This was a fascinating animation.

Even when this movie can't be compared with the masterpieces done by Jiří Trnka, Jan Svankmajer and the Brothers Quay, there are still many beautiful qualities about "Blood Tea and Red String", a film able to combine the most whimsical elements from fairy tales and fables with lots of surreal scenes. It might be a weird film, but this is an example of a good kind of weirdness.

I liked a lot the animation style from this film, which despite being done in the year 2006, has a strong resemblance with many stop-motion shorts done in the seventies and the eighties, something that works very well for the story of "Blood Tea and Red Sting". The plot was very strange, but very interesting to watch at the same time, having a marvelous dream-like quality which evokes the whimsical nature of some fairy tales.

In "Blood Tea and Red String", the grotesque and captivating elements are combined perfectly well, being the perfect example of what can be considered as a true fairy tale for adults, in the same way that "The City of the Lost Children" and "Pan's Labyrinth". Without being a perfect film, it does have the heart in the right place, resulting in a more than worth-watching experience.

8.5/10

BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING is an interesting little amateur animation effort told through the medium of stop motion animation. The central characters are all small mammals and the setting is a woodland backdrop. The crude animation looks like it comes from the 1960s but I found that quite charming being a fan of all things retro. Watching it throughout you're reminded of something like THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, but BLOOD TEA AND RED STRING ups the interest further with the inclusion of some dark and gruesome moments that are linked to paganism. It's offbeat and homemade, but in a good way for once.

One filmmaker working on a feature-length stop-motion animated film with dolls and other materials constructed by hand must be an act of obsession--in this case, one that is reported to have taken 13 years to complete. Reflecting that, "Blood Tea and Red String" concerns dollmakers and puppeteers obsessing over and maneuvering for control of a doll, its animation and of the life borne from it. It even infects their dreams, drug-induced hallucinations and drawings. It's why so much time is spent focused on the sewing and other workings of creation, as well as destruction. That the puppeteers happen to be mice and the dollmakers some rat or wolf-like creatures with crow beaks only puts a fairy-tale layer atop what is essentially a film about its own making. It also helps that hand-crafted, personal touch pays off with some beautiful animation, undiluted by dialogue, but with a pleasant score and effective sound effects.

In the largely live-action bookend scenes, the filmmaker plants the germ of an idea--with an egg that flows downstream for the fairyland creatures. The dollmakers sew this egg into their doll, which the puppeteers steal after the doll-making "Oak Dwellers," as the film's maker, Christiane Cegavske, calls them, refuse to sell the commissioned puppet. After the egg hatches, and the bluebird flies away, one of the mice is inspired to write down the story in pictograph form. Meanwhile, the shaman frog reads the scrolls, the spider spins yarns, and the dollmakers retrieve the hatched idea and send it back down the stream to be unraveled and crystalized by the live-action animator's hand.

As for the fairy-tale layer itself, I was rather flummoxed by what I suspected might be religious symbolism. There's the Moses myth with the floating down stream business, with the animator's hand naturally being the creator, the god, of this film. Then, the Oak Dwellers hang the doll on their tree in a crucifixion pose, a position the mice will also put it in at various times. There is also the doll's stigmata-like hand holes for the mice to employ the Christ doll as a string puppet. Conversely, one may see the female-gendered doll as a Virgin Mary type birthing the blue jay. There's even the business of resurrections with the frog's hearts, plus the forbidden fruit.

On the other hand, I like others' interpretations just as well if not more so. The guy on the DVD's commentary track brings up "The Lord of the Rings" and "Pinocchio," among other things, and he and Cegavske briefly discuss the works of Beatrix Potter. There's the Labyrinth going back to Greek mythology, and elements such as tree dwellers and mystical gardens are fairy-tale staples. Better still is Tedg's IMDb review where he claims the fantasy to be the inverse of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," of the animals dreaming Alice. After all, there is a mad tea party, with the playing of cards and even a raven--once again raising the riddle of how a raven is like a writing desk. There are chattering flowers to go along with the anthropomorphic animals, there's the recurring theme of consuming food and drink--sometimes with psychedelic effects--and, again, there are the hearts, and, clearly, the film's favorite color is red--red string and red-blooded tea, although it's the spider that cuts off the heads. Caterpillars, however, are merely food here.

Cegavske avoids explaining the picture in the DVD commentary for a reason. It's ambiguous and symbolic enough to recall many a fairy tale and original enough to be of its own creation. Moreover, Cegavske claims she doesn't know the whole story of these creatures, as though, as within the film, the dolls were the ones who presented the story--the inanimate doll, via the egg, to the animated dolls that are the dollmakers and puppeteers, to the live-action hand of the creator and, finally, to us.