Olivia and the Clouds (Olivia y Las Nubes, 2024) ‘Locarno’ Movie Review

The evocation of emotions, the intricate nuances, and the overly active imagination responsible for depicting the passion of love—unconventional or otherwise—could only be represented in their full, unvarnished glory by the medium of animation. For viewers used to traditional animation styles, unconventional ones like paper machete, claymation, or even a combination of both, like mixed media, could be utilized due to their unfamiliarity, providing a certain degree of freedom to create stories without any strictures holding them back.

If we go by that standpoint, “Olivia and the Clouds” is a surreal movie, a strange mix of utter weirdness and complete self-reflection heavily infused with indulgence toward pushing the medium of animation. Essentially taking two separate stories, connected tangentially by one or two characters, director Tomas Pichardo-Espaillat explores the strands of existence that makeup love and how that becomes more and more inscrutable the further he tries to examine them.

One thing in the movie is quite clear: all the men involved within the two narratives of the love story are responsible for the eventual straining of the relationship to break or fall apart. For Mauricio, in a close friendship with Barbara, his aloofness and presumable refusal to commit leads Barbara to reject Mauricio, instead searching for an escape through an animated movie she is trying to develop. Meanwhile, Mauricio wishes for the Earth to swallow him up, a proclamation that could curiously sound like whining from an individual yearning for an escape if one ignores the magic realism Espaillat’s world is interested in.

The weirder sections belong to the stories involving Olivia and Ramon. Olivia believes that she has someone under her bed who communicates with her by producing clouds, which is a weird enough story only outmatched by Ramon not just kissing a woman without consent but then throwing that spit in the pot at his house, which leads to the birth of a plant with feminine humanoid attributes that share a deep affection for Ramon, much to his discomfort.

Olivia and the Clouds (Olivia y Las Nubes, 2024) ‘Locarno’ Movie Review — A still from “Olivia and the Clouds” (*Olivia y Las Nubes,* 2024)

It’s a strange story that could be read as a satire on male fantasy regarding the outsizedness of their sexual or seduction prowess. However, the movie is so involved in the shuttling of animation styles that narrative coherence falls by the wayside. Thus, by the time the movie produces a major curveball at the end, revealing a connection between Olivia and Ramon, the true instance of the narratives being less an anthology and more of a Rashomon structure becomes apparent, with the mutability of the truth and the malleability of the story becoming paramount. But even as realization strikes, you are far too involved in vibing and parsing through all the animation styles.

Perhaps the positive attributes of the mixed-media nature of animation are enough to discard the peculiarity of the narrative itself and the unexplainable nature of the connection between the three anthologies that ultimately binds them together. More than narrative connectivity, the fluidity of the animation styles is the true unifier in “Olivia and the Clouds.”

From the paper-machete style of animation reducing and reforming character layouts to signify movement, to compression of location, time, and space through the use of comic book panels to signify multiple occurrences simultaneously within the same time, to the drawing and coloring of the human figures changing according to the protagonist of the anthology, to the film finally becoming a collage of colors to showcase the bright lights and vibe of a nightclub, to the myriad of animation and mixed media conjoining and producing something new to signify consummation and connection between two individuals attracted to each other, dancing their life away, even as Olivia’s dreams slowly and steadily hint to her true origin.

“Olivia and the Clouds” is at its best when it is completely self-indulgent, eager to show off the different styles utilized by the fantastic animation team, complemented by a soft, melodic, and sometimes bouncy background score and a surreal sound design. It is also at its worst when it is self-indulgent because, in choosing to depict the intensity of emotions and love and the pain of rejection, narrative incoherence becomes the norm, which further muddies the themes that the director does want to explore. The movie is so dense, with stray moments of paper flying across the screen or colored lines moving from the eye line of one character to the next, that in identifying all of the individual tics, it becomes quite hard to contemplate the surreal whole. But as an animation showcase, this film is impeccable.