Bewildered

I was very perplexed about Yuri Norshteyn’s Tale of Tales. How on earth does a film that bizarre win numerous awards and earn the title “greatest animated film of all time.” Seriously? This is the greatest animated film ever? To be clear, I did not dislike it. I was intrigued by the animation style, and my attention was never deviated by the film. But the structure of the movie made no sense to me, as scenes kept cutting from the little grey wolf, to other seemingly random events. I had no clue what was going on during the movie, with the exception of the men leaving their wives to fight for the Soviet Union during World War II. As I was watching the film, there’s one thing that I didn’t see clearly: a story.

One of Pixar’s mottos, “Story is king,” rings true throughout their movies. I don’t really care about an animated film if it doesn’t have a great story, no matter how pretty or impressive the visuals may be. That’s how I felt about Tale of Tales, it lacked a story. If someone asked me to describe the film, I would say something like “Well, there’s this little wolf who rescues a baby, and then there’s a kid feeding apples to crows, and all the men go off to war. Oh yeah, and there's some sort of yak that likes to jump-rope.” What kind of plot synopsis is that? One that seemingly makes no sense whatsoever. Maybe I’m missing something due to culture differences, but to me Tale of Tales was a big jumble of bewildering scenes that left me very confused.