Every culture has its creation myths, from the Mayan “Popol Vuh” to the two different accounts in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis. Across all latitudes, they have in common a desire to understand our presence on this plane of existence and to understand ourselves in the context of a larger plan written by a higher power. In highly stylized animation, the Hungarian feature film “Four Souls of Coyote” by director Áron Gauder tells a different version of events, focusing on the creation of Turtle Island (present-day North America) and the creatures that lived there, including humans. The story is shared by several indigenous peoples in the northeast of this continent.
The frame story is set in the present day. When an unscrupulous oil company tries to start a pipeline project without considering environmental concerns, a group of protesters, Native Americans and others try to prevent the groundbreaking. One of them, an elderly aboriginal man, tells how ages ago an ancient creator (voice: Lorne Cardinal, a Canadian aboriginal man) created the world based on dreams that were the product of the “great, mysterious” spirit. Out of nowhere, water appears and then a duck, which hands the ancient creator the material from which he forms the land and then the animals. In the sequence, the character manipulates the frame and its components with unexpected playfulness.
The Old Man Creator’s angular character design makes the grooves on his face look like they were etched into a wood carving, adding to the earthy feel of the animation. The other characters, too, have an elemental, hand-crafted look that sets the film apart from other European animated works and visually aligns it with its themes of connection to and respect for nature. Gauder and his team combined hand-drawn characters and painted backgrounds with computer-generated elements to translate the mythology into captivating imagery. Midway through the film, the Old Man Creator, in a fit of rage, creates a light depicted as a flying, talking snake designed to look like a pencil sketch. This minor character’s appearance is intentionally even more rudimentary, expressing the instinctive quality of our worst, most primitive impulses.
In another dream, the old creator sees four spiteful coyotes, the embodiment of disobedience and defiance. He combines them into a single being, the Coyote (Diontae Black in a humorously evil voice), and grants the trickster four lives before banishing him. Out of hunger, Coyote creates Man (Danny Kramer) and Woman (Stephanie Novak) from the same material the old sage fashioned everything else from. But the old man prevents him from eating and makes him overseer of their well, since they are weaker than the other creatures in the land. Gauder had used the character of the Coyote in previous animated shorts. Here, his desire to kill (to eat meat) and his vengeful heart (which eventually gives birth to British colonialism) drive the fable. His insatiable appetite, which compels him to scheme, recalls Chuck Jones’ amusingly inept character Wile E. Coyote.
Coyote’s arrogance, his eventual humiliation, and finally his righteous sacrifice – a story arc that places the character somewhere on the scale between good and evil – are reminders that, in the grand scheme of things, man’s role is no more important than that of other living creatures in the predetermined cycle of life. There is fundamental wisdom in thinking of Coyote not as a villain but as a chaotic agent of change.
In the middle of the tale, the old creator holds a gathering where animals, large and small, initially unable to reproduce but now jealous of both male and female, crave companionship within their own species. The harmonious relationship represents an idealized vision of how reality should work. Particularly noteworthy are the soulful scores and songs by Native American music groups Ulali, Northern Cree and artist Joanne Shenandoah. The multitude of voices raised together with fervor lends the project a spiritual dignity.
The film’s origins are admittedly surprising: a Hungarian production with no obvious connection to the original. While a Hungarian-dubbed version was nominated for the Oscars for Best International Feature Film last year, an English-dubbed version is currently playing in the US. Gauder has explained that the inspiration came in part from Hungarian singer Tamás Cseh, who was interested in Native American folk tales, translated them into Hungarian and popularized them in the European country. They were published with illustrations by his son.
With the help of Native American advisers, Gauder and co-writer Géza Bereményi found a middle ground between seriousness and amusement, the latter coming primarily from the Coyote’s thwarted antics. Although Four Souls of Coyote suffers from the sheer ambition of how much it tries to cover, while the present part is too elegantly packaged to be enjoyable, its handcrafted aesthetic and still-relevant ancestral teachings make for an illuminating experience.
