Heroic Times

In the first of two reviews I'll post tonight, I discuss what was seen on Tuesday night: a unique Hungarian animated motion picture.

Another post on Twitter gave me a push to see a film. I only heard of the Hungarian animated epic Heroic Times once Deaf Crocodile (a label I’ve been happy to discuss more often as of late) released the film on Blu in 2023. Last week I saw a Tweet from the account Old Media which proclaimed: “It took 6 years for a group of 10 artists to create over 40,000 oil paintings for the Heroic Times (1983) creating a unique animation style.” Thankfully, the esoteric Eternal Family streaming platform had this film available.

The film-narrated by our lead-is based on The Toldi Trilogy, a trilogy of poems by Janos Arany concerning a real-life 14th century Hungarian-Miklos Toldi-who became a folklore figure that went on a journey to become a knight. He was a working-class peasant due to circumstances but he rose up due to suck tasks as kicking a bull’s ass (no, really); this was what you’d want in an epic journey: love, battles, serving your King, a feud with your brother, capture, revenge, redemption, etc., all set to a loud, bold symphonic score from Tibor Erkel and Janos Decesnyi. 

As a story unknown to me until last night, I was always captivated. Naturally, the keystone reason for that was the marriage of the score and the awesome aesthetic of the oil painting animation. The film unfortunately wasn’t a box office smash; thankfully, this was restored by Hungary’s Film Institute and people worldwide can enjoy the efforts of those 10 artists, the composers, and director Jozsef Gemes.

Of course, I do know of 2017’s Loving Vincent and 2023’s The Peasants, both from British filmmaker Hugh Welchman, which uses a similar animation style of oil paintings. Neither has been seen by me (not yet, anyhow) but I’m happy that styles like this and stop-motion are still in use today. Computer animation is great and all-depending on the aesthetic style, at least-but I’m glad a wide variety of traditional animation has not gone extinct.