Review: Lava (Ayar Blasco, 2019)

Fig. 1 - Lava (Ayar Blasco, 2019).

When I heard Lava’s premise, I was intrigued. Giant alien cats launching an attack on Earth? You’ve got my attention! (To be honest, anything that features cats will at least get a glance from me.) Though I was lured in by the promise of extraterrestrial felines and madcap entertainment, I was disappointed to find Lava poorly paced, dubiously constructed, and falling short of its loftier thematic goals.

Ayar Blasco’s Lava debuted in 2019 at Argentina’s Mar del Plata Film Festival and is receiving a March 2021 re-release for English-speaking audiences through Rock Salt Releasing (Fig. 1). The film is Blasco’s second animated feature after El Sol (2009); he co-wrote Lava’s script with Nicolás Britos and Salvador Sanz. Lava follows lonely tattoo artist Débora as she navigates the invasion of Earth by the Lacrimal Culture, an alien race made up of kaiju-sized witches, people-swallowing snakes, and menacing, but somehow adorable, giant cats. The invading Lacrimals hypnotize humanity using subliminal messages spread through screens and radio waves, ultimately leaving the masses helpless and open to subjugation. Using the mysterious fanzine “Lava” as a guide, Débora and her friends (Nadia, Lázaro, and Samuel) attempt to outwit and outrun the Lacrimal Culture to survive their hostile takeover of the globe.

Fig. 2 - Lava.

Fig. 3 - Lava’s changing art style.

Media coverage of Lava’s US releases notes that Blasco, Britos, and Sanz are critiquing “screen culture.” Taking this a step further, the film is also deeply concerned with the production and dissemination of art. For instance, an early joke revolves around torrenting the in-world Game of Thrones parody “Gain of Clones” and opening the files on VLC player — identifiable by the app’s well-known orange traffic cone logo — on a laptop hooked up to a television. For those who remember the Napster years and the age of The Pirate Bay, the set-up is immediately identifiable. What’s more, the subliminal messages are coded in tattoo-style art, not empty static or the colored bars of the emergency broadcast system, and the manual for defeating the invaders is housed in a comic, thereby pitting one form of image-focused media against another. As the icing on the cake, the word “lacrimal” points to both a bone in the eye socket and an adjective related to tears. Earth is literally invaded by The Eye Culture. You can’t get more on the nose than that.

While the making and sharing of art is essential to the narrative as a whole, the most attention-grabbing use of art is intratextual. Lava employs dramatic art-shifts in the film’s hour-and-seven-minute runtime to signal shifts in narrative. Examples of this include: when the Client recounts the tale of Jörmungandr, the mythological Norse world snake, in Débora’s dream; in the sequences depicting the inside of the “Lava” fanzine; and when Débora sees (what I assume was supposed to be) Yggdrasill, the Norse world tree (Figs. 2 and 3). These changes in art style create stark visual contrasts between the main set pieces and moments of heightened fantasy. In the “world snake” sequence, the animators use a significantly more detailed, sepia-toned style reminiscent of old-world maps (Fig. 4) or the illustrations of John Tenniel (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4 - "Map sampler" (Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum).

Fig. 5 - "The Mock Turtle by John Tenniel, produced for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland".

Animators rely on the (pop) cultural linages of these styles through the visual shift, creating an elevated air of seriousness while amplifying audiences’ resonance with and reaction to the myth’s retelling. Lava’s metatextuality is indeed interesting and, for what it’s worth, the film is an ambitious undertaking that attempts to question the nature of animation, and cinema more broadly. Unfortunately, Lava doesn’t quite reach the heights it was grasping for. The film really wants you to know it’s a “cartoon for adults,” leaning into gratuitous animated violence, slapdash conversations about sex and love, and an Adult Swim-esque screwball nature. Even the main animation style feels like a cleaner version of Squidbillies (2005- ) meets Flash animation classic “The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny” (2005). But, between the splattering of animated bodies and the odd attention paid to the jiggle-physics of Débora’s breasts, the film forgets to make us care. Experimental storytelling and non sequiturs can make for provocative cinema, but Lava’s more clever, insightful moments are lost in the disjointed narrative, incoherent emotional through lines, and inconsistent character motivations. While watching, I legitimately forgot that Lázaro was swallowed by a snake. Later, I felt nothing but confusion watching Nadia and Débora discuss being attracted to each other. The setup for the confession is a one-off comment in a scene approximately 10 minutes prior and the character China (who we will come back to) randomly declaring that Nadia and Débora have “been flirting this entire time.” China’s motivation is unclear, since we don’t get to know her as a character, and if this flirting were really the case, it wouldn’t need to be highlighted so obviously and emotionlessly. Lava disrupts the action to highlight this scene, only for the film to never acknowledge it again. Even though Samuel breaks the fourth wall to alert audiences that “this is the adult part…that’s what makes this movie so special”, Nadia is back to pining for Lázaro before the sequence even ends. At best, these rhetorical moves were ineffective editorial decisions and, at worst, deliberate queer bating to seem “edgy” and “grown”.

It’s important to note that the US direct-to-VOD release will include both the original film audio and the English dubbed track. The dub features actress Janeane Garofalo as Débora. Garofalo works well as the tattoo artist under siege, handling the emotional whiplash demanded by the script deftly. However, it would have been useful to compare the two versions, to see how translations differ between the script and how voice acting choices differed across languages. I am, admittedly, more of a “Subs over Dubs” person, but I found many of the English voice acting choices in the dub questionable. Dialogue was stilted and poorly timed, while voices of the supporting cast were often grating.

Fig. 6 - Still from Lava.

One of, if not the most, troubling aspect of the film was the side-character China, a racist caricature of Chinese women (Fig. 6). I’m sure my neighbors heard me loudly groan when she appeared on the screen with blunt pigtails, slanted lines for eyes, and two oversized, protruding front teeth. To make matters worse, she is frequently shown using martial arts and bouncing about the scenery (she also, somehow, was the only character who seemed to have logical motivation, so make of that what you will). The fact this offensive, and frankly lazy, visual stereotyping made it into a 2019 film is disappointing, if not surprising. In a year where hate crimes against Asian-Americans have increased dramatically across the US and in various parts of the world, it feels in even poorer taste.

I really wanted to like Lava. But from the chaotic plot to the bigoted character design, it’s not a film I’d ever want to watch again.

At least the cats were great.

Lava can be found on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, Vimeo, and other platforms on March 15, 2021.

For further information on anti-Asian violence and discrimination, including ways to be positively involved, please visit sites like https://anti-asianviolenceresources.carrd.co/ and https://stopaapihate.org/.

**Article published: March 19, 2021**

Biography

Ayanni C. H. Cooper is an English PhD Candidate at the University of Florida, specializing in comic and animation studies. Her research interests include monster theory; feminist critique; gender & sexuality; science fiction & fantasy; representations of Blackness in speculative fiction; and anime & manga studies. Her dissertation project is tentatively titled “‘We Live in a Time of [Sexy] Monsters’: Desire and the Monstrous in Contemporary Visual Media.” (To put it simply, she’s curious why so many folks are attracted to monsters. It’s a very important research question.) Ayanni also co-hosts the podcast Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the “sex-stuff” in media matters. When not dissertating, she enjoys playing Destinywith her family (#TitanMain), finding new cartoons to watch/comics to read, and making friends with the neighborhood cats.

You can find Ayanni on twitter (@AyanniDoesStuff), Instagram (@AyanniDoesThings), and on her website, Ayanni.com.