Tribeca Film Festival '25 — Dog of God

Image Credit: Tribeca Film Festival

Some time ago, as I was taking a class on the basis of animations, as soon as the word rotoscoping was uttered it was immediately answered by waves of comments on its laziness and lack of an aesthetic quality. Those comments weren't completely filled with animosity, but rather with a perceived realism: If one was to use rotoscoping when making a film, it would be considered by the public and the critics to be of bad taste and dismissed as a technique only fit for the laziest animators, only looking to make shapes recognizable enough to call it a movie and drawn enough to call it animation. However, this technique, consisting of drawing over live action footage in order to transform that footage into animation, does not lack examples proving its worth as a medium. Relatively recently, 2017’s Loving Vincent had proven everybody wrong by making a critically acclaimed film with the same technique. Yet, it is undeniable that the very idea of painting in impressionistic style over reality is fitting for a movie about Van Gogh. The film could then, because of this specific circumstance, be considered an outlier in animation. But Dog of God once again proves its criticism wrong. In Dog of God, unlike in most rotoscope production, the technique is not placed at the center of the film, and one finds themselves very quickly forgetting that they are seeing the mere silhouettes of bodies.

Dog of Gods sends us to the sexual and psychedelic hellscape of a Livonian village of the 17th century plagued by religious despotism, sexual frustration, and witchcraft. The story revolves around a young woman, a healer, accused by the village priest to be a witch and having stolen an artefact of the church. The trial, and the town used as its setting, feels to us like a view from another dimension, a sort of purgatory where everything seems to force its characters to a morbid mortification. The people of the town are either sadists or seemingly shallow minded souls. This cruelty is felt throughout the film. Whether it is with the constant imagery of animals eating others or of their bodies in decomposition, or of castration, impotence, scatophilia. 

But none of those elements make the pictures as dreamlike as the aforementioned rotoscope method. Because of it, the bodies appear to us as macabre shadow puppetry shows one would watch on hallucinogens. The flesh does not move straightforwardly but oozes in a paradoxically stiff manner, as if their shapes were not completely defined, but still intangible vines of an illusory scarecrow. And yet, it does not make the characters any less humans. The population of the town, get drunk, laugh, and can only think of sex. They are in the image of ancient Greek satyrs under the control of a dictatorial pastor. Satyrs, who have as their only traits to pull pranks, drink wine, and a constant erection paired with an eternal search for sexual satisfaction. Creatures who we know are much closer to humans than any Ancient heroes could possibly claim, and which seem to inhabit the houses of that Livonian village, though they hide beneath human skin.

In the image of those satyrs, the madness of pleasure, drunkenness, and hatred plagues this film. But this disease is not without its beauties, and in an hour and 35 minutes, Dog of God is making us witness to the delicious insanity of those vague and sickly beings. No, rotoscope technique is neither lazy nor sloppy, for its unpolishness makes bright unlit places of the moving image in our mind.