Marona's Fantastic Tale movie review (2020)

One of the most extraordinary sequences shows Marona witnessing a human's death—not just the cessation of bodily functions, but the release of the soul and the transformation of matter into energy, accompanied by a spiral ramp (like a DNA helix) appearing in the air above the body. In addition to confirming that our pets can, in fact, see beyond this realm, and sense spirits as they pass between worlds, a deeply reassuring thought, the scene serves as a final brake against the impact of what we know is coming. Marona may be gone from this plane, but we know she's headed somewhere else. That makes the ending not bitter, but bittersweet.

"Marona's Fantastic Tale" is demanding in terms of its style, its tone, and choice of what to emphasize and how to show it to us. It is not an American studio-type of animated production, with three-dimensional-looking, realistically shaded drawings; visual grammar that mimics live action Hollywood blockbusters; a soundtrack of brash, Broadway-ready original songs or needle-drop pop tunes, and dialogue packed with cultural references and slang that must have seemed cutting-edge when the project was green-lit five years earlier. The movie unfolds according to its own logic and intuition and demands a great deal of adults as well as kids, starting with the basic proposition that life is finite and ends in death, you don't get to choose the time, place, and circumstances of your passing, and it's not only OK for animation to talk about these things, it's healing. 

If you read that last sentence and thought, "This sounds very French," well, yes: this is a French-Romanian coproduction, and while it might seem like overdoing it to call the movie existential, the word fits. This is a movie about existence, about the necessity of moving through life as best you can knowing that everybody gets the same ending. And it's about the ordinary, often wrenching truth of what it means to live, age, and die, leaving behind a legacy of love and regret, if not always children or grand achievements. When you hear the phrase "a dog's life," it is often framed in a sad, dismissive or smug, way, as in, "I wouldn't wish that kind of life on a dog." But what does that say about the value that humanity actually places on dogs? A dog's life and a human's are equally valuable to the creature who's living it. The dog is smaller and doesn't live as long and can't operate a doorknob. 

"Finally," Marona says, snuggling into the home of caretakers who actually take care of her, "humans who understand what it means to be a canine." Finally, too: a cartoon that appreciates dogs as dogs, and treats one dog's life with the gravity we'd want expressed at a memorial for a human of no importance who meant everything to us.

Available in virtual cinemas today, 6/12.