Son of the White Mare (1981): a one-man mission to demonstrate animation’s possibilities (Review)

If Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-Ray release just contained Marcell Jankovics’s 1981 film Son of the White Mare, that would be enough for an unqualified recommendation. Revered in his native Hungary after making the nation’s first animated feature – of which more later – Jankovics’s work has not always been easy to find in other countries. This gorgeous restoration of Son of the White Mare was meant to be a theatrical release until Covid lockdowns made that unviable. Fortunately, we now have the opportunity not just to see it, but to see several of Jankovics’s other early career landmarks on the same disc.

Since it’s the title film, we should talk about Son of the White Mare first, although anyone who’s seen it knows it’s the sort of film that words weren’t meant to contain. Based on László Arany’s versions of ancient Hungarian folklore, it contains elements that students of other countries’ mythology will recognise: the journey into the underworld, the tree of life. The titular character, Treeshaker, is the son of an enchanted horse whose progeny are, inexplicably, humanoids with extraordinary strength, recalling Loki’s transformations from human to beast in Norse myth. Treeshaker’s descent into the underworld with his two brothers is a classic folkloric rule-of-three structure that doesn’t bear much resemblance to the star-driven fantasy adventure movies that Hollywood was making in the early ’80s. Nowadays, you might half-jokingly liken it to superhero team-up films.

None of this grasping for precedent and comparison points gets you any closer to describing the experience of watching Jankovics’s film, which is a head trip like no other. Animation is usually stylised but it’s rarely abstract, in the painterly sense. There are those who make abstract animated shorts, a tradition pioneered by the likes of Len Lye and Norman McLaren, but very few who would make a whole feature in this experimental style. If the idea of watching 86 minutes of abstract animation sounds daunting, it should be noted that Jankovics is a much more sensual, pleasurable director than Lye and McLaren. Son of the White Mare makes the famously painstaking medium of animation feel improvisatory, riffing off, morphing and dissolving its imagery. In terms of its script, too, it’s pleasingly unencumbered by any notion of conventional filmic structure, instead throwing out new outrageous monsters and dazzling visual concepts all the way through to the end of act three.

Where did a talent like this come from? Thanks to Eureka’s extra features, we can answer this. The disc includes three early shorts, the first of which – Dreams on Wings – was made as a commercial for Air India in 1968. Jankovics’s technique is cruder here than it is in Son of the White Mare, but the short’s free-associative structure shows his visual sensibility arrived fully formed. A human iris turns into the central disc of the Indian flag, which distorts into a map of the country itself, which shifts into an elephant’s ear… It is as if Jankovics is on a one-man mission to demonstrate what animation can do that no other medium can approximate.

The other two shorts are more personal, prefiguring Son of the White Mare‘s mythological themes. The Oscar-nominated Sisyphus is a take on the famous Greek myth of a man condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain forever. There’s a twist at the end, but it’s mostly a straight take on the story; the originality comes from Jankovics’s daringly minimalist animation, rendering the whole struggle in one flowing black brush-stroke. 1977’s The Struggle plays with the story of Pygmalion in a more singular fashion. Having imbued his statue with life, the sculptor in this film finds it is just as eager to mould and carve him back. It’s a metaphor for the creative process, and how it can hack lumps out of you sometimes.

Even this isn’t the limit of the disc’s pleasures. As well as two interviews with Jankovics and a new essay by Rich Johnson, this set also contains Johnny Corncob, the aforementioned first Hungarian animated feature. It’s based on a nineteenth-century epic poem by Sándor Petőfi, written in the ‘picaresque’ mode whereby an ordinary man goes through absurd, often dangerous, sometimes fantastical adventures in order to improve his lot in life. (Think Baron Munchausen, or pretty much anything by William Makepeace Thackeray) It had previously been adapted into an operetta that shaved off some of its satirical aspects in order to make it more of a patriotic legend; worse, it cut out the witches and giants, which could not be further from what Jankovics is interested in.

To give you a measure of how far Johnny Corncob strays from flag-waving stolidity, Jankovics’s main inspiration was Yellow Submarine. (The yellow-toothed, bellowing giants have a definite Blue Meanie vibe) In the same way that the triangle – representing the three brothers – recurs throughout Son of the White Mare, the disc of the sun becomes a frequent motif in Johnny Corncob. It seems to be the meeting point between the story’s pastoral, rural elements and its depictions of great destruction, symbolised here by the eye-searing halo of solar flares. The film is not recommended to anyone with photosensitive epilepsy.

Everyone else, though, has no excuse for missing this. Son of the White Mare already has a growing reputation as one of the most imaginative and brilliant European animated films, so to discover that Johnny Corncob is, if anything, even better cements Jankovics’s position as a major artist in the field of animation. An absolutely essential set and – for this writer at least – one of the major discoveries of 2022.

Son of the White Mare