Writers: Mikaël Olliver, Petr Jarchovský and Barbora Drevikovska
Director: Kristina Dufková
This charming stop-animation film about an overweight teenager living in the Czech Republic is hard to resist. Full of wonderfully created characters and cute animals, Living Large is sure to please both adults and children. Without preaching, Kristina Dufková’s film suggests that while most of us could lose some pounds, happiness should be our eventual goal.
Ben Pipetka lives with his veterinary mother. Their apartment is a veritable menagerie; a chameleon which can never quite catch a fly with its long tongue, a snake that needs measuring and a monkey that won’t eat. Ben has no such issues with food; he’s always hungry, always thinking of cream cakes and burgers, even when he’s scoffing down his latest snack. It doesn’t help that his street seems to be dotted with patisseries and that the school vending machine is permanently on hand to deliver gold-wrapped chocolate bars.
But when school begins after the summer break, Ben discovers that his clothes no longer fit him, and he struggles to make it up a flight of stairs. Adding to his woes are his newly discovered hormones. There’s one girl in class whom he can’t help looking at, and she returns his stares. His reverie is broken when he’s called to the school medic, who tells him bluntly that he’s obese. She recommends that he begin a diet. The school bullies mock him for being fat and then mock him for dieting. He can’t win.
Ben decides that he will lose weight for the girl he has fallen in love with. However, the story doesn’t go down the expected route and the film, based on the French novel cleverly entitled La vie, en gros, by Mikaël Olliver, is populated by cool, grungy kids, skateboarders and Goths. And Ben isn’t alone either; he has a trusty friend in the long-haired Erik, and is the lead singer in a garage band.
While the creatures – including, briefly, a skating Scottie dog – are the big draw here, the human characters are stylishly and eerily made, putting one in mind of the recent Australian animation Memoir of a Snail. Ben’s mother has a mouth on one side of her long chin, and the gym teacher has arms longer than he should. The nurse at school has a grotesque mole on her cheek. Alarmingly, the bullies resemble wolves.
Although the town in which Ben lives is decidedly Czech, some of the characters, especially in the English dub of the film, feel familiarly American. It might be better to watch the Czech original to get a better sense of Czech culture, unless teenagers are the same the world over. Regardless, there are lessons to be learned here.
Living Large is screening at the 29th Made in Prague Festival.
