Review of "Loving Vincent"

Vincent van Gogh aroses feelings of intrigue, loss, uneasiness, regret, and tragedy. He started to paint in his late twenties. He was prolific in producing 900 works in 8 years before his death at age 37.   

The first feature film that is painted, Loving Vincent , could be described as an adaptation of Vincent van Gogh's letters, his key paintings, and his artistic style. Life actors rehearsed and performed the scene, which is recorded and combined with various CGI and animation effects, and 80 painters who could reproduce van Gogh's style, re-appropriate some of his portraits and landscape works and produced more than 60,000 paintings for the film which involved more than 100 animators. 

Loving Vincent is structured like a detective story featuring Armand Roulin, a young man from Arles delivering an unopened letter that van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, shortly before his death. In the process, he discovers more and more about the artist, and begins to question if van Gogh was really insane and killed himself, and if he might have wanted to live after all.
  
It was extraordinary of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman to pursue this project of the first oil-painted feature film on Vincent van Gogh.  Indeed, it would have been a different film if the film is made up of only computer-generated animations instead of artists' paintings. Although there is a jerkiness as one painting transitions to the next, I soon got used to it.  The jerkiness comes perhaps from the combination of different positions and density of swirls and dots, shades of colours, giving rise to a stronger sense of motion of the character, light and colour in each transition. The vivid play of colours does not portray cheerfulness but retain the melancholy. The frames of moving pictures feel like extensions of Vincent van Gogh's work, even though Van Gogh was not engaged in animation and film. 

The film provokes in me questions on what cause mental instability and suicidal inclinations, and how we might care for someone so they could move away from the brink of insanity.   Is society too quick and too eager to label a social outcast as mad?