Director: Handy Mulya Erlangga
Writer: Handy Mulya Erlangga
Cast: Septiani Samba, Abu Firaz, Dhita Hayu Cahyani & Frinka Maria Ambara
Running time: 5mins
Audiences are willing to suspend their disbelief for the right story, and the best independent animations recognise this. Films like Vestige are a great example; they find creative ways to economise on their motion, or their backdrops, and instead centre the time and energy of their animators to foreground details that bring the most emotional impact.
This year at Indy Film Library, we’ve been graced by a stream of great student animations. Most recently, and most successfully, Safe Travels and Crèche and Burn utilised huge teams of student animators to deliver innovative, stylised worlds – focusing on generating worlds that felt relatable, rather than realistic.
Ties Through Taste takes the opposite approach, however. The film attempts to offer up a detailed, and realistic rendering of London, with 3D modelled, minimally stylised characters. At the same time, its only credited animator (character designer, compositor, colour grader, editor, etc…) is Handy Mulya Erlangga, an Indonesian animation student based in the UK’s capital – who one day hopes to open his own studio to tell accessible stories for children.
To be frank, the results of this are broadly what you would expect. While in some places, the director’s daring decision to take on this project single-handed comes across as remarkable for the right reasons; more often it undermines the production’s wholesome intentions.
The film starts with Nadira (Frinka Maria Ambara), a young woman in a headscarf sitting alone in a London cafe, gazing dolefully at her surroundings. A mother and child on a nearby bench giggle with each other, and Nadira sighs and turns back to a menu, filled with delicacies her own mother used to prepare her. When her friend Anindya (Septiani Samba) arrives, she understands what is going on, and immediately suggests they go to eat with her family instead.
While Anindya, Mom (Dhita Hayu Cahyani) and Dad (Abu Firaz) are Indonesian, so do not prepare the exactly the same food as Nadira is used to, she soon finds things that remind her of home. In particular, opor ayam, something which she says is similar to something “we eat back home in the Middle East”. Forgiving the broad geographical strokes of the dialogue (this is clearly aimed at homesick children, and is aiming to relate to as wider demographic of them as possible), the ensuing conversation sets up a truly wonderful segment, where Handy Mulya Erlangga’s animation takes a more whimsical, imaginative form.
While Mom and Dad retain their Polar Express 3D-form, their surroundings transform into a 2D pop-up storybook. As they recount their first Eid in London – and their quest to find candlenuts to make authentic opor ayam – they explain how their relationship with food helped them to cope with being far away from the bustling family kitchen they would be used to at this time of year, back in Indonesia. It is a beautifully realised moment – the format of a children’s book connects us to these characters, and the sense they are nourishing their inner child with each preparation of their traditional cuisine.
The voice actors do a serviceable job of delivering their dialogue – especially in what I assume is their second language of English. The director might have asked for an assistant who was a native speaker to help out during recording, as some of the cadence and intonation while they read from the script comes across as unnatural – and needed additional takes. But overall, they are believable, sympathetic performances.
At the same time, in the pop-up scene, the film manages to do service to the work of credited chef, Kartika Puspitasari, whose recipes were featured in the movie. It is perhaps the only way a film could – because whatever the now extremely cancelled judges on MasterChef might insist, we do not actually eat with our eyes. The visuals of a dish tell us virtually nothing, so while we can’t smell or taste it, we need something else. To understand what Anindya is experiencing when she tastes opor ayam, the film must appeal to our less tangible, more abstract, senses. A feeling of familial warmth, of being in the safe space that the best childhood memories can provide. It’s something that Ratatouille understood well in its climactic scene – the plate of food is recognisable, but stylised; its details less important than the feelings it stokes in the fearsome critic who it silences.
Unfortunately, the picture-book sequence is not something the rest of the film lives up to. With its ambitions of realism, the film utilises photo-realistic renditions of opor ayam on Anindya’s plate – and it is, to be blunt, horrific watching.
Handy Mulya Erlangga’s animation was already hamstrung by his limited staffing choices. It is a series of images best viewed as still-life; pause the film, and you find yourself thinking “this actually looks alright”. But the moment you hit play, and the janky, hobbling movement of each character ensues, the illusion evaporates – while against a background designed to look like everyday reality, the uncanny valley effect rapidly turns against the sinister automatons, as they implore us to trust them. They’re just humans like you. Give them a chance. You won’t regret it.
The choice to soften some of the facial features of the characters does little to offset this. The identifiably normal human torsos are afflicted with huge eyes, and strangely floppy, dolphin-toothed maws, which give them the appearance of a cursed wax doll that has come to life. Not ideal when the pivotal moment of the movie hinges on one of them moving a photographed chicken leg into their mouth. The photo alone would have looked delicious, but against the pallid, matte CGI skin of the characters, it is distressingly glossy – while its lack of movement or lighting changes as it is consumed give it a weird, otherworldly flatness.
With that said, Ties Through Taste is still head and shoulders about the flaccid, lifeless sewage that AI ‘animation’ continues to produce; so I would beg the director not to be dispirited by what I have said. There is clear potential here. But it needs to be channelled in the right way.
The food, which is so important to this story, ends up seeming utterly unappealing as a result. In this case, that is a problem which must be addressed.
The core theme of the story is an examination of how food can help us feed our sense of self –stoking warm memories of our roots, connecting us to our past and its traditions, while also offering an opportunity to make new connections wherever we are in our lives, and in the world. So far, so Stanley Tucci. It’s safe, wholesome fare – and Handy Mulya Erlangga had the right idea when he picked this for his way to help kids missing home cope with the changes. But aside from one glorious glimpse of potential, the animation is the wrong execution.