Dear Angelica review: sublimely mixing art and space

To describe the appeal of virtual reality, it’s sometimes said that you get to go inside the picture. The long-held prominence of the frame—first dominating paintings, then film and television—has accustomed us to experiencing pictorial art in the form of two dimensional fields of representation, detached from ourselves. The exquisitely crafted Dear Angelica—which was directed by Saschka Unseld and hand-painted using the VR illustration tool Quill—is a great example of VR’s ability to make us feel like we’re encountering art from the inside, in the space between canvas and paint.

Watching and moving around this experience—which is available in 3DoF and 6DoF versions—also draws attention to the limitations of the aforementioned metaphor. We’re inside the art, but this art is a space: an area in the cosmos to be filled. In this instance the idea of being “inside” art also involves the illusion of witnessing the creation process.

The first thing we see is a streak of pink that evolves from a swirling, curling line into an elaborate typeface spelling out the title. Attached to the end of the lettering is a notepad, then a hand with a pen, then an arm, then a face, and on we go, eventually forming a full picture: of a young woman lying on a bed crafting a handwritten letter. This is Jessica (voiced by Mae Whitman), writing letters to her late mother Angelica (voiced by Geena Davis). 

The words she’s writing come off the page and emblazon the air, moving rightwards and prompting us to turn our heads. When the words disappear, a series of illustrations take their place that morph and evolve, changing form, colour and perspective, all sorts of beautiful painterly visions coming and going. There’s a dragon with a group of women on its back; a gorgeous, glorious lion; a woman standing on a booth in a diner, squirting ketchup and mustard everywhere while her orange-haired companion eats pancakes; the same pair in a bright orange convertible; the woman with orange hair dressed up like a superhero, fighting a green monster; and that same woman dressed as an astronaut, floating around space.

The orange-haired woman is Angelica and these visions are memories fused with fantasies, informed by Angelica’s career as a film star. The fusing of Jessica’s memories with fantastic characters (the astronaut, a fantasy film hero etcetera) would work, conceptually, even if Angelica wasn’t an actor. A message at the heart of the experience is that remembering is a process less about reliving events of the past (which is impossible) than imagining the textures and details of things that came before. The past is sealed off, inaccessible, increasingly distant, open to interpretation. Memories morph and evolve, with no fixed anchor or reference point. 

Dear Angelica not only visualizes this but spatalizes it, the curves and colours of the protagonist’s beautiful memories and imaginings—plus the words she writes in her letters—draped around us and over us. Its 12 minute runtime feels right—not too short, not too long—and this is one of those rare short experiences from its era (pre-2020) that one can imagine people returning to for decades. I love it.