Marcell Jankovics' Son of the White Mare has finally been remastered and released in the United States almost 40 years after its original 1981 release in Hungary. Drawing inspiration from an epic poem by László Arany and various Hungarian folk tales, it's an outstanding piece of psychedelic animation and a compelling if at times baffling piece of mythological storytelling.

The film's visual style is the number one reason to see it. Building upon the likes of past cartoon headtrips like The Yellow Submarine and Fantasia, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to find out its hypnotically geometric yet fluid animation influenced many future animators from The Secret of Kells' Tomm Moore to Samurai Jack's Genndy Tartakovsky. The Jack comparison might very well be the most relevant in terms of knowing if this film is for you. If you enjoyed Tartakovsky's hyper-stylistic experimentation around a Joseph Campbell monomyth structure, Son of the White Mare has a lot for you to relish.

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The story is classic fairy tale material: three heroes save three princesses from dragons. Of course, surrounding these basic archetypes are a bevvy of surreal elements. Some of these aspects of strangeness, like the main protagonist Treeshaker suckling on his equine mother's teet for 14 years, come straight from the source material. Other details put more modern remixes into this old tale, most notably the designs of the various dragons. One "dragon" is sentient tank armed with guns and bombs, while another takes the form of strobing city with Atari-esque pixelated facial expressions.

Is this "adult animation"? It's not explicitly dirty like a Ralph Bakshi film, nor is it going in the heavy psychological direction of a Millennium Actress or Only Yesterday. However, it does come with a "mature audiences" warning, and is the sort of fairy tale that might both scare kids and disturb adults even more. There's nudity and the afformentioned interspecies breastfeeding, but more than anything, the movie's most "adult" sensibility is in its symbolism.

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Simply put, there's a lot of phallic and yonic imagery in this movie. Rather than update the "might makes right" hypermasculinity of its ancient narrative, the film's main approach to dealing with it is mainly just to highlight it and let viewers judge it for what it is: sometimes entertaining, sometimes admirable, but other times rather messed up.

Son of the White Mare is about as deep as you want it to be. If you want to analyze all the layers of symbolism built into the movie, feel free to do so. Alternately, if you just want to let the gorgeous imagery and exciting action wash over you, that's an equally valid way to enjoy the movie to. The lack of a strong emotional connection to any of the characters (except, perhaps, the suffering of the white mare in the first act) holds it back from masterpiece status, but it's still well worth checking out for daring animation fans.

Son of the White Mare is now available for rental through virtual cinemas.

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