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COPPELIA – Maurizio Malagnini
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
A wonderful combination of live action ballet, animation, science fiction, and sweeping orchestral music, Coppelia is a film quite unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s a contemporary updating of the 1870 stage ballet by Léo Delibes, which was itself based on a story by the famed German fantasy author Ernst Hoffmann, whose work also inspired Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann and Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, among others. The film follows the story of Swan and Franz, two young lovers who live in a pretty European town. One day a sinister scientist and inventor named Doctor Coppelius comes to town; he promises the townspeople that he can make them handsome, beautiful, and strong through cosmetic surgery, and entices them to come to his laboratory. However, what the townspeople don’t realize is that the Doctor is actually on a personal quest to build the perfect “robot woman,” and he is using the ‘essence’ of the townspeople to bring his robot creation, named Coppelia, to life, while simultaneously turning the townspeople into mindless zombies who do nothing except stare at their own reflection. When the Doctor realizes that the love Franz has for Swan is the missing ingredient he needs to fully bring Coppelia to life, he kidnaps him – motivating Swan and their friends to break into the lab, rescue Franz, stop the Doctor, and save the town. Read more…
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