Away

It took Lat­vian ani­ma­tor Gints Zil­balodis three and a half years to write, pro­duce, direct and score his spell­bind­ing debut fea­ture – and the fin­ished prod­uct boasts a rare kind of magic.

A boy wakes up hang­ing by a para­chute from a tree; as far as his sight will take him, there exists noth­ing but a lim­it­less, life­less plain in the world around him. But when a strange, shad­owy goliath approach­es, silent­ly threat­en­ing to con­sume him, he has no choice but to flee across the strange­ly serene envi­ron­ment that engulfs him.

Across four euphon­ic chap­ters, titled ​‘For­bid­den Oasis’, ​‘Mir­ror Lake’, ​‘Dream Well’ and ​‘Cloud Har­bour’, the name­less boy flees his slug­gish pur­suer in search of civil­i­sa­tion. With only a flight­less young bird for a com­pan­ion, he con­quers bound­less deserts, icy tun­dra, mossy hill­tops and bam­boo forests, encoun­ter­ing spi­ral foun­tains and an army of purring cats on the way.

Such obsta­cles as a rick­ety scaf­fold-bridge, a prowl­ing arc­tic fox and even a downed aero­plane par­tial­ly dis­rupt the jour­ney, but there is a deep sense of ascen­sion as he draws near­er and near­er to the har­bour town of his salvation.

With not a word of dia­logue to dis­turb the calm, this lan­guid and lin­ear quest has all the qual­i­ties of an opi­at­ed day­dream, with Zil­balodis’ restrained score guid­ing the emo­tion­al peaks and troughs on what feels like a gen­uine­ly spir­i­tu­al jour­ney. The true source of enlight­en­ment, though, is the soft cel-shad­ed ani­ma­tion which lends a clean, utopi­an qual­i­ty to the images.

And it’s the sim­ple images that make Away so enchant­i­ng: a sole orange tree perched next to a crys­tal-clear pool; rows of Ghi­b­li-esque shrines lin­ing a moun­tain walk­way; piles of cir­cu­lar stones on a mossy hill­side. Above all, the flu­id colour palette that drifts from warm yel­lows to vivid greens to stel­lar, snowy whites exudes a cease­less calm, like a pil­lowy blan­ket over a tired body.

The direc­tor claims he made the whole thing up as he was going along, only real­is­ing near the end of pro­duc­tion that the boy’s jour­ney offered a par­al­lel to his own dogged com­mit­ment to com­plete the film. And yet, some­how, the embry­on­ic nar­ra­tive seems not to mat­ter. This is a film guid­ed by gen­tle propul­sion, and that’s all it needs.