Son of the White Mare (1981)

image cortesy of animationisfilm.com

First off, the Hungarian title of this film - Fehérlófia - is much cooler-looking than the English one, and it's a shame that's the version most people will never get the chance to mispronounce. It's tough to figure out where to start here, because there isn't really a frame of reference to lean on, no neat shelf in the video store of the mind where this one slots in next to something familiar. I would love to meet anyone who has heard of this film, let alone seen it. Ask the general public "what's the weirdest movie you've ever seen?" and plenty will reach for a Cronenberg or a Lynch, names that have become shorthand for cinematic strangeness, the default answers people give when they want to sound like they've seen something. A few might offer up the strangest entry from an otherwise "normal" director - a Tenet or a Fight Club, something that pushed against the edges of an otherwise conventional career without fully breaking from it. Find me someone who can throw out a movie like this one, because I suspect that list of people is vanishingly small, and I suspect most of them found it the same accidental way I did.

The plot is drawn from a Hungarian epic poem rooted in legends of the ancient steppe peoples, and structurally it's not all that far off from the fairy tales Disney has mined for decades - a hero, a quest, a kingdom to save, the whole well-worn architecture of myth. Treeshaker - who bears an uncanny resemblance to Lion-O from Thundercats, mane and all - is the son of a magical white mare, and he sets out with his brothers, Stonecrusher and Ironbender, to destroy the dragons that have seized his ancestors' kingdom. After a mischievous gnome makes fools of both his brothers (who get literal spankings for it, because apparently that's just how things are settled in this particular cosmology), and after forging a sword from his own beard, the three find the entrance to the Underworld. Only Treeshaker is brave enough to descend, where he kills three dragons - and they are great dragons, genuinely some of the most memorable creature designs I've come across in any animated film, each one feeling like it crawled out of a different fever dream - and rescues three princesses with the gnome's help.

When he tries to haul their castles back up with him, the weight proves too much, and he's left trapped below, abandoned to whatever fate awaits a hero who reaches just a bit too far past what the world will allow him. The gnome points him toward a griffin, and after Treeshaker saves the griffin's chicks from a snake, the griffin agrees to fly him to the surface - though he has to feed it pieces of his own leg along the way to keep it going, because nothing in this story comes without some kind of bodily sacrifice, some toll paid in flesh for passage between worlds. Once above, the griffin chicks restore his leg, he forgives his brothers without much fuss, and the three men marry their respective princesses (who are also their sisters, I think? the family tree here is its own kind of psychedelic puzzle that the film never bothers to untangle) and settle into their castles happily ever after. The end.

So, that's a little more out there than your average Disney film, but not exactly unhinged, right (limb-loss aside)? It's the kind of plot you could probably storyboard for a Saturday morning cartoon without anyone batting an eye, dragons and princesses and brotherly reconciliation all present and accounted for. What pushes it over the edge is the delivery method, the actual texture of the thing as it unfolds in front of you frame by frame. Instead of mimicking live action with discrete characters moving across semi-realistic backgrounds, the animation lets its colors swirl and bleed into one another, conjuring surreal backdrops and transitions where you're never quite sure where one thing ends and another begins, like watching a lava lamp reinterpret a folk tale, or a stained-glass window that refuses to hold still. Figures dissolve into landscapes and landscapes dissolve back into figures, and the whole film seems to breathe rather than simply move. And yet, somehow, it still manages to carve out distinct personalities for the three brothers, building a genuinely strange hero's quest that never loses its sense of vision even as the frame dissolves into pure color and pattern. It might look like an acid trip, but there's real heart buried underneath the visual onslaught, a sincerity and a clear emotional throughline that keeps the whole thing from collapsing into mere spectacle for spectacle's sake.

The film starts slow, taking its time to establish the rhythms of this world before throwing you into the deep end, and that opening stretch might test the patience of anyone expecting immediate fireworks (it did for me). But it's surprisingly witty and funny in stretches once it gets going, with little comic beats scattered between the cosmic weirdness, and - as I mentioned - the dragon designs alone are worth the price of admission. It's strange, it's psychedelic, and it has an inexplicable amount of phallic imagery, the kind that makes you wonder exactly what was going on in Hungarian animation studios circa 1981 and whether anyone involved ever stopped to ask. Honestly, what more could you ask for from a Hungarian animated film from the early '80s? If this is the kind of cinematic curiosity that appeals to you, I don't think you'll find many other places to scratch that particular itch. Then again, I'm not steeped in Hungarian film animation history...yet.

3.5 out of 5 Stars