OVP: I Lost My Body (2019)

Film: I Lost My Body (2019)
Stars: Dev Patel, Alia Shawkat, George Wendt
Director: Jeremy Clapin
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Animated Feature Film)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

We are going to continue our look this week at animated features by moving away from the very conventional Anastasia and into a movie that was nominated for an Oscar last year, but is anything but typical.  I Lost My Body has pedigreed roots (it is written by the Oscar-nomianted scribe of Amelie), but it is totally unique in the AMPAS pantheon, especially in a category dominated by Pixar & Blue Sky & Disney.  The film tells the tale of a forlorn protagonist, but is really the tale about a severed hand that escapes from a medical lab...and is somehow not a midnight movie requiring an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs (anyone else get that deep cut?).

(Spoilers Ahead) I honestly don't know that I need a spoiler alert for I Lost My Body, but we'll do one anyway.  The film is not told narratively, and in the case of the most interesting parts of the film, it doesn't honestly make a lot of sense to think of it that way.  There is a love story between Naoufel (Patel), a troubled young pizza delivery guy and Gabrielle (Shawkat), a young woman he is enamored with (and kind of stalks, let's be real).  He has a terrible secret in his past, one that haunts him to this day (we learn eventually that he accidentally was the catalyst to his parents' fatal car accident), but most of his present is spent tape recording his life and harassing Gabrielle.  In the end, we find that Naoufel has finally taken a literal leap-of-faith, after having talked earlier in the film about jumping into a crane, he actually does it, implying heavily that his life will be different now, and he is letting go of the trauma of his parents' accident.

This is heavy, but it's not something you'd confuse for "atypical" at the movies.  What makes I Lost My Body fascinating is the presence of a hand, like Thing from The Addams Family, that is struggling throughout the city in silent wonder.  We find out later in the film that the hand used to belong to Naoufel, and he cut it off making a project as he apprenticed for Gabrielle's uncle Gigi (Wendt), but the film goes to great lengths to show how the hand goes on an incredible journey, encountering struggles as it leaps from buildings and fights off rats with fire, underlining the deep journey Naoufel has to encounter in order to find peace.

It's good...but I Lost My Body is perhaps too avant garde for its own good.  It would have been better without the love story, a convenient and tried trope that keeps the movie tethered to a more conventional trapping, forcing the hand metaphors onto Naoufel's life with Gabrielle in a way that would have been better if they'd just trusted the audience to understand the message it was going for.  The film's animation is flowing if occasionally gross (and not always with a payoff-I'm not someone who is fascinated by realism or bodily fluids in an animated film just there to shock us), but it's the hand's journey that makes the movie work.  If only the writers had had confidence that was enough, we'd have a truly mesmerizing movie to go along with its weird Oscar nomination.