Strange Frame: Love & Sax

A science-fiction and queer run through a fairly generic premise is almost saved, but not quite, by a unique animation style in Strange Frame: Love and Sax. A street saxophone performer meets girl, hits the big time, manager forces them apart, and topple the oppressive power that be as the strength of their love reunites them in the end. Roll credits. Tale as old time, song as old as rhyme.

Where Strange Frame fascinates the most is in its animation style, somewhere between Lotte Reiniger’s cutouts and PS1 cut scenes. The visuals are more distinctive than the personalities and internal narrative logic, and this does become a case of style overpowering substance. Exactly why are scenes from The Duke is Tops interspersed in a film taking place during the 28^th century? There is often no answer to any of the film’s various questions aside from “it looks cool.”

Sure, it’s the trippiest, strangest lesbian movie I’ve ever seen, and a musical no less (even if the songs are deeply unmemorable). A science-fiction animated queer musical – not exactly something you see every day. There’s enough quirky and different on display here to give it a soft recommendation, but there’s not much to feed the imagination and linger there for days afterwards.