‘Loving Vincent’ is a series of beautiful oil paintings come to life on the screen

Posted on December 8, 2017

By MARK VIOLA

When you go see as many movies as I do, it’s extremely rare to see something legitimately new. James Cameron’s “Avatar” pushed visual effects to a point we’d never seen before, and honestly, haven’t seen since. Richard Linklater’s “Boyhood” showed us what would happen if you filmed a movie in real time over 17 years. Those are really the only examples I can think of from the last few years.

And now we have “Loving Vincent,” the first ever feature-length animated oil painting. As I noted in my preview last week, this film was created with more than 100 artists painting 853 paintings, which were painted and repainted to create each of the 65,000 frames. It’s a feat that has never been done before, and one that should be commended, because the end product is absolutely beautiful. But, the process is just a technique and only a gimmick without a good story to go with it.

Fortunately, the story here manages to be quite engaging, although I believe your personal connection to it will depend on your love of art, and more specifically, the art of Vincent van Gogh, the troubled painter who died in 1890 at the age of 37 from a self-inflicted gunshot.

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