The latest film from married writers/directors DK and Hugh Welchman follows the formula of their breakout prior effort, Loving Vincent. Utilizing a team of more than a hundred painters in multiple international studios, the Welchmans converted live-action footage into a final product that appears to be fully painted. While the resulting artistry is miles better than their prior film, it’s so well crafted that it nearly approaches its live-action source material, making for animation that appears eerily close to reality.
Buy The Peasants Blu-rayThe story is adapted from a Nobel Prize-winning novel of the same name, recounting a year in the life of a small farming village in early 20th century Poland. The film is split into the four seasons of the year, delineating the ever-shifting climate as the villagers move through the annual planting and harvest cycle. The plot and characters revolve around Jagna, an unnaturally beautiful young woman who catches the eye of all men and scorn of all women. When the village’s richest (and oldest) landowner sets his marital sights on her, it triggers a chain reaction of jealousy and deceit that ripples throughout the community.
Much like fellow animated siren, Jessica Rabbit, Jagna isn’t bad, she’s just drawn that way. She can’t help that she’s catnip to all men, but she’s also so poor that she begrudgingly accepts the marriage proposal offered by the rich old man in return for six acres of prime farmland. Unfortunately, she’s far more interested in his son, a brutish but equally smitten lout who is already married with children. This sets up a Shakespearean tragedy involving the father, son, and Jagna, as well as the gossiping villagers who all know everyone else’s business.
While the story as recounted in the film is fairly bland, Kamila Urzedowska is a revelation as Jagna, perfectly capturing the inner innocence of the character as well as the outer realization of her power over men. The rest of the actors are passable, with Miroslaw Baka’s old farmer too gruff and self-serving to stir much pity, and Robert Gulaczyk’s young son too cold and mean to be a viable paramour, with other villagers left with precious little screen time. The Welchmans do a fine job of keeping the story moving without any showy distractions, but also hang the heavy lifting on their painters as the key selling point.
This brings up my biggest gripe with this film, mirroring my complaint with Loving Vincent: there’s really no reason for it to be animated. Animation is a valuable tool for portraying fantastic characters, scenarios, and worlds that would be far too costly to create in reality, but here we have a very basic tale about very basic people, gaining nothing by being recreated in paintings. The film could have been released in its original live-action incarnation with virtually no difference in narrative impact, making its additional years of laborious post-production little more than a marketing hook. Plus, with the advent of social media filters and ever-improving AI, I couldn’t help feeling like they could have just fed the live-action footage through a computer to get the same painterly effect in a fraction of the time and budget.
Criminally, the Blu-ray contains no bonus features, so aside from a scant few seconds of footage during the end credits, there’s no making of feature to lift the curtain on the production process behind the scenes. From what we can see in the credits, it appears that the frames were actually painted as wholly original pieces, not just slapped on top of stills. In fact, the end credits mention that the oil paintings are available for purchase from the film’s website, so at least there’s a potential clawback attempt on some of the significant financial resources that must have been expended for the painting process.
In the end, the film is worth watching for Urzedowska’s incandescent performance, the most memorable aspect of its visually arresting but emotionally hollow production. The Welchmans’ sophomore effort is a conventional drama with, quite literally, a fresh coat of paint used as little more than a crutch grant it more attention than it deserves. They seem to have the chops to helm a straightforward production, so hopefully they either leave the artifice behind for their next project, or choose a story worthy of animation.
