Watch The Nightingale's Voice For Free

Admirable film.

A Masterpiece!

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"La voix du rossignol" or "Voice of the Nightingale" is a 13-minute short film from 1925, so this one is already over 90 years old. The writer and director is Wladyslaw Starewicz, but despite his Luthuanian origins, this is a French production as the title already tells us. This is the story of the relationship between a nightingale and a little girl and the writing here is the biggest strength I think. It does not only make sense, but makes an impact on the emotional side and also as a dramatic movie. Besides that, Starewicz proved again that he was among the best European, maybe world-wide, animators of his time and it's intriguing to see how different this is from the American approach at animation in the 1920s. This is a contender for my favorite work from Starewicz and if you love animation, you should definitely check it out, maybe the colored version too.

From the 1910s until the late 1950s, Wladyslaw Starewicz made a bunch of cute little stop-motion films. Aside from being one of the early pioneers in the craft, he had a fanciful knack of looking at common objects like toys and dead bugs and imagining them in their own little world. Animating them, he made some amazingly cool films that are still very, very watchable today."La Voix du Rossignol" is a bit different from the other Starewicz films in that it is more like a fairy tale or a Just-So story. And, interestingly, the entire film is hand-colored--which must have taken a VERY long time to do.The story begins with a nightingale accidentally breaking a child's doll and falling into a trap. The girl decides to keep the bird as her pet. And, each night, the bird causes the girl to have some amazingly fanciful dreams--such as one involving bugs and little fairies. In addition, the bird induces a dream about the life of this nightingale--and learns that it's sad because it lost its partner. The child is touched to see such strong feelings in a bird and decides to let it go. The bird, in thanks, gives the child the ability to sing beautifully during the day--and the bird will retain it at night. And, supposedly, that is why these birds only sing at night.This is a very sweet tale and is very well done. Engaging and exceptionally well done for a silent short. Well worth seeing even if the story is a tad confusing from time to time (it could have used better intertitle cards).

Wladyslaw Starewicz was a true pioneer of puppet animation, an artist who devised new "pixilation" techniques as early as 1910 and was still producing fascinating movies right through the 1950s. At the time of his death in 1965 he was hard at work on yet another new film, one which, sadly, remained unfinished. Starewicz was unafraid to explore the darker corners of his imagination, and was therefore an influential trail-blazer for such latter-day filmmakers as Jan Svankmajer, the Brothers Quay, and Tim Burton. Starewicz' films usually feature animals whose behavior serves as a satirical comment on human foibles, and while some children might get a kick out of his macabre sense of humor I believe the man's work is best appreciated by adults.This film, known as "The Voice of the Nightingale" in its English language version, represents a pleasant departure for Starewicz, with a lighter and gentler story that makes it one of his more accessible works for general audiences. This is a simple tale of a little girl who traps a nightingale in a cage and intends to keep it as a plaything. While the girl is asleep the nightingale enters her dreams with his song, and narrates a legend set in the Kingdom of the Flowers. (This scene, featuring fairies and sprites interacting with grasshoppers, dragonflies, etc., may remind some viewers of the "Nutcracker" sequence in Disney's Fantasia.) But then the nightingale sings of his own sad plight, the tale of how he met his lady love, their courtship and the birth of their chick, and how his spouse, out hunting for food one day, narrowly missed being hit by an arrow fired by a boy. Since then, the nightingale has been searching for his spouse, and it was while he was searching for her that he was trapped in the girl's cage, leaving their fledgling alone in the nest and unable to fend for itself. Waking in tears, the girl sets the nightingale free with a new understanding of humans' proper relationship with the animal world.The story is simple but the exquisite technique Starewicz brings to bear on this material lifts it out of the ordinary. The film combines live action footage of the girl and her surroundings with animated puppets representing the birds, animals and the fairy denizens of the Kingdom of Flowers. All of this footage has been hand-tinted, and the title cards have also been specially decorated and colored. Starewicz expresses his darker side only once, when the newly captured nightingale frightens the little girl -- and the audience! -- by briefly transforming himself into an angry rat. Otherwise, "The Voice of the Nightingale" is a gently moving little fable, sweet but not cloying in tone. Like Starewicz himself, this film deserves to be better known.

What can I really say? I don't want to waste time talking about the technical aspects because this movie is simply pure joy. Too beautiful to remain obscure. Hey film festival guys: get this movie out there!