Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Princes and Princesses
2000 · Michel Ocelot · Princes and Princesses on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the color come entirely from backlit paper, not paint. (light)
Every figure is a flat black cut-out lit from behind by colored gels, so the palette shifts by tale: nocturnal blue for one story, desert gold for another.
Payoff: The light itself tells you which world you're in before a single word of dialogue does.
Watch every character move and speak in profile, side-on. (staging)
Because the figures are solid black, gesture, gait, and the outline of a costume have to carry all the characterization the shapes allow.
Payoff: An elaborate headdress or the sweep of a robe has to tell you the whole story of who someone is.
Notice the film returns to the same workshop between each tale. (structure)
Two children and an old technician keep meeting in a deserted cinema to choose, research, and costume their next story before it begins.
Payoff: You always see the story being built before you see it told.
Listen to how much character comes through voice alone. (sound)
With faces reduced to black outline, the wry or foolish way a character speaks does the work a face would normally do.
Payoff: You end up reading tone of voice the way you would normally read an expression.
Watch the tilt of a head or the flourish of a bow. (performance)
Every emotion has to travel through posture and gesture alone, so animators make gait and stance broad and instantly readable.
Payoff: A hesitation before a foolish act tells you everything, the way a close-up would in live action.
Once you have seen it
Track how each of the six tales rewards a different virtue. (structure)
A knight wins a witch's castle by asking nicely rather than by siege; a boy's plain honesty carries him further than any cunning would.
Payoff: Once you know the pattern, you can watch each tale set up which quality it plans to reward.
Notice each tale's world rendered in period-specific silhouette detail. (setting)
The six stories roam from a medieval fairy realm to an ancient Egyptian court, a Japanese setting, and a science-fiction future, each researched down to costume and architecture.
Payoff: The same flat black shape is made to carry six entirely different worlds, one after another.
Watch a comic bestiary of shapes when lovers finally kiss. (staging)
In the romantic tale, kisses transform the couple through a sequence of comic shapes rather than a single fairy-tale transformation.
Payoff: The gag depends entirely on silhouette; the same joke in full color and detail would not land the same way.
Carry this in: Watch what a plain black shape can carry: a whole costume, a whole country, a whole feeling.