Loving Vincent (2017)

LOVING VINCENT  (2017)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Dorota Korbiela, Hugh Welchman
    Douglas Booth, Chris O'Dowd, Eleanor Tomlinson,
    Aidan Turner, Saoirse Ronan, Jerome Flynn,
    Robert Gulaczyk, Robin Hodges, John Sessions
An animated mystery about a postmaster's son dispatched to deliver Vincent Van Gogh's last letter to his brother Theo, sometime after Vincent's death. Finding that Theo himself has died, the messenger ends up hanging around Auvers, talking to those who knew Vincent - all of them subjects in his paintings - and trying to piece together what happened in the last few weeks of the artist's life. What's revealed is a maze of conflicting stories, like "Rashomon" in oil on canvas, and visually that's exactly what the movie achieves. It was shot using real actors and then painted frame by frame in the style of Van Gogh. That required the work of more than 100 artists, making it the most labor-intensive case of rotoscoping ever, and the most literal example yet of images in paint coming to life. It's a magnificent eyeshow, especially on a big screen. Crows and wheat fields and sunflowers never looked so good.