Natural realism has been the holy grail of animation since the 1920s, when Winsor McCay established the art of character animation with his groundbreaking Gertie the Dinosaur cartoons, and the 1930s, when Walt Disney elevated it to a new level with the supple, emotionally precise character movement of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The quest lives on in the age of 3-D digital animation, when motion-capture technology offers a new frontier in creating hyperrealistic characters. Social realism is another matter—with all those paychecks to sign, animation producers inevitably gravitate toward more bankable fantasy and sci-fi stories. But over the next two weeks Gene Siskel Film Center will present two new animation features that offer startling glimpses of modern life in strange lands: Ali Soozandeh’s Tehran Taboo, which explores the sexual underground in Iran, and Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day, a gritty film noir about hopeless losers crushed by China’s ruthless market economy.
Closer to home, Pari strikes up a friendship with Sara (Zara Amir Ebrahimi), her shy next-door neighbor, who’s expecting a child after two miscarriages and who fruitlessly petitions her fundamentalist husband, Mohsen (Alireza Bayram), for permission to get a job. Though Pari passes herself off as a nurse, her more liberated perspective infects the other woman, and the couple’s marriage drifts toward the rocks. No one should be too surprised when Pari, working a shift at a brothel, welcomes her next trick into the room and discovers that it’s Mohsen. The two recoil from each other, burned by the moment in which their two lies have accidentally converged. The entire movie seems to take place in a world where people refuse to concede their own human impulses.
