Animated ANZAC feature 25 April opened in New Zealand cinemas this week, helmed by Beyond the Edge 3D director Leanne Pooley. It’s the type of film that acts as an artistic telescope, piercing through time and space to pinpoint a moment in our country’s history that demands emotional exploration – lest we forget.
It’s not a documentary aiming to provide a top-down depiction of history, which is a creative decision that hasn’t gone down well with some critics and yet is totally fine with others. But because 25 April chooses to focus on the memoirs of certain soldiers and nurses who served during that doomed Gallipoli campaign, it delivers the events with a humane intimacy and empathetic warmth that a distant omnipresence cannot touch. Thus, when the cold reality of the ANZACs’ fate hits, that traumatic chill sinks in from the skin to the bone.
Only animation could achieve this vision.
In a cinematic world that often shoves animation exclusively into the cuddly arms of family-friendly affairs, it’s incredible that New Zealand’s second animated feature ever would skew towards such mature and serious content. Not only that, it deals with one of the most sensitive moments in New Zealand history. One wrong decision in the art department could have flipped the whole visual style into offensively cartoonish territory, sinking the feature entirely. But the film’s look never falls, walking the tightrope as if it were a runway.
Animated films are also very bloody expensive – you’d have better luck buying a house in Auckland for every one of your toes. I don’t have anything to solidly back up this following claim, but I can’t imagine Leanne Pooley and her fellow filmmakers would have been given an animation-friendly budget to make 25 April.
This is the reason animated films are aimed towards family-friendly audiences: you’re waaaaaaaay more likely to make your money back. Joe Dandy would much rather see a minion slap another minion with a banana than see an animated recreation of a real war, so the very fact that 25 April even exists feels like a miracle to me.
And while Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale will still be crowned ‘The First New Zealand Animated Feature’, Flux Animation Studio has achieved our country’s first CGI animated feature. That basically makes them the Kiwi Pixar (yes, I’m stretching the analogy to its breaking point).
But the unfortunate reality is that anyone who is significantly moved by 25 April will not initially call it “a great animated film,” – it will be considered “a great ANZAC film.” And that is the biggest victory Pooley and the team can hope for: immersing audiences so deeply that the fact it’s animated doesn’t immediately come to mind.
Nevertheless, 25 April has been recognised by the world’s biggest animation festival, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, where it was nominated in competition for Best Feature Film. If the animated side of 25 April is being praise on the world stage, then it should be celebrated on our country’s stage, too.
’25 April’ is now playing nationwide – find movie times near you
