Allumette review: a beautiful artifact of present era VR

Director Eugene Chung’s charming 20 minute narrative experience—a loose adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Match Girl—received substantial acclaim when it arrived in 2016, the first year VR headsets became commercially available on the mass market. One reviewer hailed it as “the first VR film masterpiece”; another described Chung—a former animator for Pixar—as “the D.W. Griffith of virtual reality.” 

One could spend a lifetime debunking hyperbolic statements about VR, so I won’t go too far into it—suffice to say that likening the unquestionably talented Chung to Griffiths is contentious, at the very least. Griffiths had a huge, demonstrable impact on establishing the grammar and syntax of motion picture storytelling. Chung is one of many early players in VR to experiment with its form, in his case in ways that are yet to catch on as dominant modes of expression. Non-interactive diorama-like experiences, similar to those created by Chung, will almost certainly have a place in VR going forward, but it’s hard to imagine this style becoming a central force in the medium’s progression. In contrast, Griffiths’ work affected the very foundation of film language.

And the idea that Allumette (an experience I’m very fond of) is a masterpiece is absurd. Just as it would’ve been absurd to use the same language to describe a Georges Méliès short film, even his most famous—1902’s legendary A Trip to the Moon. It’s virtually impossible to make a masterpiece during a period when the foundational aspects of a medium’s storytelling language are still in a state of dramatic flux; when everything’s still up for grabs.

Allumette is, however, a lovely and affecting experience, casting the viewer as a god-like observer of a miniature world, watching over a city in the clouds. Its dialogue-free narrative follows a mother and daughter who fly around on a rickety-looking wooden spaceship, making pitstops to sell giant matches. The stage-like space in which much of the drama takes place is a bridge where, in the first scene, we see a young girl alone at night, activating one of these matches, before the narrative jumps back in time. 

The vagabondish life of the mother and daughter appears to be going swimmingly, until (spoilers coming up for the rest of this paragraph) their ship catches on fire while above a large public gathering. The mother saves the girl then desperately tries to signal help, before realising what she must do: pilot the ship away from the crowd in an act of self-sacrifice that saves the people below but ensures her demise, the ship exploding mid-air. Out of the dozen or so people I introduced to Allumette, back in 2016 and 2017, two weren’t looking in the right direction when this explosion occurs, missing the crucial moment of impact. The 360 video Hard World for Small Things (also from 2016) has an ending that’s similarly compromised, which I unpack in my review. 

The fact that people invest in the entirety of Allumette, only to miss the most significant moment, speaks to a core challenge facing content creators: how to direct the viewer or player’s attention towards parts of the tableau containing narratively important information. Entire books could be written on this subject—which in fact consumed a significant portion of my doctorate thesis. Various techniques can be deployed, some originating from theatre (including lighting and blocking) and others that are unique to the emerging medium, including Nonny de la Peña’s “embodied edit”, whereby the virtual body is moved into a particular space. 

Chung directed rather than dictated, suggesting certain points of focus. This sounds meritorious, but it created an obvious flaw (another reason why Allumette, lovely though it is, is no masterpiece) reflected in the above examples (of people not properly witnessing a pivotal moment). At the time of Allumette’s release, however, the novelty of being situated in a beautifully immersive space carried much of the experience. Our ability to walk forward and stick our faces right up to the characters allows us, in cinematic terms, to transform the equivalent of a long shot into the equivalent of a close-up. The reverse of course applies when the observer takes a step back, in effect turning close-ups into longshots. 

This is fairly standard stuff now, but at the time it was thrilling. The appeal of this kind of virtual liberation was crystalized in the headline of a Mashable story titled “Allumette is an engaging VR story in which you are the camera.” Those words, “you are the camera,” reflect a period of great excitement for non-interactive experiences such as 360 videos. They don’t say “you are a person in this world, you have agency, your decisions matter.” The focus was on manipulating perspective, not changing narrative outcomes. An experience like Allumette was always going to look dated, if not antiquated—but it will remain a beautiful artifact.