English Dub Review: The Peasants

Inspired by a Nobel-winning novel first released over 100 years ago, The Peasants is surprisingly a very contemporary tale of an overly religious Polish village up in arms over the fact that a young married woman isn’t thrilled by the fact that she was forced into a marriage with an old man and as such starts carrying on with some of the other local guys. Then, instead of blaming any of the men, including one of whom is married, cast her out of the village like a piece of meat all in the name of our “Lord” Jesus Christ.

Sound familiar? It should, because the animated adaptation of The Peasants works so well in showing what happens when extremes of any kind gain power and then wields that power for evil all in the name of some false deity. Modern-day movements like extreme liberalism and conservatism constantly battle as to who can be more bat-shit crazy than the others by taking up arms over non-worthy causes then point fingers when something goes wrong.

Ironically enough, The Peasants’ animated adaptation was produced by a consortium of animation studios from all-over-the-world led by BreakThru Films with combined efforts from the likes of MOREFILM animation studio in Kyiv, Ukraine of whom literally helped produce the animation of the film whilst experiencing power cuts as a result of Russian bombs hitting nearby areas. Other areas of the world like Poland, Lithuania, and Serbia also contributed to the 200,000 hours it took to provide a turn-of-the-19th/20th-century oil-painted aesthetic inspired by the likes of Józef Chełmoński, Ferdynand Ruszczyc and Leon Wyczółkowski and is quite simply breathtaking in its execution.

The English-dubbed adaptation is star-studded featuring the likes of Eleanor Tomlinson as Jagna, Douglas Booth as Jasio,and Saoirse Ronan as Hanka, a reunion of sorts of the cast that helped bring us the excellent English dubbed adaptation of Loving Vincent. BreakThru Films is showing itself to being one of the most exciting rotoscope production studios in the world and kudos goes to Sony Pictures Releasing for finding this gem, adapting the tale in English, and dipping into a whimsical palette that continues to put Eastern Europe on the map as a reservoir of animation truly distinct and just as stunning as any other movement in the world.