That which devours you: Otesánek
A cautionary tale about desires and compulsions
Stop-motion animation and Czech folklore are a winning combination that only Jan Svankmajer could think of. His movie Otesánek is not only stop-motion, it also uses traditional filmmaking and plays with the montage style. Its animation combines clay, pictures, and even drawings. He used all he knew when creating the film, and the result is a well-composed and unique movie.
The plot is simple and yet powerful like all folklore stories tend to be. If we resume it without giving spoilers, it will go like this: a couple unable to conceive gets a trunk shaped like a baby, and it becomes alive and starts demanding to be fed. The film is complex and has many themes that develop because of the couple’s yarning. It is a story that perfectly matches the style that Svankmajer is known for: gruesome and grotesque, even weird could be a word to describe it, with his dark palettes and editing that make the movie’s pacing not fall into the standard. At this point, it must be clear that this is no fairy tale.
Veronila Zilkova is the actress who plays the role of Bozena Haráková, the mother. She does a fantastic job: her expressions, the way she talks, and even her moves give her character what it needs to be perceived as real. While in the traditional folklore tale, the couple gets happy when the trunk comes alive, in the film Jan created, Bozena is the one who became obsessed with Otesánek. Karel Horák, the husband, played by Jan Hartl, takes this trunk to his wife as a playful token while they are on a short trip, and once she has it, she starts to treat it like a real child, concerning him. She creates a plan to make the whole neighborhood believe that she is pregnant so she can bring Otesánek to the house. In a way, Jan is telling us that Bozena’s desire and all she does is what gives life to the piece of wood.
Food, hunger, and even cannibalism are recurring themes in Jan’s works, and his characters always show a desire for consumption that can’t be satisfied. It’s as if this desire were devouring the subjects instead of being the other way around. That is precisely one of the main themes in this film, in which the female lead is consumed by the desire to have children. This is presented from the beginning with a montage of pictures of babies and sounds of them crying. Both parents desire this; we can see him imagining people in line with a street seller who sells babies by weight, and he sees himself in that fantasy, thus comparing the infants with food.
However, it is not only the parents in the movie who present compulsions; Jan uses the neighbors to add more layers to the message. Most of the main characters are driven by their desires, which makes them escape reality in one way or another. We could say that Otesánek becomes a materialization of the actual destruction this behavior can cause and how this escalates. The message is so powerful that Svankjamer does not need to rely on the story’s plot; he reveals the ending through the neighbor’s daughter before it happens. She finds out Otesánek is not a human baby and remembers having read the actual folklore story, so she goes to her house and reads it to herself while reading it to the viewers.
There shouldn’t be surprises for the spectators after this; the fact that the wood baby will end up eating some of the characters must be expected, and it is. Still, the tension relies on how everything will happen. Svankjamer understands how to use this element to his favor and plays with the viewers as much as possible because he wants to take his characters to their limits before they meet their fate. In a way, he also plays with the audience’s desire because he knows it will appear as soon as he predicts the story’s ending.
If you haven’t seen Otesánek and are willing to let him show you to what end your desires can take you, I strongly recommend you watch this amazing film.