The District!

(Atopia)
Reviewed by Noel Murray
January 16th, 2008

Visionary in style and puerile in content, the Hungarian cartoon musical The District! proves the limitless potential of the animation medium, even as it struggles to overcome the limits of shock value. Director Áron Gauder and his team of animators combine photorealistic heads—traced over actual digital photos—with exaggerated comic-book bodies, in computer-generated sets that have a diorama-like dimensionality. And what happens in these stunning tableaux? Well, when pigeons flock around a window, some of them engage in spirited humping; when a dog walks into the scene, he promptly urinates. A lot of viewers will undoubtedly find Gauder's attention to every gross detail clever, but in a movie packed with crudity, each new dirty joke has diminishing impact.

The same could be said of The District!'s version of political satire. The movie opens with a chaotic half-hour in which school kids and street gangs riff on the problems of drugs, prostitution, and police violence in one of Budapest's poorest and most multi-ethnic neighborhoods. Then one of the kids comes up with an idea. Using a homemade time machine, he and his friends travel back to the caveman age and bury a herd of wooly mammoths under the future site of a vacant lot, so that when they get back to the present, they'll be sitting on one of the richest oil supplies in the world. Mostly, this gives Gauder and company the chance to introduce broad caricatures of world leaders, making the penetrating point that, wow, those superpowers sure like oil.

And yet even though The District! fumbles for something to say that isn't obvious, profane, or both, the movie lays down a lively, original rhythm, keyed to the frequent rap interludes and to the way the characters' faces look alien, yet extra-human. Even if The District! weren't set in a hardscrabble community unfamiliar to most Americans, it would still seem like it was taking place in another dimension, shadowing our own. The film's best sequence is the bizarre time-travel interlude, during which our adolescent heroes eat psychedelic mushrooms and live out the pop-culture fantasies in their heads. It's a rare moment of hopeful lyricism in a cartoon too often preoccupied with being bad-ass.

Key features: An enjoyably lo-fi half-hour making-of documentary, and scenes from a series of early Gauder TV sketches featuring the movie's characters.