Gwen et le livre de sable (Gwen and the Book of Sand) is a 1985 animated feature directed by Jean-François Laguionie, with its illustrations and animations done in gouache, giving the whole film a very watercolor texture. The plot concerns Gwen, a teenage girl who is adopted into a nomadic tribe who live in a post-apocalyptic desert. One member of the tribe, Roseline, is identified as a witch, and is said to be over 170 years old, and it is through her we get what little knowledge we have of this world and how it came to be. She tells us that the gods destroyed the civilizations of the past, and that now the world is stalked by an Eldritch abomination called Makou, which periodically roams the desert and spews out reproductions of various household objects from the sky, usually of a gigantic variety. Of course, Roseline also believes that the walled city she and her people avoid and from which the Makou seems to originate is the afterlife and that those within it are spirits, but when we learn more about them later, it becomes clear that Roseline’s wisdom is incomplete and thus many of her concepts of the universe’s function are inaccurate. In Gwen, Roseline sees a girl who has never known fear and respects this about her, but when Gwen and Roseline’s grandson Nokmoon sneak out one night to make love and fall asleep in a giant chest of drawers, Nokmoon ends up taken by the Makou. As the rest of the tribe moves on, Roseline and Nokmoon journey to the “afterlife” to try and rescue him. 

This film, like The Tragedy of Man, is currently available in a remastered edition from boutique home video retailer Deaf Crocodile. I got to see it on the big screen at my local arthouse, and it was absolutely gorgeous. Although the motion of the animation is limited at times, that minimal movement lends the whole thing a storybook quality, rendering Gwen as a post-apocalyptic fairytale. It’s a fairly short feature, clocking in at under 70 minutes, but it feels no less fully realized than a film that was twice its length. The desert features fantastical creatures that feel like revisitations of earlier French animation experiments in design; there’s nothing as strange here as what you might see in La Planète sauvage or Les Maîtres du temps, but they are of a kind. The desert nomads live solely off of a diet of feathers harvested from a mutant ostrich, and the only light that they have at night comes from a bioluminescent scorpion. Where the film gets its most surreal visual elements is in the “gifts” of the Makou, as giant watering cans reign from the sky and Gwen and Roseline navigate a labyrinth of doors or summit a mountain range of clocks. We eventually learn that these items are generated by the Makou is response to religious supplication from the people who dwell within the walled city, where religion has dissolved into a unified cargo cult centered around the titular book of sand, which is in actuality a home goods catalogue from before the collapse of civilization. Their hymns consist of recitations of product descriptions, which then prompt the Makou into creating them. The leaders of this “faith” are two twin brothers who observe the captive Nokmoon’s psychically projected dreams and hope that this can help them to prompt the Makou to create something “alive” rather than the inanimate objects that it normally produces. 

The mechanics of all of this are mostly irrelevant. The world-building exists solely to allow for the visuals, and that’s where the film shines. Gwen is able to rescue Nokmoon because this is that kind of fable, and it’s mostly an accident. The twin priests observe that a spiral image in Nokmoon’s dream resembles the product image of a particular firework, and prompt their faithful throng into singing it into existence via the Makou, which backfires when the people below are terrified by the suddenly bright, loud heavens. Gwen’s presence in the climax has no real bearing on the events there, except that she is able to bring Nokmoon home. She knows a bit more about the world now than Roseline does, but she lets the old woman continue to believe as she always has. Even if that story is a little confusing for the audience (and there are certainly some things left up to interpretation and conjecture, which is why I would recommend watching this one with a friend), it’s the sumptuous use of a non-standard artistic technique that makes this one worth finding and checking out. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond