Just a quick heads-up – by way of warm-up for Flatpack 6 we’re doing a series of Colour Box family screenings at mac on the first Saturday of every month. Tomorrow we kick off with My Neighbour Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki’s spell-binding fable about two sisters in the countryside. Screenings are at midday and 2pm, and there’s also a chance to develop your own Totoro-drawing skills. Here’s a brief youtube guide to help prepare you…
Just sifting through photos from our film-tent at this weekend’s marvellous Book Bash. There are many things to love about this event: it’s free; it encourages kids to get excited about reading; it’s at Aston Hall, one of Birmingham’s underrated treasures; and it’s run by librarians! Their joy at being set free in a field rather than sat in a library is somewhat infectious, and makes for a really nice buzz. Even on Monday when it was chucking it down we were impressed by the pacamac hordes who turned out. Here are a few shots from the slightly sunnier Sunday…
At the top is pianist Paul Shallcross, who drove all the way from Brecon to accompany the inspired vandalism and acrobatics of Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton. Below is his appreciative audience. Watching all these rapt young faces taking so much pleasure from something nearly a century old, I wondered if we could get Michael Gove to make silent comedy compulsory for all five year-olds. I was also reminded of a 1954 book called Children and Films: A Study of Boys and Girls in the Cinema, by Mary Field. The effect of cinema on young audiences was a hot topic at the time, and Field travelled around the country using infra-red photography to capture children’s reactions to particular sequences of film. The two images below are of matinee audiences in Barnstaple and Chippenham, both enjoying a moment of ‘Anticipated fun’.
With thanks to Pete James, and Janet Brisland.
Just had a marvellous day showing films at Aston Hall as part of this year’s Book Bash, along with special guest and old friend Paul Shallcross who went down a storm accompanying the joyous mayhem of Laurel and Hardy. We’ll be back there tomorrow, without Paul but with a oneoff screening of animated feature Eleanor’s Secret. Next week we’ll be giving away a couple of DVDs of the film on the blog, and will also post a couple of photos from the event.
Hitching a ride with the Travelling Picture Show throughout the summer, animator Claire Evans has been making a ‘chain-film’ with young people all over the Midlands. Here’s a silent extract from the Hereford bit; the full film complete with spooky soundtrack will be showing at our gala finale on Sunday.
magic box hereford from themagicbox on Vimeo.
Another short from the Travelling Picture Show programme, made as a graduation film at CalArts by Nicole Mitchell. This one is part of Fantastic Planet, and always goes down well.
Our favourite short film review so far (not of the above) was: ‘Boring and weird and funny and sad’. All in ten minutes!
The Travelling Picture Show kicks off in Lichfield today. (I’m not there but apparently it’s going very well.) One of the most consistently popular films in the programme is a fifty year-old French short with hardly any dialogue about a boy and his balloon, and even if you haven’t seen it there’s a good chance you’ve come across something influenced by it.
For a start there’s a Juliette Binoche film and a stage production, and note the multicoloured balloon clusters currently floating about in Pixar’s Up and Sofia Coppola’s Dior ad. These films celebrate the feelgood side of The Red Balloon – if you want the brutal underbelly check out the Don Hertzfeldt cartoon Billy’s Balloon. Decidedly not for kids.
Here’s another short film from the Travelling Picture Show programme, for anyone with noisy neighbours. This went down particularly well in the Shift_Time tent this weekend, and my two year-old son has become hopelessly addicted to the little mole.
[Wikipedia entry.]
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.”
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.
