AKA: Nyocker!
Country and Year: Hungary (2004)
Director: Aron Gauder
Starring: L.L. Junior, Gabor Csore, Andrea Roatis

Review By: David Austin
Rating: 3 ½ out of 4 stars (very good)

With their Region 1 DVD release of The District, new DVD company on the block Atopia have hit their first home run. The District, a raunchy animated satire of Romeo and Juliet mixed with a healthy helping of geopolitics, is witty, entertaining and presented in a unique style. Along with the recent Kontroll, The District showcases a Hungarian cinema that is emerging as a real counterweight in Eastern Europe. Watch your backs, Czechs and Poles!

The best thing about The District - a movie that has a lot going for it - is the animation. Rather than emulating the currently popular styles of rotoscoping or anime, The District utilizes a hopped-up version of South Park’s crude, intentionally two-dimensional technique mingled with motion and facial capture software. Of course, comparing the animation in The District to that of South Park is hardly fair. Unlike South Park’s minimalist world, every frame of The District drips with detail and style. The look of the film is crowded and crude (not to mention lewd), with drawings that bring to mind Ben Katchor’s pencilwork in his graphic novel The Jew of New York and older Ralph Bakshi works like Heavy Traffic. The filmmakers realize the city of Budapest beautifully, even in its seediness. Movement too is fluid, allowing for both action and dance sequences, as well as with deliberate mockery of the Dragon Ball Z style of Japanese animation.

Grotty and gritty and sexually charged as it is, The District is fundamentally sweeter than Bakshi’s films. Director Gauder cares about his characters, even the dumbest and most venal. Appropriately, as in South Park, the protagonists are a group of simultaneously precocious and naïve kids living in the grungy titular Budapest district. The kids are a Goonies-esque grab-bag - our hero, Richie Lakatos, the wiseass child of Gypsy hoodlums, his sister, his thuggish friend, a nerd, a Chinese kid, an Arab kid. On the other side of the cultural divide (or at least the other side of the street) are cutie-pie Julika Csorba and her mooky brother, children of the Gypsies’ rival, a Ukrainian pimp.

Richie loves Julika, but she does not seem especially interested. After Richie’s grandfather lays out his theory of life – men love women, women love money, so men need money to get women (expressed much more crudely, of course) – Richie dreams up one of the greatest get-rich-quick schemes of all time. Because oil brings in money, and oil comes from ancient, decaying animals, Richie and his friends build a time machine, go back to prehistoric Budapest, nuke a herd of wooly mammoths (using a bomb provided by the Arab kid’s Uncle Osama), and bury the bodies under the future city. The plan works and soon the district is rolling in cash. However, there are snakes in the garden, and soon the boys’ less intelligent parents, Vladimir Putin and his army of Russian hooker-spies, the Vatican, and President Bush all take an unhealthy interest in the black gold.

As the plot demonstrates, The District recalls vintage South Park not only in its animation and characterization, but in its sense of humor, which mixes the earthy with the absurd. More specifically, it marries character-driven, small-scale comedy with politics and societal issues in unlikely but clever ways. However, even when tackling the big issues, the film’s focus remains small-scale. The kids stay rooted in the district and so does the comedy. Make no mistake though, this is not a children’s film. The humor is quite raunchy and there is a surprising amount of nudity, as well as nearly constant sexual situations. That said, the sex is always played for laughs, not titillation, and, despite realistic imagery, The District rarely goes in for gross-out humor.

The cherry on top of this sundae is that The District is also a musical – more specifically, a Hungarian hip-hop musical. Periodically, characters break out into song (or rap), be they hookers singing about their trade or petty gangsters bragging about their business. The entire opening credit sequence is a masterful musical montage that sets the tone of the film and introduces many of the players seen throughout the film.

Recommended? Highly. The District is terrific, original stuff, and a ton of fun.

If you like this, you might like: Mind Game, FLCL, Heavy Traffic, Aachi and Ssipak, Wizards, South Park

DVD DETAILS

DVD Production Company: Atopia (www.atopia.com)
Release Date: January 15, 2008
Run Time: 91 Mins
Extras: Original Trailer, Making of The District, Excerpts from Original TV Shorts, Atopia trailers

Atopia’s Region 1 disc features a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen print that nicely captures this film’s unique look and color scheme. Atopia also has included some solid extras with this disc. In addition to a trailer, there are excerpts from the animated television shorts that preceded The District feature film. The clips are well done, but even this brief glimpse is enough to demonstrate the quantum leap the filmmakers took in bringing this to the big screen. There is also a 30-minute featurette on the making of The District which demonstrates the facial and motion capture techniques used in bringing the protagonists to life.

© David Austin