Painted backdrops on movie sets are older than Hollywood. Occasionally, painted images took center stage on screen, as in the 1948 fable about a hard-pressed artist, Portrait of Jennie. Loving Vincent, a story of the most famous hard-pressed artist of all time, claims to be the first fully painted feature-length motion picture. Every frame in this animated tribute to Vincent Van Gogh was hand painted in oil by a team of more than 100 artisans.
The story concerns a young man, Armand (British actor Douglas Booth animated in oil paint), on a quest that brings him into the company of various Van Gogh associates after the artist’s death. The real message of Loving Vincent, however, is the medium itself. Many frames will look familiar to anyone who has seen Van Gogh’s work; they ripple with light and color just like his paintings. The night sky is bold with stars; in daylight clouds are furiously daubed onto the sky. Van Gogh’s images often struggle with the stasis inherent in two-dimensional painting. They are strangely alive, as if the artist perceived the unceasing motion of molecules at the quantum level.
In Loving Vincent, those vibrating colors fade to black and gray during flashbacks recounted by the people Armand encounters. In one of those is glimpsed a scene Van Gogh (depicted by Robert Gulaczyk) never painted—the moment when he presents his severed ear wrapped in a handkerchief to a woman in a brothel.
Loving Vincent’s screenplay isn’t pitch perfect. No one uttered the “sorry for your loss” banality in late 19th-century France. And yet, the narrative successfully renders the legend of Van Gogh as a genius engaged in a losing struggle with existence. Rejected in life, after death he was recognized as the preeminent early modernist and embraced as the model artist-martyr in an uncaring, hardheaded world. Alas, by the end of the 20th century his name was as associated with auction results as artistry after owning his work became the ultimate trophy for museums and plutocrats.
