Encouraged by a prophecy and his scheming wife, Macbeth sets out to be King of Scotland, but soon realizes the lengths he must go to keep his power in this gruesome tale of pure horror.Encouraged by a prophecy and his scheming wife, Macbeth sets out to be King of Scotland, but soon realizes the lengths he must go to keep his power in this gruesome tale of pure horror.Encouraged by a prophecy and his scheming wife, Macbeth sets out to be King of Scotland, but soon realizes the lengths he must go to keep his power in this gruesome tale of pure horror.
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- Narrator
- (voice)
- Lady Macbeth
- (voice)
- Duncan
- (voice)
- Banquo
- (voice)
- Macduff
- (voice)
- Witch
- (voice)
- Witch
- (voice)
- Witch
- (voice)
- Donalbain
- (voice)
- Malcolm
- (voice)
- Lennox
- (voice)
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- Writers
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Storyline
Did you know
- Quotes
Duncan: And you whose places are the nearest, know We will establish our estate upon Our eldest, Malcolm, whom we name hereafter the Prince of Cumberland.
Macbeth: [aside] The Prince of Cumberland. That is a step on which I must fall down or else o'er leap... for in my way it lies. Stars... hide your fires. Let not night see my black and deep desires.
- ConnectionsVersion of Macbeth (1898)
You can't really do this in live action beyond a few props - they remain at the level of words, which, as I have suggested, are spoken too quickly to be fully digested. But in animation, with its visual flexibility - where 'realistic' events can easily slip in and out of symbolic imagery - and its physics-defying action, this second level can be brought to the fore, without in any way sacrificing narrative coherence: a simple, but powerful example is the scene where the Witches tell Macbeth his future - the emblem signifying his Thaneship of Cordor becomes a string of bones collapsing into the king's crown.
Perhaps the most immediate advantage of animation is the vivid atmosphere it can create. On stage, the violence must be artificially stylised (you can't go lopping off real actors' heads), and even on film you know it's just illusive choreography and tomato ketchup. In this 'Macbeth', however, there is a satisfying goriness, making the horrors, the murders, Macbeth's ever-proliferating paranoia terribly real, and also providing some remarkable visual moments, such as the blood-dripping aftermath of Duncan's death.
Furthermore, 'Macbeth' is a supernatural play, which can only be recreated on stage with dry ice and old-crone shrieking. By turning Scotland into the kind of vast, arid desert-scape you might expect in Greek tragedy; by turning the interiors into crumbling, inhumanly vast, drippingly dank Gothic chambers; by turning the solidity of the action into an unstable visual mosaic backing the weird hallucinatory quality of Macbeth's waking nightmares, director Sebreyanakov creates an unsettling atmosphere that makes the Witches' world more powerfully convincing.
Ultimately, there are some things animation can't do. This 'Macbeth' is only surpassed by one other, that of Orson Welles. Welles created just the kind of visual world I've been talking about, privileging the visual, the symbolic, the hallucinatory over the verbal. But he does it with believable people, and not the somewhat stilted beanpoles Sebreyanakov offers. In the animation we get a powerful sense of the otherworldly and of mental breakdown. With Welles we get this, and tragedy. In other words, Shakespeare.
- the red duchess
- May 28, 2001