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.
After enduring the horrors of Nim’s Island this weekend I turned to the web in search of some hope for childrens cinema. There are plenty of folks out there rightly lamenting the narrow choice on offer in the UK, although on the education front the launch of Film Club looks promising in terms of getting a wider range of movies into schools and giving teachers plenty of autonomy in choosing their own programme. (A lot of film ed in this country has been heavily studio-driven in the past with compulsory St Trinians goodie-bags etc.) Teacher friends have spoken with religious zeal about the effects that careful use of Google Video/YouTube can have on their pupils, and the podcasts on the Teaching for the Future blog are very much pushing in that direction. What would be really handy is more places gathering relevant material, particularly short material, under curriculum-related headings.
For more casual home viewing some great stuff can be found at Bangazee, a nice varied selection of youtube clips compiled by one half of Stratford-based animation duo the Brothers McLeod. ‘Vinni Puh’ goes down particularly well in these parts (below). Or if you’re feeling ambitious the now-dormant but still-useful no-longer-dormant, and still-useful Alternative Films for Kids has loads of suggestions from a parent who is obviously quite happy to twist her offspring’s melons now and again (including classic Saturday morning fare like Samuel Beckett). On the multiplex horizon, auteur types Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr Fox) and Spike Jonze (Where the Wild Things Are) seem to be mellowing with age and doing one for the kids, and Michel Ocelot’s Prince’s Quest arrives here on DVD in a couple of months. Any other hot tips to rescue us from Nim II would be much appreciated…
