Violence Voyager

Violence Voyager is an animated feature that uses neither a succession of photographed cels nor computer animation to tell its tale of children battling inside a lethal amusement park. Writer-director Ujicha's film is instead told with a kind of simplistic puppetry. Painstakingly detailed figures bob then collapse on painted backgrounds, their motions and movements the work of an unseen hand. This two-plane presentation imbues the film with a basic sense of dimensionality, a tactile physicality not unlike that of a pop-up book. This off-kilter nostalgia is accentuated further by the film's plucky tone. Although the pre-teen adventurers are subjected to incredible physical harm, their determination does not waver. They soldier on, the heroes of a horror show children's comic, careening towards its conclusion. 

Trauma in Violence Voyager is relentless but the young persons wading through the goo never pause to consider their losses. Instead it's up to the (likely adult) viewer to witness, aghast, as children's faces melt off or their bodies are transformed, by an industrialised womb, into grotesque skinless gnomes. The permanence being enacted on these pre-adolescents is a nightmare all of its own. Occasionally Ujicha interjects in ways that defy the otherwise flat theatrical staging: real fluids ooze between the paper layers or an explosion is enacted, and accomplished, by lashing firecrackers to flat cut-out figures. These moments are reflective of an acute vandalism, one that motion pictures, as a medium, are fluent in - artists and technicians spend their working lives erecting sumptuous facades which are then, summarily, detonated by the pyrotechnics team. Violence Voyager represents these two spheres of intent working through a concert of one; Ujicha making then un-making his own painted world.