The passion behind the pixels

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Designers Tommy Refenes and Edmund McMillen.

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The most one can ask of a documentary is that it might make you see a familiar subject in a whole new, unexpected way.

That's the achievement of Indie Game: The Movie, a handsome, polished feature doc by Winnipeggers Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky. This is a film that forces a reevaluation of video games.

Many big-selling video games -- Call of Duty, Halo -- are the equivalent of big Hollywood movies, big budget franchises that represent the efforts of hundreds of people with their photo-realistic depictions of apocalyptic scenarios.

As the title suggests, Indie Game suggests a parallel realm of independent games, designed by individuals who throw their hearts and souls into the modest works they create.

Pajot and Swirsky focus on four individuals:

-- Jonathan Blow is the successful creator of the hit indie game Braid. Far from looking at the doc as an excuse to do a cinematic victory lap, Blow actually stresses over the game's positive reception, and despairs that even the game's most fervent fans don't seem to understand it.

-- Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes are the creators of Super Meat Boy, a Super Mario-style platform game in which a skinless hero (who leaves blood splatter with every leap) seeks to reunite with his kidnapped mate, a bandage girl, while negotiating a field of fiendish buzz saws.

-- Quebec-based video game designer Phil Fish is the guy most likely to blow a gasket as he prepares the debut of his long-delayed game Fez at a video game expo.

Fish has good reason to be distraught. His game isn't finished. His former partner hasn't signed off on a release. And the online gaming community is growing ever more skeptical that the game will ever be completed.

What is poignant about Fish's story is that his game represents a kind of wish fulfillment. Buffeted by a series of personal disasters, Fish creates a game in which his fezzed hero attempts to reconstruct a shattered world.

McMillen, the designer behind Super Meat Boy, recounts a childhood as an outsider, and a grandmother who seemed to be the only one who understood his early drawings were an expression of his oddball world view, and not necessarily (as one teacher suggested) "a cry for help." Meanwhile, McMillen's partner Refenes grows increasingly depressed as the game's debut on an Xbox platform draws nearer, worried that there will be no payoff for years of putting a normal life on hold.

The assumption might be that this movie is for gamers only. As someone who logs maybe about an hour of video games per year, I disagree. I was fascinated.

The directors dare to suggest that the video game is a serious art form, and the anxieties, terrors, and birthing pains of the game designers are no less grave than the visual artist sweating his first exhibit, or a filmmaker rushing to complete the final cut before a festival premiere.

In documenting these lives, Pajot and Swirsky offer up a film with enough drama, suspense and humour to put a Hollywood blockbuster to shame.

Score one for the true indie.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Movie review

Indie Game: The Movie

Directed by Lisanne Pajot and James Swirsky

Cinematheque

14A

96 minutes

Four stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 6, 2012 D1