In the early 2000s, the 3D animation style of Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani’s innovative debut film, Bouchra, would have been cutting-edge, the preserve of high-end gaming consoles and glossy advertising. A decade later, the capability for animating animals in particular took a quantum leap, seen in Life of Pi’s photorealistic tiger and the Planet of the Apes reboot’s monkeys. The filmmakers – originating, respectively, from Tel Aviv and Casablanca – harness this once-futuristic, but now outdated, noughties aesthetic for their debut feature, creating an uncanniness (if not the “uncanny valley” accusation) around the imagery and its purpose, questions naturally emanating from Bennani’s contemporary-art background. Bouchra premiered last week in Toronto’s competitive Platform strand and plays the New York Film Festival’s experimental Currents section later this month.

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But this textural immersion – made with open-source 3D modelling software, like last year’s Flow [+lire aussi :
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fiche film] – is carefully deployed for a highly personal investigation into Bennani’s Islamic Moroccan heritage and its bearing on her identity now, as a queer artist in New York. Most notably, the on-screen characters in every setting are depicted as anthropomorphised, bipedal animals – the leads, Bouchra and her mother, Aicha, are portrayed as fearsome-looking, yet cute, coyotes. Early audiences have drawn parallels to the Disney animation Zootopia, but this reviewer saw more of a kinship in Bouchra to the Netflix hit BoJack Horseman, with both of them filtering modern life and creative neurosis through a reality-distorting haze.

Bouchra (herself voiced by Bennani) has a close relationship with Aicha, despite their geographic distance, yet she feels uncertain about how, nine years beforehand, she disclosed her attraction to women through the high-dramatic device of a handwritten letter, blanching at verbal explanation. A transatlantic phone call is the trigger and framing device for her to embark on a new artistic project, coincidentally greenlit by her ex, Nikki (Ariana Faye Allensworth), characterised amusingly as a latte-sipping, New York creative-class stereotype. The sequences flow seamlessly between New York and the Casablanca of her upbringing, respectively defined by casual hook-ups sparing no sight of furry cleavage and bottoms, and domestic tensions in her old family home; Bouchra also addictively watches Moroccan popular media, such as a cheesy primetime call-in show, on her phone screen, a visual means to plug into her old life. The storyboard sketches she prepares in her apartment eventually transition into full-blown scenes, leaving us pleasingly adrift and unsure if we’re seeing the final rendering of Bouchra’s film, or the real inspiration for such. 

With the animation so accurately recalling an earlier era, it works to help the film’s empowering message resonate, whilst still leaving questions hanging about artistic intent. Are we meant to process it as ironic, silly or undercutting? And with the dialogue deriving from actual friends and family of the directors, is the animation principally a clever alternative to prosaic visual realism? Bouchra isn’t quite revolutionary enough to feel “new”, but everything about it is made with such intelligence and rigour, persuading us that PlayStation 2 graphics and autofiction actually do belong together.

Bouchra is a co-production by Italy, Morocco and the USA, staged by Fondazione Prada, 2 Lizards Production, Hi Production and SB Films. Its world sales are handled by Lucky Number.