Hollywood Studios have done their best to make feature animation cute and not cutting edge. Look at the last batch of theatrical releases and you see how they are aimed to not get too deep for the audience. Even when Pixar wants a teenage girl to understand what’s going on inside them, they reduce things down to cute little characters that can easily be marketed to children in the toy section of Target. Marketing overrules storytelling in big budget animation since they have to move dolls, theme park rides and Happy Meal toys. The heart of the movie gets compromised by the beancounters. My Love Affair With Marriage follows the life of Zelma from right before conception to nearly 30 with the sense that her outer and inner life won’t be available in the gift shop. There are even songs to make us feel the emotions going through Zelma. Most importantly My Love Affair With Marriage will make you reflect on your own affairs.
Zelma comes home and we discover how her parents met in a rural farming village on Sakhalin Island in the Soviet Union just above Northern Japan. A scientific narrator in the form of a Neuron explains how conception occurred inside her mother. We learn how the how Zelma came together genetically while the girl races around the rather hog farming community. A “Greek Chorus” sings a song that reminds us that she can’t be a fully formed woman until she marries a man and has true love in her life. Her life gets uprooted as they moved to the opposite side of the USSR to Latvia. Things get more confused for her when puberty hits. She comes to term with femininity and appealing to boys. There’s also the subplot about how she needs to fall in love with a man in order to have him provide and make her happy. Her life must be defined by a man. She loses her virginity to an older artist (Avatar‘s Stephen Lang). She gets into not feeling the magic of a relationship while we learn of the biochemistry in the brain that creates the euphoria of love. We see how her career in art leads to relationships that turn into marriages.
My Love Affair With Marriage is a brilliant use of animation to tell the story of a character understanding their life and relationships with others. There are songs in the film that guide Zelma through these obstacles that keep changing as she matures. We get a crash course of what life was like in the final years of the Soviet Union and how she dealt with culture shock when she was able to visit the Western nations. Writer/director Signe Baumane does so much on the screen so that it’s enlightening and entertaining. Having dealt with marriages over the year, there’s a lot of truth on the screen. Not to give away the ending, but when a character suggests that they can fix a relationship by having a baby; Baumane gets to the root of that bad idea. The animation technique she uses by having 2-D characters with backgrounds that are physical models makes the film visually alluring. The voice talent is great including Dagmara Dominczyk (Running With Scissors) playing Zelma across all those years. Cameron Monaghan (Shameless) really sounds like a jerk as her first husband. Matthew Modine (Stranger Things) is her Swedish second husband. The mix of heart and brain science make this rather unique as far as a “love story” goes. What romance movie talks about the shared microbial cloud when tongue kissing on a date? And yet it only increases the sense of what goes on during the early day a relationship evolves. This is a proper adult animation adventure that gets inside the female character. My Love Affair With Marriage provides an introduction into the chemistry of why love happens and also fall apart.
The Video is 1.85: anamorphic. The 1080p transfer brings out the details in both the animation and the sets. The Audio is DTS 5.1 Surround and LPCM 2.0 Stereo. The subtitles are in English, Spanish, French and Latvian.
Trailer (2:04) sets up the film being about a girl becoming a woman.
Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series Presents Director Signe Baumane (57:45) took place in Detroit in 2022. She explains how even though she had no money, she was able to make the film happen over the course of 7 years. She talks about how her first film Rocks In Pocket cost $300,000. She thought she could make her second for about the same price. She gets into how they funds were raised including a Kickstarter to hire SAG voice actors including Stephen Lang and Matthew Modine. They cut the soundtrack with voice and songs before they started the animation. They set up a studio in Brooklyn. She shows off the construction of the mini-sets and locations that were built with scraps from renovations in buildings near the studio. She shows off the shorty pencils she ended up with at the end of the initial animation. She had the finished animation done in Latvia.
MVD Visual presents My Love Affair With Marriage. Directed by Signe Baumane. Screenplay by Signe Baumane. Starring the Voices of Dagmara Dominczyk, Michele Pawk, Trio Limonāde, Cameron Monaghan, Matthew Modine and Stephen Lang. Running Time: 108 minutes. Rating: Not Rated. Release Date: September 10, 2024.
