This film with such a long and frenchified title, that is to say, "L'Horloge Magique Ou La Petite Fille Qui Voulait Etre Princesse", is another remarkable and astonishing Herr Ladislaw Starewicz stop-motion puppet animated film.This German Count must declare that he loves ( yes, sometimes aristocrats experience something akin to human feelings
) the Starewicz oeuvre, animated films with a complex and attractive universe in which the most incredible creatures lives and go on amazing adventures too. In these animated films,different insects, rats or even human puppets ( the most dangerous of all
) keep to their natures,while doing things they normally would not do; a beetle is a beetle but he likes to go on bicycle or to the cinema. This integration of human devices within the insects or reptile world creates a strange mixture that attracts or disgust the audience at the same time.
This time, in "L'Horloge
" Herr Starewicz mixes puppet animation and live action, achieving a beautiful and rapturous film that tells the story of a watchmaker who has made a strange clock that, when it strikes the midnight hour, brings to life a tiny puppet world from inside the clock. The watchmaker's little daughter, Yolande ( Starewicz's daughter Nina Star ), will live together with the puppets, and have strange adventures involving knights and princesses in enchanted forests or mermaids and dragons in a sea world.
The film has the atmosphere of the classic stories, those that we were told when we were children ( incredible perhaps that, even the German aristocrats were innocent babies long ago ) achieving an unreal, strange and attractive world full of those characteristic Starewicz creatures that his technical skill and craftsmanship bring to life. In these witty, wicked or bold puppets lives in a fantastic world that Herr Starewicz endows with poetry and magic, giving the audience the feeling of timelessness and stirring memories of dreams long past.
And now, if you allow me, I must temporarily take my leave due to the fact that this Count must order the disinfecting the "Schloss" from a plague of longhaired beetles.
