I’ve never seen a film quite like this chaotically strange animation from writer-directors Tyson Yunkaporta and Jack Manning Bancroft, who fill it with slap-happy pleasures and plotlines that bounce around like pinballs.
Attempting to explain the narrative is a fool’s errand, like trying to tickle yourself. I can say with confidence – assuming I didn’t unknowingly consume magic mushrooms beforehand and hallucinate the entire thing – that the story follows a teenager, Kim (voice of Yolande Brown), who gets pulled into a surreal alternate universe that they explore with their new pal Jeff (Yunkaporta), a bright-green alien dog.
The script was conceived early in the pandemic via Indigenous mentoring program AIME’s educational project Imagi-Nation TV, which compiled contributions from more than 150 young people. This partly explains the film’s skittish spirit and scattershot structure.
Like Alice tumbling through the rabbit hole, Kim travels through a vortex-like thoroughfare filled with swirling colours and crazy patterns, before floating past a giant glowing green Buddha and riding a psychedelic dragon-like snake thing, because why not? This isn’t social realism; look elsewhere for films about the lives of Polish potato farmers and Mongolian beekeepers.
Kim functions like the lead character in Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life – another head trip filled with kooky elements and weird rants. They’re less like a protagonist than a sponge, absorbing the strange goings-on around them. Or perhaps more like a video game character, having a degree of agency and input but functioning essentially as a vessel to guide us through candy-coloured bizarro worlds.
In Imagine, these worlds take the form of five islands, where Kim and Jeff bump into various Aboriginal elders and eccentric creations – including, among many others, a rainbow serpent (voiced by Wayne Blair) and an animated version of Taika Waititi (voiced by the man himself), who wears a Thriller jacket and shares his thoughts on pursuing your dreams with Kim and a trio of insect-like creatures. Other supporting cast members include Yael Stone, Radical Son, Irmin Durand and even Ian Thorpe.
We’re obviously not intended to take the film too seriously during its many whacked-out moments, though it also dips in and out of all kinds of meaty monologues and profundities. Before long, Jeff is engaged in deep philosophical discussion with a Viking about knowledge, race, culture, fascism and the foundation of life. As they talk, weird pirate-like rats ride jetskis towards them but never arrive. I’m not sure what happened to our yo-ho-ho rodent pals; this film has a habit of introducing things that visually pop, like firecrackers, then disappear quickly, shuffled off to some parallel dimension. The texture and style of the animation is an eclectic mixture – sometimes beautifully vivid and polished, other times intentionally scratchy and lo-fi.
Indigenous perspectives are laced throughout – sometimes subtly, sometimes in very striking ways. In one scene, based in Jeff’s home world, the lead characters are guided through a museum (called “HISTORY ‘n’ Other Stuff”) by an elder, who tells Kim that “this isn’t like the museums your people made … your people took memories and called them artefacts. Your people took stories and stuffed them. You put barriers, and walls, and ropes, and glass, between you and the past.”
It’s ruminative, big-thinking dialogue, incorporating ancient and contemporary perspectives. This scene could have been wonderful, but the film’s ever-frantic approach boots us out of the museum posthaste. How might this moment have played out if the setting had been properly explored, fleshed out, mined for its narrative and thematic potential?
I appreciated Imagine’s chaotic energy, but watching it felt a bit like sitting in a car that’s whizzing through all sorts of amazing environments, rarely slowing down so you can have a proper look. It’s certainly a one-of-a-kind production, and I suspect it’ll linger in the memory.
Imagine is screening as part of Melbourne international film festival on 23 August.
