Blood Tea and Red String by Christiane Cegavske

Blood Tea and Red String
Written and Directed by Christiane Cegavske
2006
86 minutes
Cinema Epoch

It took Christiane Cegavske 13 years to create, animate, edit, and complete her feature length animated film Blood Tea and Red String. Painstakingly animating each sequence by hand, by herself, Cegavske's dedication to her film is as impressive as the final result itself. Set in a dark, twisted fairy tale world, Blood Tea and Red String is a sad and disturbing dreamscape of ugliness, fear and extreme beauty that causes uneasiness and pain. It also brings back the fears we all had as children; the knowledge that death, obsession, and decay lurked inside all the fairy tales we knew and loved. Blood Tea and Red String is a groundbreaking example of surrealism in modern fairy tales and a testament to the dedication of the driven female visionary, embodied by Cegavske...

Red-eyed white mice dressed in velvet and lace commission a doll based on the portrait of a beautiful young woman. The Creatures who Dwell Under The Oak (some strange cross between foxes, birds, and weasels) accept the mice's gold and create a doll out of red string and cloth so beautiful that they cannot bear to part with her when the mice come to collect her. They place daisies in her eyes and play music for her, reveling in her beauty. The jealous mice devise a plan to steal her away in the middle of the night, and when the Creatures awake, they are horrified to find her gone. Three of the four Creatures set off after the mice to get their doll back, while one stays behind to water the daisies.

The bizarre landscape they encounter is nothing short of spectacular. First lured astray by a shifting maze, and then tempted by the glowing yellow fruit of the trees found within the maze's garden, the Creatures are easily led astray. They eat the beautiful yellow fruit, and it sends them spinning into a trip of hallucinations and inebriety. The welcoming large green leaves of the pretty plants around them unfurl to reveal appealing beds, and the Creatures unwittingly lay down to rest. The plants, the fruit, the garden, and the beautiful waterfalls are all a trap for the innocent Creatures. The leaves slowly curl around them, tightening their death grip until the carnivorous plants will digest the Creatures. A wizard, in the guise of a robed frog, stumbles on the Creatures and saves them. Leaving in their place a disembodied heart, the wizard keeps the plants satiated while pulling the unconscious, drugged bodies of the Creatures out of their grasp.

Meanwhile, the mice play cards and drink blood tea, a thick, red substance that dribbles down their white faces and taints everything t touches with the color of blood. They clutch the doll close to them, giving her drinks of the tea, playing hands of cards for her, and slowly falling into debauchery and drunkenness. It's not long before fighting breaks out among the mice, and they start to have different opinions about what should be the fate of the doll. In the care of the mice, the doll has fallen into disrepair. Her stitches are coming apart, and her face is covered with blood tea.

The Creatures near the abode of the mice, and encounter a spider, spinning a web, with the face of a woman. She has killed dozens of birds, which hang from her red webbing, dying or dead of her venom. She carefully wraps them like packages and stores them for future meals.

It's then that there is a startling climax. The doll herself undergoes a grotesque transformation that leaves the mice with only an empty husk, a ruined shell of what she used to be. The Creatures accept the loss of the doll with more grace, and head back to their home to return to the daisies and their music.

While the story sounds tame as I tell it, some of the visuals are truly disgusting. The image of the doll being opened up and sewn back together various times with red string is one that haunts the film. The skull-headed raven in the abode of the mice, the blood tea as it gushes like a wound from the teapot, and the fanatical way the mice seize the doll to their bodies. It's a scary film. With the haunting quality of adult fairy tales like The Last Unicorn, Alice in Wonderland, and A Wolf at the Door, it's an example of a modern interpretation of Victorian children's horror. The detail and the puppets maintain a definitive stylistic quality throughout, and the musical score is creepy to the point of being maniacal. Painstakingly animated scenes seem to go on interminably, longer than they ever needed to, and combined with the music the ears, eyes, and nerves of the viewer are rubbed raw.

The intensity of the story and the characters lends a mythological quality to the film that most other fairy tales don't have. The obscure 'lessons' that the characters learn are hard to interpret, and even harder to apply to modern life. There's a distinct emphasis on drug use, intoxication, and obsessive misguided love, however, that's difficult to miss.