Nõiutud saar (The Enchanted Island): a sweet and charming film with a moral about unity in diversity

Riho Unt and Hardi Volmer, “Nõiutud Saar (The Enchanted Island)” (1985)

Another gem from Tallinnfilm studios and this time it’s a cute stop-motion animation short with no dialogue, just harmonica and string-based tune fragments to substitute for speech and emotion and to emphasise action. The style is simple and sweet with appealing characters; even the monster that pops up with rows of sharp teeth bared in the middle of the body where the head should bounce up is endearingly cute. Initially the film appears to be aimed at children but there is a slight sexual though harmless innuendo in the middle of the short.

A small group of fishing folk lives on a tiny island in the middle of a vast flat sea. Each day they row out to catch fish. One member of the group – usually always the youngest or most inexperienced – has trouble putting his boat out to sea and nearly always drowns while fishing. One day though the fishers are overcome by a monster whale; the little guy turns out to have the most guts and gets rid of the whale. However it seems the monster whale has cast a spell over the rest of the group, all the fishers having gone spastic in their attempts to appease their god, so the little feller converts himself into a bird-machine and flies to another realm to fight the evil spirit. He has to do this three times before the spell is finally broken and the fishers return to their normal functioning selves.

The little characters are Swiss-knife cybernetic organisms that change their forms and this is where the animation is most inventive; the little guys’ hands change from fins to harpoons to wings whenever required. They have expressive eyes but otherwise don’t show emotion. The evil that confronts our hero comes in various forms: firstly as a leviathan whale, then as a beguiling lady flamenco dancer (whom our hero defeats by turning into an old-fashioned gramophone player) and then as an even more colossal whale with a hidden secret weapon. The music is charming and whimsical: harmonica represents our hero’s character including his initial awkward klutziness and later bravery while other characters are accompanied by other instruments, mainly strings.

It’s a funny, sweet and charming little film with a little moral for children that it doesn’t matter if they’re not the same as other children in certain skills: everyone is unique and might have a special talent that helps everybody survive together. The fishing folk accept our hero in spite of his incompetence as a fisher as he has other abilities that help them all. The one flaw people might find is that the fishing folk tend to ignore our hero throughout the film and don’t appear to change their attitudes towards him; some change in the way they interact with him might have lifted the film to universal greatness. Disney-style sentimentality is not called for here, just a slight acknowledgement of what he’s done for them is all that’s needed.

One comment on “Nõiutud saar (The Enchanted Island): a sweet and charming film with a moral about unity in diversity

  • December 1, 2017 at 11:28 am

    It's loosely based on a Chukchi tale. In USSR there were few sources consistently supplying cartoonish weirdness (in a good sense). Both Tallinfilm studio and adaptations of Chukchi tales were in top 5. Combining them was bound to create something outstanding.

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