Helene Pogosyan
At nine o’clock in the morning, a lone man wanders through the Canadian wilderness, his companions — a dog, the sunless sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all.
As temperatures plummet far below zero, his chances at survival are soon to follow. The man is doomed to face the primordial enemy of the first humans to leave their temperate southern climes for a hostile northern terrain: the frost. It eats into the flesh piece after piece like the most violent predator.
The desperation is a heartless master, as a man wills to do whatever it takes for a source of warmth. This is the story of Jack London’s To Build a Fire in a splendid adaptation by Fx Goby and Nexus studio.
To Build a Fire drops the viewer into the middle of the northern winter as the animated film embarks on a trail different from the physical terror of the original. It strips the narrative to the bone, preserving the raw essentials. The character’s darker thoughts are elegantly implied in a way detectable solely for those familiar with the source material. The gruesome details of frostbite and burned skin are replaced with the background scenery of the Yukon territory, beautiful and merciless.
The man is formed by minimalist blocks of colour in contrast to the overwhelming whiteout of nature. As the camera shows the vastness of the environment, the man himself becomes small and bleak. He is trapped, slowly becoming one with the unforgiving land.
The wide shots achieve the sense of a great emptiness, alien to the unequipped yet arrogant colonist. The static background encases the haunting atmosphere. The only beacon of human life aside from the ill-fated traveller is the smoke of a fire looming in the distance, as unmoving as the rest of the Boreal forest. We sense the cold so strong the world stands still as the unnamed man convulses in his final desperate search for any source of heat.
Although hypothermia and frostbite aren’t shown, they can be felt. To sharpen the effect, the sound design gives a voice to the real protagonist of the film, the wild land itself. The blowing of the wind, the cracking of the ice combine with the classical music in a soundtrack fit for the timeless pursuit: man against nature in a fight he is doomed to lose if he fails to respect its strict yet unwritten laws. In a truly magnificent work, To Build a Fire freezes to the bone and leaves one cold for a long time after.
Enjoy this animated film from the FAAF collection.
Dmitri Drobnitsky
Kirill Benediktov
