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JERRY BECK
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AMID AMIDI
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Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa Titles by Jamie Caliri
by amid
December 12, 2008 4:12 am


Madagascar

As our outgoing Commander-in-Chief is fond of saying, “Fool me once, shame on you—fool me…you can’t get fooled again.” So while I didn’t get fooled again by going to see Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, I also managed to miss the film’s opening end titles, which actually offer a fun and creative take on the characters. The sequence can be viewed and downloaded in hi-res at the DUCK Studios website. If the style looks familiar that’s because the paper cut-out animation was designed and animated by Jamie Caliri, who is also responsible for the end credits of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and United Airlines’ “Dragon” commercial.

UPDATE: Below is the credit list for the artists who worked on this stop-motion sequence. Also, Megan Brain who created the paper cut-outs, has a couple blog entries here and here displaying her paper puppetry. (Thanks, Jorge Ribeiro)

Preproduction
Jamie Caliri:Director & storyboard
Dan Ridgers:Line Producer
Megan Brain:Art director, puppet design/fabrication
Alex Juhasz:Storyboard & background art
Pablo Grande:Prop design/fabrication & background art
Todd Hemker:Animation Director

Animators
Yorico Murakami
Scott Kravitz
Jinna Kim
Hsinping Pan
Hsin-I Tseng
Blake Robertson
Evan James
Jan Chen

12/12/08  6:52am

Please don´t forget Megan Brain!!!

She is the responsible for the paper sculpture and character design on those films. That´s what´s recognizable between them.

12/12/08  8:02am

It seems like everything DUCK Studios does is gold… their UA commercial “Heart” is just beautiful.

12/12/08  10:43am
Chuck R. says:

Thanks for this! Absolutely brilliant and fun, fun, fun!

I still prefer the Lemony credits, mostly because of the eerie Asian-flavored music and visuals —a welcome departure from the expected Victorian/Gothic/Gorey schtick.

I think these folks are amazing and I’m glad Amid’s spreading the accolades around.

12/12/08  11:20am
Don says:

Nice work, Amid. I don’t know how you feature this END sequence (not opening btw) and totally overlook Megan Brain. Her creative stamp was all over that thing.

Fantastic work, Duck Studios!

12/12/08  11:35am
Fred Cline says:

Thanks for listing the credits for the crew that worked on this - they deserve some recognition.

12/12/08  11:51am

Amid, I think those are the end credits, not the opening titles.

And don’t knock Madagascar 2. I actually enjoyed it! :)

12/12/08  12:00pm
Hameed says:

Beautiful work! And Megan Brain’s paper sculptures are incredible! I’m really glad that DreamWorks Animation seems to be doing more and more creative stylized title/credits sequence. Can’t wait to see the ones on MvA now…

12/12/08  1:21pm

It was the best part of the movie and when I watched the credits I was sad to see the catering staff listed above duck studios. To and insult to injury, I was floored that they didn’t list the crew for this and opted to only credited Duck Studios! Thanks for put it up CB. Its nice to see these guys finally getting a little credit of their own. Its good stuff :)

12/12/08  2:25pm

I was so in love with that Lemony Snicket end sequence. Thanks for the heads up on this!

12/12/08  2:40pm
Stone says:

I gotta say that I went in expecting Madagascar 2 to be a snore-fest like the first one but it was really entertaining. It improved on many of the faults from before. It’s worth a look.

12/12/08  2:51pm
Michael Sheehan says:

“So while I didn’t get fooled again by going to see Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa . . .”

Sure, why go and see a movie before forming an opinion of it? It’s so much cheaper to judge it without bothering to watch it.

Surely this justly-deserved nod to a lovely credit sequence could have been delivered without this kind of snarky remark, which says a lot about the commenter and little about the subject.

12/12/08  5:39pm
slowtiger says:

Just saw it, and it was decent entertainment. I even had the impression it was less talkative than part 1.

Now I wonder if anyone would enjoy a feature film done with cutouts … no, not Southpark!

12/14/08  1:50pm
Pedro Nakama says:

I wonder why this wasn’t in the Art of Madagascar book.

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