Maybe Elephants by Torill Kove (2024): Film Review

‘Maybe Elephants’ revisits certain autobiographical features present in Torill Kove’s earlier film ‘Me and My Moulton’ (2014). Once again we observe rituals and transforming moments in the life of one perfectly average and at the same time thoroughly peculiar, Norwegian family. Both films exemplify a coming-of-age story. ‘Me and My Moulton’ centers on the characters of three sisters maturing to realize the meaning of individuality through a case study of their parents, who never closely conform to societal ideals of parenthood. In ‘Maybe Elephants’ the same family sets off to Kenya in the 1970s and while the sisters smell the teen spirit, their parents’ non-conformism is again a miss-match with the times and space. However, it is the character of a mother that comes to the forefront. Strong, intelligent, and creative, it is she who first plants the seed of an idea of a life-changing journey. It is also she who struggles with depression, inevitably distancing herself from her loved ones, even at the risk of losing them.

Kove is neither judgmental nor resentful, she ironically reports from memories and feelings experienced in the past. Irony is a key to unlock her earlier works such as ‘My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts’ (1999) and the Oscar-winning ‘The Danish Poet’ (2006) that touch upon the subject of collective memory, or as some would have it, the strategies of collective suppression. Norwegian history of culture, politics, and World War II interweaves with the family narratives of lineage, romance, and identity. Visual investigations into how an experience mutates into memory and fiction seem to interest Torill Kove the most.

Watch the 'Maybe Elephants' trailer:

One of the strongest moments of ‘Maybe Elephants’ presents the mother who chases away a herd of elephants from the camping site but with the passing of the time, the sisters’ memories of this event significantly vary. It is one of these excellent and thought-provoking coincidences in arts that in Margaret Atwood’s novel ‘Surfacing’ (1972), which on its own focuses on disintegrating family dynamics, a reader finds a scene that perfectly correlates with Kove’s work; a scene full of detailed recollections, or – perhaps – reimaginations: My mother stood up and walked towards the bear; it hesitated and grunted. She yelled a word at it that sounded like “Scat!” and waved her arms, and it turned around and thudded off into the forest. That was the picture I kept, my mother seen from the back, arms upraised as though she was flying, and the bear terrified. When she told the story later she said she’d been scared to death but I couldn’t
believe that, she had been so positive, assured, as if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and word.

contributed by: Olga Bobrowska

'Maybe Elephants' screened at the June Annecy Festival and will screen at the Ottawa International Animation Festival (25-29 September 2024).

Credits:
'Maybe Elephants', 2D computer animation, 2024 (17', Norway, Canada)
Directed by: Torill Kove | Production: Mikrofilm AS, Lise Fearnley, Tonje Skar Reiersen, National Film Board of Canada, Maral Mohammadian | Script: Torill Kove | Animation: Jo Meuris, Torill Kove, Louis Bodart, Parissa Mohit, Eva Cvijanović, Lori Malepart-Traversy, Magnhild Winsens | Music: Luigi Allemano | Sound: Håkon Lammetun | Editing: Alison Burns | Voice: Torill KOVE | Compositing: Cathinka Tanberg, Alexandre Roy, James Martin | Creator: Torill Kove | Artistic direction: Magnhild Winsens