Animating Reality

A second DVD review in the span one week.   You'd think I sit around all day watching cartoons.

This disk came in a little over a month ago and it's taken me this long to finish it.  Animating Reality: A Collection of Short Documentaries (distributed here) clocks in just under three hour with 13 films.  Most are fairly serious, so it's not really a compilation that lends itself to a single screening.





Not a single film here is both animated and documentary.  The animation may by-and-large be non-fiction  but some are closer to Maya Deren's Meshes of the Afternoon in form and tone.   The canvas of non-fiction can hardly be stretched to cover that film, but won't argue against anyone who would assert that it's the poetic meeting place of fact and fantasy.

The most touching piece isn't animated.  The short documentary Birdlings Two is a dialog between the filmmaker Davino Pardo and her father Rene.  The filmmaker is surprised to find that her father, a businessman, made a film with Norman McLaren and the NFB twenty five years earlier.  Their conversation is conducted over faded photos and super 8 footage of the young man diving into a swimming pool while wearing a suit.   It's a lovely little film.

Like many of the DVD's pieces, Birdlings Two is a student film.   I find it encouraging that many young filmmakers are making work that is unconstrained by technique and cookie cutter narrative.  If only every graduating animator with a Kung Fu Granny thesis film put their efforts into something more personal like these films, something beyond an "audition" for a big studio -if only...

Also interesting is Wiener Wuast by Maya Yonesho.  This is a simple concept well executed.  Index cards with abstract watercolor animation held in front of a camera in Vienna.    Cute and well done.

This disk makes an interesting companion to the Annecy collection.  Both have distinct non-American slants, while the Annecy disks cover the heavy hitters of the international animation world, Animating Reality contains work by artists largely unknown in the animation community: one film screened in Annecy, One at Anima Mundi and Holland and none in Hiroshima or Ottawa.

Vive L'animation!

I may have been to me, but I've never been to Paris and, unfortunately not Annecy.

A top-tier animation festival (and should be considered along with Ottawa and a few others a top tier film festival, in general), Annecy celebrated it's 50th Anniversary this year. In commemoration, they've released a 5 DVD set containing 40 films highlighting the half century of international animation.

The DVDs are Region 0, PAL.  Americans might not be able to watch them on their BluRay decks but any computer should have no problem.  BUY HERE!

And, being French, the booklet and menus are in French.  The overwhelming majority of the films are non-verbal, some (like "Frank Film") are in English with French subtitles, others (like "Bob's Birthday") are strictly  en français and we just have to lump it.

Many of these films aren't easily screened in any language: Robert Mitchell and Dale Case's "Further Adventures of Uncle Sam" (a iconic slice of 1970s zeitgeist), Alison de Vere's "Mr. Pascal", Jean-François  Laguionie "La Demoiselle et le Violoncelliste", and many others.

Also included are several popular films from this century -Chris Landreth's "Ryan", Jeremy Clapin's "Skhizein" and Michael Dudok de Wit's elegant "Father and Daughter".

These are 40 films which represent the best of international animation for the last 50 years, even with the exclusion of many American greats, it's a showing which make you proud to work in the same field as these greats.

(On a practical note, this ships from France.  I ordered on a Monday and received the package Thursday, standard delivery.  No problems.)

Limited Expectations

A few weeks ago I picked up a small stack of animated Dickens DVDs.

I was hoping they would relate to these cels I had posted earlier.

The DVDs do not include credits, but from my best guess these are the very same Australian produced TV films.

Before 2003 I had never read any Charles Dickens. I had read a few Stephen King books in the 8th Grade, when my high school English teacher claimed "Dickens was like the Stephen King of his time" I took that to mean a verbose editophobe who never began a sentence he didn't intend to run on. Oscar Grillo, though, insisted I should read Dickens -and man, was he ever right. Pretty much the polar opposite of Stephen King.

So far I've only screened "Great Expectations" and "A Tale of Two Cities". "Nicholas Nickelby" and "David Copperfield" have yet to make it into the DVD player.

These types of stories are interesting to us. Drawn animation is a great technique telling epic narratives -all of those dentist office Bible videos are great examples. Its interesting to see how they've been told throughout animation history.

Going in, I did not think these would be very good -and they're not. But they attempt something admirable, they use animation to tell sophisticated stories. The voice acting is impossible to understand. There's no director credited and from the bizarre camera work is doesn't look like there was either. Filmicly, its an attempt at Scooby Doo economies without the know how and expertise of a Hanna Barbera crew.


They do this on a very low budget too. Animation is expensive, yes. But a quality (and evergreen) film adaptation of story like "Bleak House" would cost under $5 million to do animated (I'm not talking about 10 years of development, but a modest but financed production). To do the same thing in live action might cost over $20 million (again, modestly budgeted). On top of that animated films have longer shelf life on video especially in the "family" section.

Rambling, I wonder how the death of the video store will effect the direct-to-video animation market. The infamous "cheapquels" were a boon to executives and overseas studios, but can "Tinkerbelle Part 8" still reel in the millions without point of purchase displays at Blockbuster?

Stravinsky Rock

DATELINE: 1983.

Animators' greatest concern - Faustian bargains.

There's a promotional piece from the time of the film's release that credits Anne Marie Bardwell with the lion's share of "Angel's" animation. There's a softness to the character and Broadway feel that, in light of her credits with Don Bluth, suggest she handled the part in this sequence.

I suspect "Mok" was animated by another hand. He's snappier. Not just in his posing, but his linework is harder, more angular.

This is probably the strongest sequence from "Rock and Rule". The effects are pretty nice.

From right around the same time, R. O. Blechman's "L'Histoire du Soldat." Tissa David up until the silhouette which is Fred Mogubgub's work:

Butterflies.

Music.

Everything.

When I talk about "Broadway posing" this is what I mean:

she goes from here

to here ("Where'd he go!")

a cut, then here. ("OMG! There he is!")


which animates right into this

It's all very skillfully done, I just don't know what it means.  Then again, I don't know what her conflict is.  She's only being asked to give up her current rock band -including and egomaniacal lead singer who abuses her -for the one thing rockers want: stardom.  In effect, she's not losing anything but still gaining her ultimate desire.
The viewer knows this also means Mok will gain some super power, but she doesn't.  And really, their world is pretty grim as it is, so whatever this guy does to it can't be much worse.
Here are some parallel drawings from "L'Histoire du Soldat":

the devil is trying to buy his violin

The drawing reminds me of the point in "Waltz with Bashir" when I realized we would be watching uninspired animation.  In that film wild dogs run through the street.  They run past a woman holding her child.  She clutches the baby facing the dogs.  Tsk. Tsk.  How much more powerful, more real if she were to sacrifice her body to protect the child.

And look at what Vertov is doing here.  Cradling the violin, protecting it from the Devil.  

he considers the violin

looks at it.

That look!  Like a boy with his puppy.

to here.  "I don't want to sell it."

In this shot he goes from frightened and protective to defiant and proud.  The change goes through the "look" at the violin.  There you have.  Hegel in action -thesis: poses 1 & 2, antithesis: pose 4, synthesis (the relationship/catalyst of the two):  pose 3.
It's not just philosophy executed in animation- it's humanity.  Emotional realism.
If there's a modicum of interest in this post, I'll continue with a comparison of the Devil and Mok.  Both characters in "L'Histoire du Soldat" have near perfect voice acting.  The Devil performed by Max von Sydow.  The voice performances in "Rock and Rule" are fine, but really, starting with two strong voice records like the Soldier (Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev, after surgery for throat cancer) and The Devil gives an animator a leg up.

God Save The Queen

The early 1980s look like a tough time to have been British.

Punk burnt itself into New Wave, everybody loved Maggie and the animation -it looks like the Battle of London hitched up with Mutual Assured Destruction to produce two films which vie for "most depressing animated film ever".


Doing our bookkeeping this weekend, to get in the mood I finally watch the copy of The Plague Dogs which Christina lent me over a year ago.


what's worse: accounting or vivisection?

She also lent When The Wind Blows at the same time. I watched that first. It's taken several months to recover from the morbid feeling.

When The Wind Blows was released in 1986, a feature length follow up to Raymond Briggs' widely acclaimed The Snowman. That film aimed to outdo the hopelessness of The Plague Dogs (released four years earlier) by showing two doddering codgers slide into a grueling death over an hour and fifteen minutes.


This is one of the happier scenes in Plague Dogs.  Dog accidentally shoots man. Feels remorse.
The Plague Dogs follows up Watership Down -the same creative and production team, this time with not a frame of input from John Hubley.

Two dogs wandering the countryside and slowly dying vs. two old people in their home slowly dying. It's hard to choose which is more inspiring.
The dogs are animated in a realistic fashion. That's probably the right choice, given the nature of the film -but that choice shackled the animation. We never connect with them, in part, because the animation is stiff and formal.


As I've written before, I'm a great admirer of how Ed Smith animates dogs. He has that rare ability to be anatomically precise, but still give life and character.

I wonder if better acting from the dogs would've made the film more enjoyable. If it would make for a stronger piece. I think so, now you cringe and look away that the painful scenes (most of the film), with sensitive animation we'd be drawn in -unable to look away.

We talk about what animation can be -"documentary", adult, personal. How films that use animation techniques can express the same depths as live action. These British films are strong plays at mature storytelling. Ultimately, they reveal more about their own culture and times than any great universal truth. That, in itself, is noteworthy.

Will today's spate of "mature" features -Persepolis, Waltz With Bashir, Mary and Max and on and on -represent a new age of intelligent storytelling using single frame technique or will they come to be seen as a byproduct of an era which prized novelty at a time when economics made animation a viable gimmick?