Vincent deserves every award going; only as a movie viewed in three dimensions, not as some lunatic gesture of hagiography, does it fall dramatically short.

The plot of Loving Vincent is extremely threadbare: the son of a postman is tasked with delivering a letter van Gogh sent to his brother Theo. Much mystery is swirled around whether van Gogh shot himself... But what Loving Vincent really is is a love letter to the brushstrokes and the colors that van Gogh saw, that he created on canvas. That is where the film really shines.

Van Gogh’s story has been told on screen several times before, Kirk Douglas gave a very flamboyant performance in Vincente Minnelli’s Lust For Life while Tim Roth portrayed the artist in more introspective fashion in Robert Altman’s 1990 biopic Vincent & Theo. These films may have been more successful in dramatising Van Gogh’s life than Loving Vincent but they weren’t able to immerse us in the art in the way that Kobiela and Welchman do.

It’s accomplished and, in a way, impressive. And as Van Gogh did paint so much, so indefatigably, it is almost as if a whole pictorial world could perhaps be put together, just as this film has been put together, from his canvases alone. But it also becomes oppressive, self-admiring and even a bit pointless... as an exercise in style, Loving Vincent is of interest, but it doesn’t tell us that much about his work or his life.

There is something brilliantly bonkers about Loving Vincent.... The result resembles Richard Linklater’s adventures in rotoscoping, Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, but seemingly painted by the world’s most famous artist. It might not completely satisfy dramatically but Loving Vincent is one of the most beautiful films of 2017, offering a glimpse of life through different eyes.

[T]he procedural is plodding and Booth’s delivery is disappointingly bland after his stand-out turn in ‘The Limehouse Golem’. Eleanor Tomlinson enlivens proceedings as an innkeeper’s daughter, but even with Chris O’Dowd, Helen McCrory, Aidan Turner and Saorise Ronan on board, this remains remarkable only for its technical prowess. The imagery may distance you from the narrative but visually, this does its inspiration proud.

Delving into what some consider mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman have created a detective story with “Loving Vincent.” Their speculative narrative attempts to penetrate the myth of Van Gogh, but it’s their inspired visual approach that brings him to life.

This rather melancholy if stiff account of the artist’s final weeks before he died in 1890 from what he claimed was a self-inflicted gunshot is neither consistently riveting nor all that original. But the movie at least benefits somewhat from focusing on this singular tragic soul—yes, Van Gogh is shown famously cutting off his left ear—whose work continues to fascinate us today.

How miserable was he, and why? What secrets did he harbor? What enemies had he made? The questions are interesting, but not quite sufficiently dramatized to sustain “Loving Vincent” for its full length. As the story limps and drags, the viewer also becomes accustomed to the images, and astonishment at the film’s innovative, painstaking technique begins to fade. But its charm never quite wears off, for reasons summed up in the title.