Broken Hallelujah

Blood Tea and Red String

"a David Lynchean fever dream on Beatrix Potter terrain as lovingly crafted as it is unsettlingly sour-sweet" - Dennis Harvey, VARIETY

Equally obsessive if far more oblique, Christine Cegavske's Blood Tea and Red String is the fruit of a 13-year process, a stop-motion fable as beguiling as it is baffling.

Crammed with overdetermined images of birth and death, Blood Tea concerns the struggle between a trio of grasping albino mice (done up like the coachmen in Alice in Wonderland) and a group of half-bird, half-wolf critters known as The Creatures Who Dwell Under the Oak. Cegavske's debt to Jan Svankmajer is obvious, but the film more closely resembles one of Alejandro Jodorowsky's psychedelic vision quests as re-realized by Ladislaw Starewicz.

Cegavske's ultra handmade style (she did the menacing crows in The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things) is the opposite of every trend in contemporary animation, and worth lauding for that reason alone.

The DVD was released this month and I am very curious to see it.