“The Face” is not only the story of the value of honesty, and responsibility, but it’s also the celebration of the lost art of story-telling. Every day the neighborhood children flock to the door of an old man who appears with a mask and tells them an utterly off-beat fairy tale. This man is dying, and now seeks to give away all of his belongings, including his sacred Face mask which “can look on for miles and miles”. “The Face” has an insatiable hunger for imagination and wonder exploring storytelling, and its ability to still captivate children if told with the right exuberance and offbeat imagination.
The plot then thickens when the storyteller gives the children a seed and tells them that the first to grow a plant from that seed will prove to him that they can own the mask, and then the plot twist arrives. Iain McCraig, an art designer for ILM directs this beautiful story with the same childhood innocence we once saw in the original “Star Wars” films and implants a true sense of simplistic surrealism within the storyteller’s tales which feature a biker doctor, and a very large and odd fish that becomes his ally; not to mention he speaks of the dreaded IRS Dragon. The ending hints at a possible sequel, but truly it’s just showing what storytellers do. They take one great tale and pass it on to the next generation.
