Follow @CartoonBrew on Twitter
YouTube
Vimeo
RSS
Follow Cartoon Brew on Facebook
Mondo Disney #Mickey Mouse
The Hub No Longer Encourages “Belly Bros” and “Care Dudes” #Bronies
FEATURE PREVIEW: "Ernest et Célestine" #Belgium
How Pixar Almost Deleted "Toy Story 2" #Galyn Susman
Submit to Cartoon Brew’s 3rd Student Animation Festival
"Kill Me Now": An Artist's Plea For Help? #Illumination
|
|
|
Amazing Animation Test of Ronald Searle’s “St. Trinian’s”
 November 26, 2010 10:26 am
A crew of all-stars brought the piece to life: it was boarded by Meyer and Matt Jones, animated by Sandro Cleuzo and Boris Hiestand, and hand-inked by Meyer with immaculate precision onto frosted cels. Uli has a blog post describing the production process in detail. Somebody let these guys loose on their own hand-drawn feature or short, Searle-related or not. I NEED to see more of this!
41 comments
posted in Shorts, Boris Hiestand, Matt Jones, Ronald Searle, Sandro Cleuzo, Uli Meyer 
|
ADVERTISEMENTS
EVENTSMarc Davis Lecture RECENT BREW TV EPISODES By Sitji Chou. A man tries to understand the futility of creating human connections when they’ve been impeded by the microcosmic void between material particles.  By Nikolas Ilic. A story of a Scottish sheep farmer who shears his sheep and tosses them cliff side…  By Dylan Hayes. Lesson 1: Everyone gambles, not everyone loses. Lesson 2: The world is full of traps. Lesson 3: You cannot win if you don’t take risks.  By Jean Yi. A personal and humorous exploration of being the ‘Nice Girl’ and coming to terms with the label and all its different meanings.  By Ferg Brennan. A lonely fisherman catches an unusual fish, which he decides to keep as a pet. |
AMG! Gorgeous!!
I know of the “Daring Young Men” credit sequences and the bizarre “Dick Deadeye” feature. Are there other animated Searles?
LOVE it!
To support this here’s a post on one of the best examples of animated Searle:
http://ronaldsearle.blogspot.com/2010/08/energetically-yours-ronald-searle-1957.html
Absolutely astounding work!
I’m constantly getting inspired!
Astonishingly good work. I watched it 5 times. I truly hope the rest of this reaches the public.
Oh boy! Amazing animation. That’s the kind I could watch for hours… hint, hint
Fantastic- great job, guys.
S.
I’d love to see a feature film like this. Nice work.
Absolutely beautiful.
Bravo to my pals at Uli Meyer!
Fantastic!!! It is flawless!! We need to have more of this!!!! I want to see a whole feature like this!
Wow! O_____O
That was freakin’ great!
Nice! Let’s have a car wash or a bake sale and get this movie made!
Gee, that looks expensive.
Reminds of Richard Williams.
Frank, even if the production time for that 25 seconds took a while, it was probably worth it to get it right, don’t you think?
To conceive and execute it like that, with the shot choices they made, make for something really expressive and much better than something more limited. Though, given some of the scenes, they could pull off limited, too and still keep it interesting. So, if something happens hopefully it won’t take forever and cost a bundle (for potential profit’s sake).
It looks really nice and it’ll be cool if some more happens with it.
Fabulous animation test! Also, did anyone else notice the end credits music from the Nightmare Before Christmas in there?
I noticed that, and I liked it!
Yep, I recognized it. I thought it was a terrible distraction.
I had to re-run the clip to fully appreciate the animation.
Ah, Uli Meyer’s team, delivering pure class, once again.
Uli always strives to achieve the best results, and he has certainly done it with this test! Hats off to the team!
Ronald Searle will love to hear that his naughty school girls still raise eyebrows 65 years later! Thank you so much!
We are looking into the possibilities of making something a little longer and all your positive comments go a long way to show that there is an audience for this.
@Frank – this didn’t take long to produce and the costs were minimal, the frosted cels being the most expensive item. The rest was just paper, pencil, pen and ink, oh, and a small team of talented artists.
Well, then, I hope somebody provides the money to do this thing in a longer form. That’s some of the best-looking stuff I’ve seen in a while.
YES!!!
Thanks for all the great comments! I hope we’ll get to do more soon…
Uli’s attention to detail was staggering- he even learnt to draw with his left hand to emulate Searle’s left-handed linework better!
Hahaha it helps when you’re born a leftie and a god given gift drawing for drawing though wouldn’t you say?! ;D
wow! gorgeous!!!!!!! great work guys!
When I was a student at Sheridan College in the 1990’s all the best animators used to watch Uli Meyers work with amazement.
He was the King!
Glad to see he just keeps getting better;)
I as well would like to congratulate all the artists for a job well done!
Beautiful work. It would be great to see this get made into a short subject.
I thought this was excellent!
This should be made as a feature film! (A short film would be good, too.)
Love this. Disney’s “Milt Kahl era” certainly was very inspired by Ronald Searle… Uli Meyer’s animation looks as good as Milt Kahl’s to me.
If you get this film off the ground, who wouldn’t love to be part of that… animation on paper again. Yahoo!
…*sniff* my boys are all grown up now, and animting and all kinds of sh*t. God Bless you all … this is beauty in motion
Amazing! I loved the realistic smooth motion with the cartoon style in the same time.
Absolutely beautiful animation and faithful rendering of Searle’s drawing – and I loved the Searle cat – but I felt the joke was not carried through in the teachers’ reactions. I feel the expressions should have emphasised the sense of surprise and concern, or at least cynicism, that is suggested in the source cartoon. A good part of Searle’s humour lies in the contrast between the monstrousness of the girls’ deeds and the resigned “Oh, well, girls will be girls” attitude of the staff. Whether displaying pride in the girls’ achievements or amusement at their predictable foibles, the staff remain stereotypically middleclass schoolmarms (an angle the first St Trinians film managed to exploit very well in the persona of Headmistress Millicent Fritton).
Ronald never liked any of the live action versions and the way he sees the characters is quite different. The St. Trinian’s staff are not resigned at all but part of the school’s horror cabinet. They are quite aware of what those killer girls are up to and teach them how to go about their deeds properly. In one cartoon a teacher tells the girls to use clean needles before injecting a pupil from another school. One drawing shows the headmistress stepping over dismembered bodies of the girls, commenting “The cleaner’s getting slack, Horsefall”, in another she welcomes a witch arriving on her broom stick as the new chemistry teacher. The staff is pretty evil too. Ronald’s comment in regards to the animation of the teachers was “They’re perfect!”.
The way the headmistress was portrayed in the first film was not the way Searle saw it. Ronald did criticise one thing though, and that was the way the girl rubbs her nose as she jumps off the bed. The girls were too well bred to do such a thing. The comedy lies in fact in that. Upper class, well bred killer girls.
Fair enough – they’re Searle’s jokes, so what he says goes!
And I can see the argument for the other teacher frowning in disapproval, for that reason.
But for me the humour has always been in the contrast of the teachers’ “normal” reactions to the horrors the girls unleash – as exemplified in the The cleaner’s getting slack, Horsefall example you mention. The girls are wicked, but the staff merely act as if it is normal: this is funny. They take pride in the girls’ achievements (“And this is Rachel, our Head Girl”, as a prospective parent is introduced to a prolific decapitator) but are not presented as wicked themselves, they merely preside over it all. One cartoon shows the regular return-to-school frisking that results in a pile of confiscated weapons; the “clean needle” joke is about ‘honorable behaviour’ and ’standards’ – an evil comment (“I hope that’s a dirty needle!”) isn’t half so funny.
As with Charles Addams, it isn’t the horror that’s funny – it’s the context, the parallel with normality, that is funny. And it seems to me that the staff generally serve to provide that context.
Huh?
Look, I’m a huge fan of Searle and a huge fan of Uli Meyer’s work, and I think the test is BEAUTIFUL but why isn’t a giant talent like Uli creating original works? Searle’s style has been aped by Disney and recreated beautifully. Milt Kahl showed it is extremely possible to take Searle’s style (okay, he adapted it) and animate it very well, so there’s nothing particularly new here. Presumably the rights to the St. Trinians girls aren’t available as terrible live action movies (with horrible animation) keep being produced. Maybe Uli did it just for fun and the art of it and maybe that’s a perfectly valid reason to do anything, BUT…
I would like to see Uli turn his hand to something real. I love his work and I want to see more. Whatever happened to the monster movie?
Thanks burkiss. It’s true…I haven’t had this much fun in a long time. Monsters are still alive.