In the run-up to the launch of the Travelling Picture Show tour next month, I thought I’d start posting some of the featured shorts. This cubicle romance was nominated for an Oscar this year, and you might remember the director Konstantin Bronzit from his brilliant short Au Bout du Monde.
Oliver Postgate died yesterday, aged 83, leaving behind an amazing body of work and a hell of a life. There are plenty of old kids TV programme which we nostalge over but which bore us rigid after 10 minutes on dvd. Thanks to the artistry and story-telling and fun that went into them, Clangers and Bagpuss and Ivor will always be a class apart. We look forward to foisting them on future generations for many years to come, and the marvels which he and Peter Firmin achieved in a converted pig-sty should be compulsory viewing for any filmmaker bemoaning their lack of funding.
Less familiar and equally of note (in a more grown-up, messy way) was Postgate’s own story; his crackpot inventions, his conscientious objection during the war, his tumultuous family life, and an abiding sense of inadequacy which he used as a motor for his work and talked about with candour on Desert Island Discs last year. It’s a bugger to track down, but do read his memoirs Seeing Things if you get a chance. Here’s a brief snippet, from a revelation that visited him during a hospital stay in 1978:
“What hit me then was a realisation that this joy in life that drives through all things is the life that drives all things. I felt the huge engine, the driving, rolling river of life and death, of happiness and sadness, a river of which my dark fumbling life was only a tiny part, a leaf on the rapids, yet, in my realisation of it, I was part of the river itself, both a part of it and it a part of me.”
This little skit by Coventry-based animator Qianqian Liu was cooked up during the recent Digitoons masterclasses run by the Brothers McLeod. It has picked up nigh on 100,000 youtube views already (including the usual flood of considered and illuminating comments) and can also be seen at the Hare and Hounds this Sunday as part of the Housewives’ Choice night.
Discovered while trawling for kids films yesterday, a Japanese series called Komaneko. We understand that it means ‘frame-taking cat’ and will no doubt breed a whole new generation of stop-frame filmmakers.
This morning I dragged myself away from several deadlines to go and hear Osbert Parker talk about his animation at the Flip Festival, and I’m so glad I did. The cliche about animators is that they’re monosyllabic and prefer to express themselves by moving bits of paper around. Parker does a lot of that but he can also talk with real pzazz and insight about the process behind his work. He started out in graphic design, and showed a stack of images from his sketchbooks which made it clear that he still thinks like a designer in some ways and researches the hell out of everything he does. Reversing the usual progression he went straight from college to an MTV ident and lots of juicy ad commissions (many of which can be seen here), and it was over ten years until he started working on personal projects like Film Noir and Yours Truly. Through these films he established a signature style which involves turning bits of live-action footage into cut-out animation - spending insane amounts of time on stuff like cutting out little Humphrey Bogarts with a scalpel, placing them in a toy car and spritzing with water. Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film uses a similar origami approach but although the effect is amazing it’s more of a set-piece technique-fest for me, while Yours Truly skewers the audience with story-telling. Here’s hoping he gets his creepy mixed-media kids feature off the ground!
PS: Quiet Earth review.
Flip Animation Festival is on in Wolverhampton this week, and includes one of the first UK screenings of Nina Paley’s debut feature Sita Sings the Blues. Paley is a comic strip artist who moved into filmmaking ten years ago, and spent the last five animating Sita on her home computer. Inspired by the Ramayana, the film concerns the parallel man-troubles of Sita (in India’s mythical past) and Nina (in contemporary America), with musical backup from 20s songstress Annette Hanshaw. The director’s blog details some of the copyright hassles Hanshaw’s music has encountered as well as the film’s plaudit-strewn festival journey, and this Variety review will help to whet your appetite. (It’s also screening tomorrow in Leeds.)
PS :: There’s a rundown of other things going on this month at our listings archive. If you want this info sent to you directly, sign up to our email list on the left <<.
Ordinarily this thread marks the passing of forgotten legends or cult heroes and it seems a little flippant to include a 33 year-old in ‘Obituary Corner’. But this is the kind of thing that won’t get a mention in the papers, and we thought it should be noted here. A four-man operation that grew out of college in Kent, Shynola were a big factor in getting us and many others excited about animation and music videos 7 or 8 years ago and Gideon Baws was central to the group. He died from a virus on 11th October. There’s more at antville and Creative Review and below is one of Shynola’s finest moments, their Lambchop video.
It’s always good to start the day with a pleasant surprise through the letterbox, and a dvd of ‘The People and the Whale’ is just what our Friday needed. It’s a short animation by Stockholm-based Peter Larsson, whose earlier film ‘The Man Who Got Nowhere’ we showed at Flatpack 2. Once again Larsson has peopled his work with grotesque clay folk who show a tendency towards mob mentality and incoherent shouting, showing how a beached whale becomes a beacon for the local community. The cathartic explosion at the end reminded us of a real-life incident in Florence, Oregon…
More info on Larsson’s films and nifty collages can be found at hockey-rawk.com. We’ll definitely show it at the next festival, but if you can’t wait until March Peter is selling DVD copies on the site.
Well, three months old; ancient by internet standards. PES is a master at reappropriating familiar objects, and somehow here he manages to get you salivating over pin-cushion tomatoes, parmesan wool and post-it butter…
Plenty more to see at eatpes.com, including classics Roof Sex and Game Over. The ‘Human Skateboard’ ad is great too.
