French cartoonist Aurel’s feature-length directorial debut, Josep, tells the story of Josep Bartolí (1910 – 1995), a Catalan illustrator and painter who was interned in France after the Spanish Civil War. Running a scant 75 minutes, the animated film covers his years in France until the Nazi occupation and his escape to Mexico, as well as his relationship with Frida Kahlo; it also tells the story of Serge, a gendarme who became friends with Bartolí, and whose life in the present day provides the film with its framing device.
Aurel’s main creative decision is to have the film largely rendered like an animatic: characters generally move from key frame to key frame without any movement in-between, rather like a motion comic with voiceovers and music. Often, the only fluid animation will be lips syncing to the dialogue: it’s as if we’re poring over someone’s artwork of their memories, while they’re recounting them to us, and true enough, there are many cuts to moments portrayed as Bartolí’s sketches on lined paper.
The jerky motion, and the fluctuating outlines, may prove offputting for many viewers, but it compounds the sense of discomfort, and the feeling that life in a concentration camp is stifling everyone’s spirits. There’s also much to admire in the film’s lush watercolor backgrounds, and where and when it chooses to (and chooses not to) use saturated colors, conveying all of this is a vague memory of a dark time that the ailing Serge is struggling to remember.
Memories are the theme with the present day Serge, whose subplot involves him reminiscing with his young grandson, Valentin, a graffiti artist who notices his collection of Bartolí sketches after being left with the old man for a day. These sequences are fully animated, and between the fluid movement and inherently poignant story of a dying grandfather, become much more engaging than Bartolí’s own story, and ultimately a touching reflection on the way art can bridge and form relationships between strangers, across the ever expanding gulf of time.
The film’s main aim is to educate audiences on the awful conditions that Spanish people fleeing Franco were kept in: much emphasis is placed on the squalid conditions of the concentration camps they were placed in, which eerily resemble the more well-known ones the Nazis built, and the abusive nature of the guards — in one harrowing scene, Bartolí overhears a woman being raped, and sees the guards looking out instead of intervening, something he forces himself to record with a drawing.
It feels as much of a critique of France now as it was then: the camps and corruption bring to mind places like the Calais Jungle, and current concerns about racism and violence in the police force. By depicting France, Francoist Spain, and the Axis powers as equally cruel, Aurel asks us to consider what’s really changed since the ’40s, and whether countries considered liberal may actually be, in fact, fascist. (The strong presence of the Senegalese in the gendarme — who we’re told enjoy taking whatever chance they can to beat white prisoners — similarly asks us to consider the limits of representation in a colonial institution.)
Emotionally, the film falters because of its attempts to emulate reading a sequential comic: the issue is that when you read a sequential comic, your brain determines the pacing and fills in the gaps in the imagery, whereas here the effect resembles a very slow slideshow, and moments that should feel intense or upsetting (with the exception of the aforementioned rape scene) come across too tranquil. Many terrible things happen to Bartolí and those closest to him in France, but they have as much impact as reading a biography on Wikipedia. Our interest perks up when the film moves to Mexico, and the frame rate becomes higher, with characters actually moving instead of transitioning to the next shot, but by that point, we’re already 15 minutes towards the end.
Animation is acting, and unfortunately Josep neuters itself by limiting that half of its characters’ performances so greatly. It ultimately feels like a work-in-progress for a stronger film, and is destined to become primarily a curio for animation experts, as well as those interested in Bartolí and Kahlo (who, for the record, is barely in the film).
Josep is now available for streaming on Amazon Prime in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Plans for a North American release, or an English dub, are currently unknown.
