Woodenhead

Woodenhead (2003)

A Grimm Musical Fairytale

An innocent rubbish tip assistant, Gert, is given the task of escorting a beautiful mute "princess", Plum, on a perilous journey to meet her prospective husband. Their journey is fraught with danger, challenges, romance and discovery. In surreal action, they encounter a menagerie of characters and animals in far-flung corners of New Zealand.

Date of release
2003-07-18
TMDB
6.1 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 30m
Genres
Fantasy, Music
Director
Florian Habicht

Casting

Interesting facts

Woodenhead is a 2003 New Zealand film directed by Florian Habicht.

Trivia

Habicht states on the DVD that the film was inspired by a dream in which two angels appearing as Milli Vanilli fly into a stadium and tell him that the band lip-synched their music, apparently unaware that this is common knowledge. They then tell him to make a film where the sound is recorded before the visuals.

While it would have been hard to resist such a disarming directive, Habicht realised there were also some definite advantages in making a low-budget film in this way. It enabled him to focus separately on the visual and aural components of the film, allowing him, for example, to cast people who had the look he wanted but who weren't necessarily trained as actors.

Furthermore, this style of filmmaking suited the filmmaker's intuitive style perfectly, giving the film a surreal, otherworldly feel. As well as being literally out of synch, he also accentuated the oddness by mismatching the soundtrack with what you see – often you'll find sweet and innocent dialogue accompanying grotesque and sometimes violent visuals or a South Island kea screeching on a North Auckland road.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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