If you like van Gogh's art, you'll probably love 'Loving Vincent'

Attention, fans of Vincent van Gogh (all zillion of you): The new film Loving Vincent will intrigue you, inspire you, sadden you. More to the point, it will make you gasp, "Whoa, how did they do that?" 

Part art exhibit, part detective story, Loving Vincent (now showing in New York and Los Angeles, expanding to additional cities through November) is an unprecedented filmmaking wonder, made from a series of van Gogh-style paintings — a staggering 65,000 of them — come to life through 21st-century movie animation.

One of the joys of contemplating a van Gogh painting is to imagine that it's actually moving, that you can see the diner quaffing wine on the cafe terrace under an inky night sky, follow the balls rolling around on the green felt of a billiard table, watch the black crows lifting off the golden swirling wheatfield.  

Husband-and-wife filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, plus more than 100 animators, went beyond imagining and actually did it.

The movie is made entirely of oil paintings, derived from the artist’s original works (such as The Starry Night and Cafe Terrace at Night), or inspired by his signature kinetic style, using a technique the filmmakers call "painting animation."

When the duo posted early footage in 2016 to recruit artists, it went viral: The clip garnered more than 200 million views (and more than 5,000 applications from painters wanting to join the project).

"We think of (van Gogh) as a rock star," says Welchman, 42, calling from Paris, where the filmmakers communed with the paintings in the van Gogh room of the Musée d'Orsay. "When you stand in front of his canvases, it's amazing how much energy they have and how vibrant they are."

The Dutch artist is the perfect subject not only because of the quality of his art but also because of the mystery and drama of his intriguing and contradictory life story. 

"He was so prolific, it's possible to imagine his world (from his art), to bring (the people he painted) to life to talk about him," Welchman says. "We found they said different things about him, and we could get a dramatic play out of that."

Vincent's story is familiar even to non-art lovers: Pitiable, alienated painter, possibly bipolar or epileptic or both, annoyingly argumentative, widely despised. He cut off his earlobe, sold just one painting in his lifetime, and was dead at 37. Now he's among the top-selling artists of all time, whose emotion-drenched images are the familiar wallpaper of contemporary culture.

But did Vincent die a suicide, as the official story goes, or did someone kill him, as recent scholarship has proposed? This theory is explored in Loving Vincent, which takes place in 1891, a year after his death, and involves the real people who populated Vincent's paintings.

Cynical Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth) is sent to Paris by his father, postman Joseph Roulin (Chris O’Dowd), to deliver a letter from Vincent to Theo, the brother who supported him emotionally and financially. But Theo has died, too, just six months after Vincent.

Roulin becomes an amateur detective investigating Vincent's death in Auvers-sur-Oise, just north of Paris. What really happened, he asks the people who knew the artist in his final months: the innkeeper’s daughter, Adeline Ravoux (Eleanor Tomlinson); Dr. Gachet, who treated him (Jerome Flynn); the doctor's housekeeper, Louise Chevalier (Helen McCrory), who disliked him; and the doctor's daughter who may have loved him, Marguerite Gachet (Saoirse Ronan).

Kobiela, 38, a Polish artist-turned-filmmaker, got the idea from reading van Gogh's moving letters and seeing the long lines for van Gogh museum exhibits, says Welchman, a British producer.

The film was shot over four weeks with the actors working on sets designed to look like van Gogh paintings or against green screens. After that live-action footage was edited, the artists painted each frame in the style of van Gogh.

There are 850 shots in the 94-minute movie, Welchman says, and each shot had at least one painting. Longer shots required multiple paintings, each repainted multiple times, based on the action and changes in facial expressions and backgrounds.

Some shots took weeks or months to paint, "but the results are worth that," Welchman says. "The opening of the film is a gigantic tracking shot down from the stars, which took three of our best painters a combined 18 months to animate, all inspired by The Starry Night."

It's significant that the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the authority on all things van Gogh, has endorsed Loving Vincent, and that art museums in the U.S. are planning to show it.  

The film has earned a 79% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Some reviews have been rhapsodic, with adjectives like "stunning," and "hypnotic," although The Guardian called it "corny and misleading" and a "tasteless insult to his paintings."

But maybe one term will suffice: Jaw-dropping.