Budapest bizarre

>> The District! is a sexually explicit
animated Hungarian hip hop musical

by MARK SLUTSKY

Time travel, singing prostitutes, nuclear bombs, George W. Bush, woolly mammoths, Romeo and Juliet—all of these things can be found in The District!, a very strange animated film from Hungary, directed by Áron Gauder and written by László Jakab Orsós and Viktor Nagy Damage. It’s an exuberantly goofy and dirty film that barely holds together at the seams. Nothing and everything in it works, but there are bursts of impressive creative energy that juice up the movie every time it starts to slacken, and you have to give it credit for being, as far as I know, the world’s first Hungarian animated quasi-political sexually explicit rap musical.

Set in a slum neighbourhood of Budapest, the movie sets up its R&J parallels in the form of competing crime families, one Roma, one Hungarian, both with kids who get up to kooky antics together. Desperate for cash, the kids band together and realize that oil is the most lucrative property around. So what better way to get it, really, than to build a makeshift time machine, go back a few eons, dump a bunch of mammoths in the ground and return to the present, where the organic matter, resting under the streets of their neighbourhood, has turned into the black stuff.

From there on, the plot begins to involve the Vatican, various world leaders, plenty of prostitutes and Budapest ne’er-do-wells. As a story, it pretty much plays out like it sounds. As a spectacle, your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for the comically grotesque.

The animation is impressive: it’s done through what’s most likely a highly computerized process I won’t pretend to understand here, with the faces of the characters rotoscoped in; they’re otherwise animated like marionettes, flopping around all loose-jointed and fluid. It’s actually really... freaky. The characters have these realistic expressions but their body movements are so artificial; the contrast is just plain weird. I’ll be honest here: I respect the technical skill involved but there was something uncanny about it that I didn’t like. The District! is kind of like that: it’s a grab-bag of ideas and images and stuff, some of which are impressive, and others which are sort of creepy and off-putting.

The District! opens this
Friday, Oct. 26

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