Popular reviews

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  Review by FukBirds ★★★★

  Folklore be like: what if something happens, but THREE times!!

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★★ 18

  Potentially the greatest animated film ever made. A film that exists in a place outside of time, temporally expansive and reserved simultaneously, transportive to the point of destroying one's perception of moments as they move, from one to the next, weaving in and out of worlds, destroying & creating dimensions and falling deeper into the pull of novel galaxies; a film that makes you feel like a pingpong ball, only the pingpong machine is a swirl of dreamscapes and non-space and realities and outer space and dark matter, fused into a never-ending, reddening rainbow, an arch of colors formed of folklore in the spiraling sky.

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 5

  Quite simply the quintessential hyper-psychedelic animated film, more of a trip than even Pink Floyd - The Wall. Marcell Jankovics transitions through a never-ending sensory overload of stunning images with perfect fluidity and attention to detail without ever abandoning his mythologically-based narrative for too long. The battle sequences, for lack of a better word, are amazing; watching this film is like playing the most surreal, abstract Atari 5200 game that you can imagine and crossing it with a healthy dose of ancient Scythian folklore. Get to it.

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  Review by Will Steele ★★★★★

  From caves paintings to this, it may have taken 64,000 years, but it’s hard to imagine visual storytelling could ever get more elementally sublime: A true apex in animation.

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 1

  The first time I saw this poster (LOOK AT IT), I knew I had to see this movie. Finding out that the whole thing looked like this made it irresistible. Why I waited a few months first, I don't know. This is the brightest, most beautiful animation I have ever seen. It's expressive, unique, inventive, and bizarre. There are so many little moments that just blew my mind, like when the three brothers wake up together, and it just morphs through all three of their faces waking up. The way everything just flowed through from one image to the next was also mesmerizing. It reminded me of the best moments from Prince Achmed, but far more dazzling and psychedelic.

  The…

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  Review by sprizzle ★★★★★ 3

  Schedule your next psychedelic experience around this movie.

  I'm a sucker for folk tales. I love the absolutely unbelievable, grandiose ideas and scenarios they present, while offering no explanation or justification. It's a folk tale. That is the justification. This is a beautiful picture from Marcell Jankovics and Pannónia Filmmstúdió in Hungary. It's a tale I'm not familiar with, but it plays the same as many you'll understand. Son of the White Mare (that's what the name translates to literally) goes on a quest seeking to rip trees out of the ground and free three princesses who have been kept in the underworld. Pretty standard...

  What is far from standard is the animation and sound design in this picture. It…

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  Review by lubchansky ★★★★★ 1

  new thing is becoming a weeb but for hungarian animation produced under communism 

  seriously if you have criterion i DEMAND you check out the jankovics movies on there rn. just absolutely stunning shit in the literal sense. i was having physiological reactions to what i was seeing

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  Review by Leighton Trent ★★★★½ 16

  Either Marcell Jankovics wasn't high enough when he made this or I wasn't high enough when I watched it... 🤔

  
  Okay, reducing this down to 80 or so minutes of hyper-psychedelic images for your best buzz is a bit of an insult to a film that is a kaleidoscopic and variegated cornucopia of music, sounds and images that goes full sensory overload in the first frame and never stops. Easily the most distinct and stylistic piece of animation I've ever watched, this wildly fascinating take on Hungarian and Eurasian mythical folk tales is delightful with its simple story, but its deep roots of storytelling, its fluidity of story and the colorful detail Jankovics is working with here is completely dumbfounding…

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  Review by Joshua Dysart ★★★★½ 7

  Jankovics once again animates a completely mutable reality where otherworldly bros with godlike game shake and quake and morph the World Tree all around them like a bunch of Hungarian Mythic Hero Frat Dicks. It’s outstanding. Transfixing. Straight up prog creation myth narrative psychedelia. Constructed almost entirely out of vaginal and penile shapes that heave with color and flex with virility. The whole thing is horny as fuck. There’s a bit where the deity brothers just bare ass spank each other. It makes me feel, I don't know... a little tingly inside. At first it’s so abstract and representational that I had to struggle to interpret what was happening, but Jankovics reprogrammed me until my mind began to function on…

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  Review by Stephen Gillespie ★★★★ 2

  While so many animated films emulate the syntax of live action filmmaking, films like this invent their own language. And do so all the way through.

  That is not to say this isn’t cohesive. There is a uniform style here but that style leaves open infinite possibilities. Clean lines  and bold blocks of uniform colour are the deal of the day, but so is plasticity. The way shapes morph and evolve here is bewitching, as is the way it oscillates between calm curves and jagged corners.

  The narrative is similarly malleable. The story feels like it could go anywhere, as it peppers in known tropes but in bizarre and unpredictable ways.

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  Review by Graham ★★★★ 4

  It would be easy to drop a totally quirktastic load on this as being just a psychedelic brain-fuddler best served as a full-screen backdrop to a Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Grateful Dead peace and love mannn concert. I mean, that would be epic with just the right amount of hallucinogens, but would not do full justice to this spectacularly original and well crafted piece of Hungarian animation from the early 80s.

  Not being a hardcore follower of the genre, I'd only heard of Fehérlófia recently when it dropped into the official LB Top250, and I'm really glad it did. Only once in a blue moon does something so unique come along and when it does, it deserves to be…

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  Review by Jaime Rebanal ★★★★★

  I sometimes wonder if there'll ever be a point within the near future where this style of animation makes a big comeback especially as we're primarily seeing computer-animated features back and forth following the wave started by Pixar and DreamWorks. Marcell Jankovics's Son of the White Mare isn't like many other animated films that I'd seen, in that watching it feels like the encapsulation of an entire mythology that's slowly growing in front of your eyes - allowing numerous stories to spawn forth.

  But really, it's just remarkable enough as a technical feat and it makes me want to watch more of Jankovics's work.