A Soulful Rendering of Native Origins

Every culture has its creation myths, from the Mayans’ “Popol Vuh” to the two separate accounts contained in the Judeo-Christian book of Genesis. The commonality across latitudes is the desire to make sense of our presence in this plane of existence, to understand ourselves in the context of a larger plan written by the hand of a higher power. With distinctly stylized animation, the Hungarian feature “Four Souls of Coyote” from director Áron Gauder retells another version of events, focused on how Turtle Island (what’s now known as North America) and the creatures that inhabit it, including humans, came to be. The tale is shared among multiple Northeastern Indigenous peoples in this continent.

The frame narrative occurs in the present. As an unscrupulous oil company attempts to start a pipeline project before addressing environmental concerns, a group of protesters, Native American and otherwise, tries to stop the groundbreaking. One of them, an elderly Indigenous man, speaks of how in time immemorial, an Old Man Creator (voiced by Lorne Cardinal, an Indigenous Canadian actor) built the world based on dreams, product of “the great mysterious” spirit. From nothingness, water emerges and then a duck who hands the Old Man Creator the material from which he molds the land and then the animals. In the sequence, the character manipulates the frame and its components with an unexpected playfulness.

The angular character design of the Old Man Creator makes the ridges on his face seem as if etched onto a woodcarving, adding to the earthly feel of the animation. The other characters also feature an elemental, handcrafted appearance that both distinguishes the film from other European animated works and aligns it visually with its themes of connection to and respect for nature. Gauder and his team combined hand-drawn characters and painterly backgrounds with computer-generated elements to render the mythology into captivating imagery. Halfway through the film, the Old Man Creator, in a fit of anger, engenders lighting, which is depicted as a flying, talking snake designed to appear as if it were a pencil sketch. The look of this supporting character is deliberately even more rudimentary, expressing the instinctual quality of our worst, primitive impulses.

In another dream, the Old Man Creator sees four mischievous coyotes, the embodiment of disobedience and defiance. He condenses them into a single entity, Coyote (Diontae Black doing a humorously wicked voice), granting the trickster four lives to live before banishing it. Motivated by hunger, Coyote creates Man (Danny Kramer) and Woman (Stephanie Novak) from the same material that the elderly wiseman used to form everything else. But the Old Man prevents him from eating and puts him in charge of their well, since they are weaker than the other creatures in the land. Gauder had utilized the figure of Coyote in previous animated short films. Here, his desire to kill (in order to eat flesh) and his vengeful heart (which eventually brings about British colonialism) drive the fable forward. His voracious appetite that compels him to scheme calls to mind Chuck Jones‘ amusingly inept Wile E. Coyote character.

Coyote’s arrogance, his eventual humbling, and ultimately his righteous sacrifice — an arc that places the character somewhere on the spectrum that separates good and evil — act as a reminder that humans’ role in the grand scheme of things is not of larger importance than the other creatures in the predetermined circle of life. There’s a grounding wisdom that comes with appreciating Coyote not as a villain, but a chaotic agent of change.

Halfway through the folk tale, the Old Man Creator holds an assembly where animals big and small, who at first couldn’t reproduce but are now jealous of Man and Woman, demand companionship within their own species. The harmonious relationship presents an idealized vision of how reality should function. Notably, the movie’s soulful score and songs feature Native American music groups Ulali, Northern Cree, and artist Joanne Shenandoah. The multitude of voices raised together with fervor lend a spiritual gravitas to the project.

The film’s origin is admittedly unexpected: a Hungarian production with no obvious ties to its source material. While a version dubbed in Hungarian was that country’s entry for best international feature film at the Oscars last year, one with an English-language voice track is currently showing in the U.S. Gauder has explained that the inspiration came partly from Hungarian singer Tamás Cseh, who took an interest in Native American folktales, translated them into Hungarian and popularized them in the European country. They were published with illustrations done by his son.

With the help of Native American consultants, Gauder and co-writer Géza Bereményi arrived at a middle ground between solemnity and amusement, the latter mostly derived from Coyote’s thwarted antics. Although “Four Souls of Coyote” suffers from the sheer ambitiousness of how much it attempts to cover while its present-day component wraps too neatly for comfort, its handcrafted aesthetic and still-relevant ancestral precepts make for an illuminating experience.