The Sundance Film Festival in Park City started last Thursday night, kicking off with an independent animated feature by Adam Elliot. The first reviews appearing online are intriguing - catching many veteran festival goers by surprise. Check out these quotes from Scott Foundas’ review in the LA Weekly:

For the first time in its 25-year history, the Sundance Film Festival opened Thursday night with a movie from Australia. It was also the first time the festival has opened with a feature-length animation — one, I feel confident in saying, that is among the strangest animated films ever made.

Pixar this most certainly isn’t. In fact, where most feature-length animated films, by sheer virtue of the painstaking labor involved, aim to reach the broadest possible audience, Mary and Max — which took over a year to produce, at an average rate of five seconds of finished animation per day — is as insular and private as any live-action “personal filmmaking.”

In the eight years that I’ve been covering Sundance, this is one of the only times the opening night film has been less than a calamitous failure, and maybe the only time it has been a movie of serious ambition, worth talking, thinking and arguing about afterward.

Mary and Max is in negotiations for theatrical distribution and will hopefully open in the U.S. in 2009.

Following up on the piece about the 3D papercraft/cut-out trend, here are two new works that are more-or-less from that school of thought.

I’ve received three emails about this first project in the past day so I figure it’s what all the young kids are talking about this week. It’s a music video for the song “Bubblicious” by music producer Jake Williams, aka Rex the Dog. It was directed by Geoffroy de Crecy at Partizan Lab. The DIY stop-mo aesthetic is fun to watch, but it began to feel repetitive once I realized that that was the video’s entire gimmick and it wasn’t building towards anything more substantial. It’s a great ‘making-of’ video; it’s too bad they weren’t actually making anything.

More successful as a finished piece—yet flawed in an entirely different way—is “Unboxed”, a stop-motion and traditional hand-drawn commercial for Audi co-directed by Aaron Duffy at 1st Ave Machine and Russell Brooke of Passion Pictures. There’s an interview with Aaron Duffy about the commerical at Motionographer. I like the piece, but it’s uncomfortably derivative of cartoonist Saul Steinberg, both conceptually and design-wise. It would have been a classier move if they’d been straight up and acknowledged they were using Steinberg’s work as inspiration instead of pretending like they have no idea who he is and saying in their interview that they “did dozens of designs” for the ad agency. I’m sure they did dozens of character designs, but I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the character is handled in such a Steinberg-esque manner.

I’ll keep it brief: Go see this film!

I saw Laika’s Coraline tonight and, despite the publicists request to embargo reviews for three weeks, I can’t stifle my enthusiasm. It’s great! A beautiful little gem, a stop-motion masterpiece and certainly Henry Selick’s best film.

The Academy has its first contender for 2009. I will have a lot more to say about the movie in future post… but here are a few more superlatives: The animation is terrific. The art direction is fantastic. Shane Prigmore, who did the 2D animation the replacement faces were based on, is the unsung hero of this show - his work is superb! And yeah, the story is solid. They Might Be Giants have a cameo song in the film! And speaking of cameo’s, there is a nifty visual tribute to Joe Ranft…

That’s all I’ll say about it for now. However I’m a bit concerned about the marketing. The bus posters and billboards (particularly one at Hollywood and Highland) are not very attractive. This film has so many incredible visuals, surely something more compelling than this could be created. Memo to Focus Features: you have a hit on your hands, please tell the world.

Chris Diaz led me to the YouTube link (embed below) for that Krazy Kat stop motion that I mentioned in this post last month.

I could do without the narration, but the models, settings and animation are perfect. It was directed by Derek Mogford and produced by Spitting Image Productions for King Features 1n 1996.

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

French animation school Gobelins has released the latest batch of their student films. From a purely technical standpoint, the quality of this school’s work never ceases to amaze me. It’s certainly better than a lot of professional work that comes my way. My personal favorite in the current crop is California Love, a CG short with the design sensibilities and expressiveness of hand-drawn animation. The film was created by Lucie Arnissolle, Yann Boyer, Vincent Mahe, Mael Gourmelen and Stephen Vuillemin. At the film’s website CaliforniaLove-LeFilm.com, you can see various ‘making of’ videos showing the individual contributions of each of the team members. Solid work all around.

Another curious entry is For Sock’s Sake, which is a stop-motion short produced by one person, Carlo Vogele. Though Vogele graduated from Gobelins, he made this film during an exchange semester at CalArts. I’ve seen pieces of clothing anthropomorphized like this before but the quality of acting and personality in Vogele’s animation is particularly impressive and shows a promising animator in the making.

(Thanks, Pete Shand)

31 comments  permalink  posted in CGI, Stop Motion, Student

Wallace and Gromit in A Matter of Loaf and Death

December 1, 2008 8:15 am

Cracking good news! Wallace and Gromit, who haven’t starred in anything significant since the 2005 feature The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, are returning to action in a new half-hour short entitled A Matter of Loaf and Death. The video above offers the first footage from the new short that has appeared online. Loaf and Death will debut on TV in Australia on December 3. UK TV premiere should also be this month with other countries to follow in 2009. A description of the new production:

The new film reunites Park with writer Bob Baker who co-wrote both The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave. Sally Lindsay (Coronation Street) will be the voice of Piella Bakewell, alongside Peter Sallis who voices Wallace. In this new masterpiece viewers will catch up with Wallace and Gromit who have opened a new bakery – Top Bun – and business is booming, not least because a deadly Cereal Killer is targeting all the bakers in town so competition is drying up. Gromit is worried that they may be the next victims but Wallace couldn’t care – he’s fallen head over heels in love with Piella Bakewell, former star of the Bake-O-Lite bread commercials. So Gromit is left to run things on his own when he’d much rather be getting better acquainted with Piella’s lovely pet poodle Fluffles.

(Thanks, Matt Jones)

17 comments  permalink  posted in Shorts, Stop Motion, TV

Pulsar by Katushi Bowda

November 26, 2008 5:10 pm

By far the coolest thing I’ve seen on YouTube all week is this Japanese short from 1990. From the video description: “This is not clay animation but gypsum animation. This movie was made by Katushi Bowda. It was broadcast by the Japanese TV program ‘EBITEN’. It was contest for amateur short movie directors. And his present occupation is professional Stop Motion Animator.” More recently, Bowda also created a segment for the feature Winter Days. His website (in Japanese) is Bowdas.com.

(Thanks, Tony Mora)

7 comments  permalink  posted in Shorts, Stop Motion

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