Alter Egos
2004 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Laurence Green
Genres: animation, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Animator Chris Landreth befriends former filmmaker Ryan Larkin, who now lives on Montreal streets. Two careers at opposite arcs illuminate addiction and artistic decline.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to celebrate Landreth's technical wizardry, but what's actually subversive here is the refusal to look away—a documentary that weaponizes rotoscope intimacy to make you sit with someone else's wreckage, which is the opposite of the usual redemption arc pablum.
Landreth's formal precision—the marriage of documentary rigor and animated introspection—places this squarely in a lineage of reflexive cinema that interrogates the medium itself; the editing between lived footage and rendered memory becomes the film's argument about artistic witness and responsibility.
The decision to animate interviews over documentary footage rather than simply observe creates a strange new intimacy that feels earned rather than imposed—Landreth's line work becomes the specific technical choice that transforms what could be patronizing portraiture into something genuinely tender and alive.