Consuming Spirits (2012)
Average Rating: 8.3/10
Reviews Counted: 19
Fresh: 17 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 8.1/10
Critic Reviews: 11
Fresh: 9 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.7/5
User Ratings: 185
My Rating
Movie Info
Christopher Sullivan's animated dystopia is about as far from a cartoon-for-kids as they come. Relationships among the three main characters - Earl Gray, Gentian Violet, and Victor Blue - multiply and divide as their stories becomes increasingly complex, hilarious, and scary. The Huffington Post writes of the film's "insanely meticulous construction" and continues: "The animation took 15 years of work... The characters were hand-drawn onto layers of glass which were then moved with needles and
Dec 12, 2012 Limited
Cast
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Robert Levy
Earl Gray -
Nancy Andrews
Gentian Violet -
Chris Sullivan
Victor Blue -
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All Critics (19) | Top Critics (11) | Fresh (17) | Rotten (2)
Something more coherent, masterful - and oddly poignant - than it may initially seem.
Top Critic"Consuming Spirits" puts a hook in you and doesn't let you off. A hook the size of a crowbar.
An ambitious animated epic that runs well over two hours and sometimes feels more like a feat than a film. Nevertheless, it's a kind of milestone in its genre.
It is the story of people in a small ordinary town, knowing nothing but their ordinary affairs, revealing their sins and crimes with an ordinary negligence.
Sullivan pulls the narrative noose tight at long last, and wraps up "Consuming Spirits'' as neatly as a Victorian novel - albeit one written by someone with an alarming affinity for the grotesque.
This labor of love from do-it-all animator Chris Sullivan has the same rough-edged, cantankerous charms as the characters that populate it.
Frame by frame, sketch by sketch, Sullivan has created a rich and layered world in "Consuming Spirits," one that won't easily let you go.
Akin to the Disney version of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Consuming Spirits has moonshine on its rotten breath, but its images are never less than intoxicating.
Even if one grows impatient with the film's dovetailing tales of small-town desperation, it's hard to tire of its visual execution.
The most creative film of the year: a striking, one-of-a-kind, hilarious dystopian epic of animated weirdness.
Fifteen years in the making, Chris Sullivan's Consuming Spiritsis the work of his lifetime -- or any lifetime, for that matter.
In its final half-hour, it pulls all the threads together, and a breathtaking bigger picture finally comes into focus.
Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
Issues of plot aside, though, the thing that any viewer is likely to notice first is the striking, nearly unpremeditated style of the film.
Audience Reviews for Consuming Spirits
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The convoluted narrative relates the intertwined stories of a few of the denizens of this town and exploring topics such as alcohol consumption, familial devotion, extramarital affairs in a darkly comedic fashion that suits its haunting and often purposefully grotesque visuals. Some of the most memorable moments include a non-professionally approved amputation and a man gallivanting about disguised as a deer.
"Consuming Spirits" could, and likely will, be considered a masterpiece by many. I think it's pulled down a tad by its excessive length (the film clocks in at 130 minutes), but the storylines do segue together nicely at the end. On the whole, this is a meticulously crafted and admirably realized example of the storytelling capacities of traditional animation, even if the measured, hypnotic narration of protagonist Earl Gray (Robert Levy) does occasionally make your eyes droop.
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