Metropia

Movies are like all other arts, either commercially exploiting consumer tastes or non-commercially exploiting official funding organisations. The former sink or swim in the big hard capitalist world, the latter gain lifebelts that support their creative visions. Terry Gilliam struggles with reality, reaching such heights as Brazil (and various loss-making nadirs), while a Turkish graffiti artist he reportedly inspired, Tarik Saleh, obtained Europe-wide funding for his debut computer-generated animated movie Metropia.

A Swedish writer, Fredrik Edin, cooked up the scifi idea of a grim and grimy Europe in 2024, its cities' subway lines linked by an all-powerful corporation and its citizens increasingly connected secretly to a central thought-control system via call centres (and a potent shampoo). Stig Larsson (a namesake of the Millennium author) co-wrote the screenplay with Edin and Saleh, and the fund-dispensing agencies didn't cavil at the idea of re-making 1984, Kafka and Brazil.

They must have been enchanted by Saleh's concept of animating edited and deliberately deformed photographs of ordinary people and settings, and adding real actors' voices. It's not an innovative concept, and it's not attractive when the animated heads (big) and bodies (shrunk) sport minimal movements and are stuck in stiff posed positions in spooky gloomy settings.

In addition to the Swedish soundtrack there's an English-language version, employing some vocally distinctive offbeat movie stars (with Vincent Gallo, Juliette Lewis and Udo Kier in lead roles). Their talents are not well used, with bad syncing highlighting the animated characters' lack of screen presence and action. The predictable story of a bald average Joe (Gallo) meeting the shampoo model (Lewis) and battling a global conspiracy takes far too long, far too slowly, to unfold and moments of magic animation effects are too few to justify the movie's funding.