Wow, A Talking Fish! (1983)

There is a lot to enjoy in Wow, A Talking Fish!, though I have to be upfront: I was let down by the screener rather than the film. Robert Sahakyants' short is a surreal, sharp-edged bit of Soviet-era animation with terrific voice work, but the copy I was sent kept freezing and cut off mid-sentence, so I never reached the end. On the strength of what I saw it is a lively curio, and with that big caveat, two and a half stars.

Stylistically it reminded me of much older animation, and oddly of something like Beavis and Butt-Head, all sharp lines and flat, undetailed faces, expressions boiled down to a few decisive strokes. It is scrappy in a way that suits the material, and there is real energy to the design. The surreal story has an old man in conversation with a pair of enormous monsters as they try to tempt him into eating from a lavish banquet, and the voice acting throughout is fantastic, doing a lot of the comic and menacing lifting.

Where it falls down, at least in my experience of it, is on the technical side, though that may be a fault of the screening copy rather than the film itself. Mine stuttered, froze and then simply stopped partway through, which makes a fair final judgement difficult. What I saw was intriguing and characterful, but I cannot in honesty rate a film I was unable to finish any higher.

Two and a half stars, provisionally. A striking, well-voiced oddity that I would genuinely like to revisit in a clean copy, because there may well be a better film here than my broken screener allowed me to see.

Reviewed as part of the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival's Politics of the Imagination programme.

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