Next up for the Letterboxd Challenge, a previously unseen animated film from central or eastern Europe. This is another one where “previously unseen” is doing absolutely no filtering work, and we ended up choosing the apparently-most-popular option.

Despite its popularity relative to the other options, I’d never heard of the movie — and no wonder, because apparently it was never officially released in the US; so if you weren’t importing Region 2 PAL DVDs and missed it in animation film festivals in the ’80s, you wouldn’t have been able to see it at all until the 2019 4K restoration that was supposed to have led up to a 2020 US theatrical release, but oops 2020. Well, at least it’s available on streaming and disc in a great version now.

And this is definitely a movie that benefits from a good restoration, because it is visually fascinating. If you’d asked me when this movie was made without looking it up, I would have said (incorrectly; it was 1981) “absolutely 100% no questions asked the 60s,” because it has this brightly-colored, psychedelic style to it, where forms morph from one thing into another, and it’s not interested in being purely literal in its representations — why yes, that is an awfully vaginal looking cave, isn’t it.

“Not interested in being purely literal” is also a good description of the plot. This is apparently based on a 19th-century Hungarian folktale, and it involves human sons of a horse mother, princesses abducted by dragons, an entrance to the underworld in the roots of the world tree, and absolutely everything happening in multiples of three. If you aren’t familiar with the folktale (as I was not), the movie is comprehensible, but only just. I’d recommend doing a Wikipedia pre-read before watching the movie — because really, the weird-but-also-extremely-familiar folktale story isn’t the draw here, it’s the way the animation is used to tell that story; already knowing the story lets you relax more into the visual richness of its telling.

This isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen before, and for that reason alone it’s an easy recommendation.