I watched a Hungarian cartoon called The Tragedy of Man. This long-term construction was shot since 1988 by the same man who in the distant 80s shot the animated film “Son of a White Horse”, based on Hungarian myths. What about him? Overall, I liked the cartoon. He has a pleasant visual and a picture with stylistics, interesting visual and directorial decisions like different styles for different eras (and here I liked the animation, visualization and stylistics much more than in the same “Son of the White Horse”, because here you can at least see objects, details and understand what is where and how).
The cartoon itself is essentially a philosophical journey in the form of a poem and various “reflections on the eternal and the great.” In this case, with thoughts about life, about its meaning, about the fact that nothing is perfect, about the fact that only epochs change, but people remain the same ignorant and vicious beasts, about the fact that even the most noble and bright idea of something can turn into the most inhuman and destructive thing in the hands of the human crowd (this topic was brilliantly shown and revealed in the cartoon of the 50s “Animal Farm”), about the fact that a person himself does not know what he wants and is insatiable in everything, and that you need to live, work and take your own actions, if you do not respond to your own person and think.
The main characters here are only two (plus or minus two more) and, perhaps, the only character that I really liked in this cartoon is Lucifer. Smart, cynical, ambiguous, sarcastic, quirky, witty, sees at the root and cuts the truth, has a critical thinking, ridicules everything and all realist and trickster. I love this character. Plus, his design is both simple and interesting – a black human figure with an elongated wolf head. For some time, Lucifer here tried to portray not as the embodiment of the clichéd “evil that corrupts and inclines to the dark side”, but as the giver of knowledge and experience and responsibility for this knowledge.
The only thing I didn’t like about this movie was the ending. Or rather, not from the point of view of the plot or some details (something is fair there, and everything is fine with Lucik), but from the point of view of semantic load. For this ending completely negates the original message and meaning. Why grow above oneself and overcome all adversity and become oneself and oneself, why be aware of the shortcomings and problems when the ending dictates, “You must believe in the supreme deity and follow precisely this path of his as the right kind”?! It pissed me off the most. Religious infantile idealism was chosen instead of sound and adequate objectivism and realism.
The cartoon is good and curious in its own way, but personally I was smeared with the ending, which sent the original plot and message to the hiking erotic.