THE STORY – Elsa is still mourning the loss of her brother, Franck, an astronaut who disappeared during his first mission. She’s soon surprised and shocked to receive a message from him, but her joy is short-lived when she learns of the dark and troubling forces behind his reappearance.
THE CAST – Megan Northam, Catherine Salée & Sam Louwyck
THE TEAM – Jérémy Clapin (Director/Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 88 minutes
On Oscar nomination morning back in January 2020, one of the coolest surprises was the unexpected nomination of “I Lost My Body” as Best Animated Feature. The French film by Jérémy Clapin features a strikingly unusual plot: a severed hand escapes from a lab and becomes obsessed with finding its body again. A far cry from films such as the eventual winner, “Toy Story 4,” “I Lost My Body,” took such big swings in the animated genre that it was easy to predict that Clapin would have more surprises in store for his next film.
And surprise us; he does, with his follow-up film, “Meanwhile on Earth.” Mind you, he’s still taking big swings in storytelling, but how he has chosen to tell this story marks a big surprise. He hasn’t abandoned animation entirely but instead opted to tell his sci-fi genre mashup largely in live-action with actors and a script. While the new approach offers new challenges for the filmmaker, the good news is that his adventurous spirit hasn’t dimmed one iota.
“Meanwhile on Earth” centers on retirement home worker Elsa (Megan Northam in a promising screen debut), who, after three years, is still grieving the loss of her beloved brother Franck, an astronaut lost on an international space mission. Her only moments of solace come with her regular visits to a memorial statue of Franck erected in her small French town. One night, however, her world is shaken when she begins to hear strange voices, including that of Franck, who explains that there’s a way Elsa can help bring him back home.
So far, so good. Clapin effectively sets a creepy mood rife with foreboding, helped in no small way by several retro animated sequences that suggest that the stakes will soon be upped. That happens one morning when Elsa awakens to find a sticky ear pod mysteriously lodged near her eardrum through which a soothing female voice speaks to her. The voice tells Elsa that she is one of five aliens who are holding Franck hostage, but they will return Franck to her alive if she can provide them with living bodies that the aliens can use as vessels to walk among us.
After “I Lost My Body,” we have come to expect major narrative risk-taking by Clapin — if he could make a traveling severed hand in search of his body plausible, what can’t he make us believe? But fair or not, there’s a difference between what giant leaps of logic audiences will allow in animation and what they can in live action. Here, Elsa is given a family, friends, and a job where she cares for senior citizens. Does she really want to see her brother so badly that she is willing to sacrifice the lives of five people just to achieve that goal? Maybe, but if she does, we have to have that narrative set up properly. Sure, Elsa shows us that she has a few qualms about it and tries to justify it by sacrificing jerks, the sick, and the elderly. Without a proper justification, however, it does lessen an audience’s desire to sympathize with Elsa and her grief, on which the entire film depends.
Similarly, much of Act 2 gets bogged down in establishing the details of the body switch procedure. (These aliens can be very demanding.) It must be done in a certain remote forest on the site of a newly chopped tree and concluded by a certain time, or else the portal through which aliens can travel will close. Ticking clock and all, the film gets so convoluted in laying out the details that our most important narrative through-line — Elsa’s lingering grief — while still there, is decidedly placed on the back burner.
Happily, Clapin gets us back on track in Act 3, presenting Elsa with a major moral quandary (which she passes) and, at last, establishing the idea that all that has come before is the necessary journey that Elsa needs to achieve closure on Franck’s death and to move on with her own life. The tone that Clapin sets here is key to making those story threads come together. While the plot may reference “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” its mood is much more “Under the Skin,” and Robrecht Heyvaert’s evocative cinematography captures that tone to perfection. In addition, Dan Levy, who created a dreamy score for “I Lost My Body,” has created similarly melodious music that captures and complements the atmosphere that Clapin has worked so hard to achieve.
Despite the screenplay turbulence that threatened to derail “Meanwhile on Earth” in Act 2, Clapin managed to land the plane with style. Any filmmaker who can take big swings and still create a satisfying conclusion is a director to watch. We watch with great anticipation for the next story that Jérémy Clapin feels inspired to tell, no matter what medium he chooses to tell it.
