The Polyphony
When we watch Disney’s Zootopia, it is easy to be swept up in the vibrant, glossy optimism of a city where “anyone can be anything.” But let us look past the colourful surface, and tangle the meticulously managed system built on deep-seated anxieties and infrastructures of distrust. This paper pulls back the curtain on the film’s playful storytelling to reveal a much sharper, more complex analysis of institutional power and societal inequality than meets the viewing eye.
What Beasts of No Nation, directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, is about is not only the loss of war, but also about how war is loss. War is a lost cause, and no matter whose side you’re on there’s no going back. By depicting an African child being dragged into a civil war, everything he once knew taken away from him, Fukunaga paints a poignant and uncomfortable picture of war’s human cost.
Every once in a while, there is a film that packs so much emotion and personal connection for me that I feel an urgent need to lay my thoughts out in written words; Nobody Knows (2004) is one of those films.
More than just a feel-good film, CODA revolves around Ruby, a CODA (child of deaf adults), and her deaf fishermen family. Having a great passion for music and singing, something her parents know next to nothing about, Ruby has to choose where her values lie the most.
To watch Kore-eda Hirokazu’s After Life (1998) is to watch countless people telling and retelling countless life stories, and we could all relate to them despite knowing that they are all fiction, because we could easily find ourselves in those stories.
Millennium Actress (2001) by Japanese director Satoshi Kon is a beautifully animated love story that spans across millennia, yet is also confined within the small screen that is cinema and serves to demonstrate the ultimate power of movies as a narrative device.
The Polyphony