▶

Sneznaya Koroleva / The Snow Queen (1957, USSR)

The Snow Queen listens through the mirrors of ordinary people for anyone who mocks her, and punishes them by sending them away to a kingdom of winter and ice. I may be going out on a limb here, but .. is there perhaps a political subtext here? Watched it all. This is technically inferior animation, but closer in spirit to the Disney of twenty years earlier than anything Disney themselves were making in the 1950s.

20 Million Miles From Earth (1957, USA)

As usual, there’s more emotion in the animated face of Ray Harryhausen’s monster than in all the live actors who hunt him, and more of a story in the eyes of the monster than in the actual script. Watched: 40 minutes, plus the Harryhausen scenes. Did he ever get a chance to work with good actors and a good script? He’s a genius, but that’s not much good if you’re the only one in the production team who is.

▶

Montpi (1957, West Germany)

Ooh .. this is something completely new. If I cared about movie theory or movie history I might have a name for whatever sort of style this is, but I don’t. I just care about being unexpectedly run over by something new. Watched it all. The Paris in this love story is uglier than Hollywood’s Paris, but also more real, like it’s a city that people actually live in.