Sound And Vision: Mascha Halberstad
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week we look at The Prodigy's Wild Frontier, directed by Mascha Halberstad.
If you aren't Dutch Mascha Halberstad might need an introduction, even though she deserves to be a household name worldwide. Mostly because Mascha Halberstad put stop-motion on the map in a big way in what is a country with a small (but fruitful) animation industry but with not a lot of big stop-motion works. Rising to fame in The Netherlands with the short Munya in Mij (Munya in Me) she did her first music video before she did any feature work, for The Prodigy's Wild Frontier. But her two features to date Knor (Oink) and Vos en Haas Redden het Bos (Fox and Hare Save the Forest) could be fused together and you would have Wild Frontier.
Knor, for instance, is a children's movie about a girl getting a small pig as a birthday present from her grandfather. He might have nefarious intentions with the piglet as there is a sausage-making competition coming up and he was a prize-butcher. The film has a firm pro-vegan, anti-meat-stance, making the clear and undeniable case that eating meat and loving animals becomes a bit more difficult if the animal you love might become the meat you eat. It is also a surprisingly scatalogical film, so poop-centric you might call it a Farrelly Brothers-movie for kids. Turns out Halberstad really wanted to make an adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Twits, but instead was recommended a children's book by Dutch author Tosca Menten, when the rights for Dahl turned out to be too difficult. (Side note for Dutch readers: Tosca Menten will be present as a guest for this year's Film By the Sea in Vlissingen, where Knor will also be shown)
The choice for this book and making one of the Netherlands' first big stop-motion projects turned out to be a good one. Halberstad swept the Dutch Golden Calfs awards, with Knor being the first animated winner of the most important film prize in the Netherlands and winning two other prizes.
This might be why the follow-up Vos en Haas Redden het Bos looks even smoother in its animation than Knor. The feature is based on a famous Dutch children's book series that Halberstad also turned into a television series starring the same characters. The story again is environmentally conscious, also having a few choice barbs in the direction of Donald Trump. The villain of the piece is a capitalist beaver with a American twang in his voice, who tries to buy friends with money, mistakes garish kitsch for genuine art and builds a huge dam, damning the whole area to suffer in the meantime. Otherwise this is a film with a large cast of animal characters, living in a forest, and behaving like humans.
Combine the anti-meat-eating stance of Knor, and its chase scene by bike with Vos en Haas' forest friends, make it more adult and you get Wild Frontier. In the music video a Mickey-Mouse-lookalike wolf gets captured by two bloodthirsty hunters, who wreak bloody havoc in the forest. A revived dead moose comes to his rescue, butchers the hunters, and revives their headless corpses as animals who they have killed before.
That the wolf is first seen reading a book about "Dualism in the wild frontier" is on purpose, as the video is full of pairs and dichotomies. Humans versus animals is the main one, where the anthropomorphized animals (like in Vos en Haas Redden het Bos) are shown to be very humanistic, while the hunters have an animalistic quality, shown with their blood-shot eyes and foaming at the mouth. There are also the pairs: two hunters, two animal victims (a boar and a hare) and two rescuers (moose and wolf). That leaves the end, where our pair runs into a red fox with lit-up eyes as a bit of an odd end, until you rewatch the video and figure out it is bookended. Quite literally, because the fox that shows up at the end is first shown on the cover of "Dualism in the Wild Frontier".
The music video shows that Halberstad had themes of environmental concerns on the brain well before Knor and Vos en Haas Redden het Bos, while also being open to larger themes of smart philosophical and political commentary. Vos en Haas Redden Het Bos might be a slight movie, only for the youngest of audiences, it still has some political undercurrents. And Knor, leaning towards a slightly older audience of children, has some really smart things to say about forgiveness and who deserves it. It teaches children that not every adult is trustworthy or deserving of grace, unless they have proven to have earned it. Halberstad is a smart director, making smart children's entertainment. The Wild Frontier video shows she can do the same for an adult audience.
