Scarygirl (2023) - Movie Review

Coming off of the decent if inconsistent Tales From Sanctuary City trilogy, director Ricard Cussó’s latest is a major switch-up, both textually and visually. Textually, it’s adapted from an IP that has been doing the rounds semi-regularly for the past two decades, becoming toys, a comic book, a Flash game and even an Xbox Live Arcade download before making it to the big screen.

Visually, however, is where things get really interesting. While Australia has been experiencing something of a boom within the animation industry over the last several years, thanks in no small part to studios like Animal Logic and Flying Bark, this still manages to look like nothing else I’ve seen this country produce thus far. Not even the Sanctuary City movies come anywhere close to this.

The Drover's Wife: The Legend Of Molly Johnson (2022) - Movie Review

Something keeps telling me I shouldn’t be as down on Westerns as I have been in the past. The reason for its cultural and artistic appeal, even to this day, is out of a sense of moral ambiguity. Of a land untamed by man, unchained by law, where the only way to make things right is to right them for one’s self. Sure, its presence in American and even Australian folklore can feed into certain power fantasies that shouldn’t apply in societies that keep insisting that they are bound by rules of law… but as someone who tends to feel less safe, rather than more, whenever law enforcement officers are nearby, even I can understand the draw of that kind of story.

Of course, that runs into the problem of who has been holding the pen when writing those stories. It’s a period in time when men were damn-near encouraged to take the law into their own hands… but only the men, and even then, only some of them get the benefit of doubt in altercations with firearms. As I got into when I reviewed Sweet Country, there’s a thick vein of hypocrisy in our own country’s glorification of the image of the outlaw, as they were (and in many ways still are) willing to denigrate for embodying a different variety of that same image. This is the reason why Revisionist Westerns exist in the first place, and it’s why this particular one managed to grab my attention and keep it.