In our Storytelling workshop, there was one activity where we were asked to breakdowns the bones of the story/movie that is familiar to us. Instantly I thought of Annette (2021), a musical movie written by the Sparks Brothers and directed by Leos Carax. Personally, for me, Annette was the most appealing and eclectic (or maybe the weirdest?!) movie that I watched in 2021.
(Spoiler Alert!)
To summarise the story of Annette, the story began with Henry, a stand-up comedian and Ann, an opera singer that fell in love, got married and have a child together named Annette. While Henry’s career spiralled down, Ann’s took off, which resulted in an aggression on Henry’s end. Henry ended up accidentally killed Ann which left Annette with only her father. Later he discovered that Annette has a singing talent like her mother and thus began Annette’s singing career with Henry as her manager. Fast forward, Annette became a worldwide sensation and together with Henry and her mentor, The three of them went touring across the world. One night Henry killed Annette’s mentor because of his jealousy towards him. When the time of Annette’s final show came, Annette refused to sing, instead, she outed to the world that her father was a killer. The ending of the scene was Annette visiting Henry in the prison and how they have a conversation (in this case, a duet) with a brutal/sad/bittersweet open ending(depends of how optimistic you are).
So! What I love the most about this movie was the fact that Annette was a puppet the entirety of the movie except for the ending. I feel like as a movie, the director gave us, the audience, a chance to play along in this movie. When we saw a puppet Annette, it’s easy for us to not take her seriously, and I think that is probably what the director was aiming, for us to forget her as a human being, not unlike how the Adult in the movie sees her, as a means to an end. I feel like this movie is a great example of how the decision about how to tell a story is very important. In my opinion, one of the reason this works well because it is a live action movie, where they casted real people as the character. Maybe it is because we as a human could relate more to other human rather than to an object. When we sees a puppet Annette, which was also barely talk or do anything that hinted of humanity, It’s easy to ignore her existence, especially when there was a lot more real human drama surrounding her. Also, I feel like the writer and director of this movie did a great job in including the audience in the narrative without underestimating the capability of the audience to grasp everything at the end.
Finally, there are a lot of ways we could tell a story, we could spoon-feed the bones of the story to the audience, or we drizzled it in form of riddled words and visuals. As animators, with the capacity of creating and telling those stories, the choice could be in our hand. How the audience react and process what we delivered is another story. This is why I love visual storytelling!