Away review: a lone animator on the open road

▶︎ Away is released in UK cinemas on 28 August 2020.

Away is a story staged as a straight line through a vast expanse, told with fierce momentum and lyrical serenity, made under stringent constraints with the greatest freedom. Constraints, because Gints Zilbalodis, a twentysomething filmmaker from Latvia with no prior features to his name, produced the film completely alone, with public grants that would barely cover the budget of an average animated short. Freedom, because there were no colleagues or commercial financiers to compromise his vision. Technology has reached the point where animated features can be solo efforts, giving rise to a new kind of hyper-auteur production; here is Exhibit A.

The plot, such as it is, has the straightforwardness of a fable. A teenage boy, marooned in a strange land after a plane crash, embarks on an odyssey by motorbike, dashing across shifting vistas with a Tolkienesque map for guidance and a hatchling bird for company. The boy wants to regain his village; the bird wants to fly.

Throughout, a spectral colossus stalks them from a distance and, occasionally stopping to engulf a poor animal, its intent unclear. This wordless chase unfolds across landscapes so clearly symbolic that they seem like projections of a spiritual journey. The boy feels fear in the desert, finds hope in an oasis and faces death on a mountain pass.

This isn’t surprising, given that the story was suggested to some extent by its settings. Eschewing script and storyboards, Zilbalodis modelled the sets and characters using the program Maya then probed them with the software’s virtual ‘camera’, developing the narrative according to the images revealed to him. He finalised the story at the editing stage, and by rendering the film in real time was able to finesse scenes with relative ease, spared the long waiting times imposed by a full-blown rendering engine. With its potential for accident and experiment, this pipeline tends toward the process of live-action filmmaking, or the exploration of an open-world video game.

Away, then, is what animation can look like when improvisation is embraced throughout production. You feel it in the roving camera, which drifts leisurely through space, taking in mountains and sky, while the boy drives purposefully onward. This is freedom of another sort. Zilbalodis indulges it a little too readily – the thrill of extended zooms and impossible crane-shots wanes after a while but the loose staging marks a refreshing break from so much mainstream CG animation, which emulates the film language of classical Hollywood live-action cinema above all. (The floaty camerawork also holds a special appeal for an audience emerging from lockdown.)

The visuals betray the film’s economy of means: textures are minimal, shadows absent. There are few characters, and a speeding motorbike is simpler to animate than a person on foot. Zilbalodis’s achievement is to create a narrative world in which this sparseness makes sense. The boy and his bird are basic assemblages of flat colours – but then, these aren’t fully formed characters so much as vessels for simple ideas: the yearning for home, the desire for freedom, the need for companionship.

Some scenes, such as an encounter with cats by a geyser, appear superfluous to the plot, yet tap into meanings that resonate with the boy’s journey. The geyser erupts – hope springs eternal. This, I suppose, is what happens when a sensitive filmmaker takes a free-form, intuitive approach to storytelling. Away is often oblique, but rarely random.

What about the colossus? It’s an ambiguous figure to the last, sometimes menacing like the truck in Steven Spielberg’s film Duel (1971), sometimes melancholic like the yeti in the bande dessinée Tintin in Tibet (1958-59). A flashback links it to the victims of the plane crash – is the boy haunted by a fear of death, or perhaps survivor’s guilt? The giant halts whenever the boy finds cause for hope – does it stand for despair? I, a freelance journalist, perceived it as a mass of looming deadlines. To Zilbalodis, I like to think it stood for something equally mundane: the ever-present threat of failure as he ploughed on, alone, toward the completion of his remarkable film.