Reflective Encounters

“The first thing that hits you as a viewer when taking in David Doutel and Vasco Sá’s Garrano is its strikingly immersive, elaborate painterly style (achieved through a mix of analogue – oil paint – and digital approaches). Intense lighting and meticulous layout harmoniously combine to heighten the emotional states and overall performance of the characters, a father and son at loggerheads under the weight of their daily labour, an interloper, and their ostensibly tame Garrano pack horse.

With elaborate character animation that seems to draw upon either reference footage or rotoscope, significant labour has gone into cementing an advanced and evolved visual style that pulls the viewer in and makes the characters – notably the titular horse – particularly sympathetic and believable. The backgrounds, layout and compositing effectively convey the sense of burdensome heat and the paradoxically claustrophobic openness of the forest environment they inhabit.

As the dubious decisions made by the characters lead to inevitably brutal consequences (which speak to a fanciful desire of some at the end of their rope to burn down the world they inhabit and all their obligations along with it) we’re presented with a poignantly analogous series of images through the depiction of fire in its raw untamed glory, parallel to that of the Garrano horse itself, a force of nature that cannot be held back indefinitely.”

— Ben Mitchell