Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
Directed by Benh Zeitlin
Hushpuppy, an intrepid six-year-old girl, lives with her father, Wink, in 'the Bathtub', a southern Delta community at the edge of the world. Wink’s tough love prepares her for the unraveling of the universe—for a time when he’s no longer there to protect her. When Wink contracts a mysterious illness, nature flies out of whack—temperatures rise and the ice caps melt, unleashing an army of prehistoric creatures called aurochs. With the waters rising, the aurochs coming, and Wink’s health fading, Hushpuppy goes in search of her lost mother.
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3 films that influenced Beasts of the Southern Wild
What critics say influenced Beasts of the Southern Wild
I don’t really buy that a tiny girl would talk like Hushpuppy, who narrates “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with a plainspoken lyricism that recalls “Days of Heaven,” but the movie is a fable, the narration is beautiful and Wallis makes it sing.
Comparisons to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” are inevitable and appropriate, as Zeitlin emulates those movies’ sense of reverie and poetry and their ability to find aesthetic beauty in the natural, mundane world.
Reminds me of The Band - Music from the Big Pink - its on another level, there's magic realism, bits of Mallick's "Days of Heaven", post apocalyptic fantasy and everything what Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things are" should have been.
Benh Zeitlin‘s feature directorial debut feels like one that will be cherished by kids for decades to come, and lead Hushpuppy – played by six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis – might be remembered as iconic a child protagonist as To Kill a Mockingbird ‘s Scout, Days of Heaven ‘s Linda, and Where the Wild Things Are ‘s Max (the three pictures it shares the most in common with).
You can, perhaps, already guess the film’s influences: movies such as George Washington , Days of Heaven and Ballast, yes, but also real-world events such as Katrina, the BP oil spill and even melting polar ice caps (we see glimpses of strange, prehistoric creatures arising from the softening ice and trampling their way toward the Bathtub).
Report: It’s difficult to explain exactly what Beasts Of The Southern Wild is, though it’s undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
Director Benh Zeitlin’s film, which has echoes of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, is at once folksy and apocalyptic, as it follows a six-year-old heroine in a delta shack, facing the possible end of the world.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild,’’ whose mood is enhanced with Cajun-style music, has been compared by some to Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life’’ because of its intoxicating visuals and the presence of prehistoric beasts in both films.
Similar to The Tree of Life grand universal themes are juxtaposed to an intimate personal story.
Ending much like Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life , which also moves from the prehistoric to the apocalyptic, the film is variously poetic, mysterious and opaque, a bit like the work of the African director Souleymane Cissé but without the depth.
It's a flawed comparison -- and indeed, any comparison for a work as completely and startlingly unique as this will be flawed -- but I kept imagining "Beasts of the Southern Wild" as a pagan, powerful, Godless (but not loveless or hopeless) variation on "The Tree of Life," where parents and children cope with the passage of time and the end of life in a series of moments built as much on visual poetry as character interactions.
It's also the kind of film that's likely to polarize audiences, in much the same way as last year's "The Tree of Life."
His excellent scores for (among others) Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape from New York are highly effective in their relative simplicity, and it's impossible not to respond to their hypnotic rhythms.