Animation

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Jan Svankmajer has announced that Insects will be his final movieRead More »

A 1981 American animated musical drama film starring Ron Thompson and produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi. The film tells the story of four generations of a Russian Jewish immigrant family of musicians whose careers parallel the history of American popular music.
The majority of the film’s animation was completed through rotoscoping, a process in which live actors are filmed and the subsequent footage is used for animators to draw over. However, the film also uses a variety of other mixed media including water colors, computer graphics, live-action shots, and archival footage.
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Joanna wanted a film on the collages of Max Ernst, and I wanted to make a tribute to the two men who most influenced my film work at the beginning: Max Ernst (collage) and Luis Bunuel (surrealism in cinema).I had written a book of about 100 pages in the surrealist tradition of ‘automatic writing’, which I called the CLOUD JOURNAL. I thought I could marry some of the text of the journal with the collages of Ernst’s UNE SEMAINE DE BONTE, along with bits of my own animation.So I shot the film on day one of the Ernst collage novel (example: lion), and used the first 16 pages of my journal. I enlisted my friend and collaborator, Leroy Clark, to narrate and engineer the sound. We finished up digitally, then on 16mm film (the original format).I have nothing esoteric to say about this film, except to explain the title: it is a tribute to Luis Bunuel. There is no walrus in the film, as there is no dog in LE CHIEN ANDALOU.Read More »

A brilliant analogy to life on Earth, Happiness tells the story of a rodent’s unrelenting quest for happiness and fulfillment.Read More »

Nearly fifty years ago, a gunman rode the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor of the University of Texas Tower and opened fire. TOWER, an animated and action-packed documentary, shares the untold story of that day – when the worst in one man brought out the best in so many others. Read More »

Ёжик в тумане

Hedgehog is on his way to visit Bear cub,
to sit and count the stars, their nightly ritual. Read More »

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The animated film VISITATION unwinds through a dark landscape of unending life and death; steeped in the alchemical and inner dream life the film explores a black and white landscape of gothic figures who enact evolving metaphysical dramas. Surrealistic and strange, cast in grainy 16mm images, the film allows an imaginary glimpse within “an outer-world night…” The visions in the film are summoned from the film maker’s imagining of a mythical eternity which is beautiful but fraught with pain, exposed by the ether voices and figures which inhabit the eternal ballet beneath our consciousness. VISITATION imagines scenes from the alchemical experiments which were calculated to disclose and finally manipulate existential nature. Metals, air, fire and water were essential elements in Alchemy, and their psychological counterparts are likewise interpreted within the film as essential elements of death, cruelty, rebirth, and eternal evolution. The film was inspired by hearing wolves crying and simultaneously reading H.P. Lovecraft, a combination which led the filmmaker’s imagination into the world she then created. Using painted cut-outs and early cinema techniques (multiple passes, mattes, multi-plane levels, in-camera superimpositions, shutter manipulation, etc.) the film was shot with a 16mm Bolex camera in black and white which gives it a grainy handmade look. The abstract passages were created by placing objects directly onto raw film and exposing the film with a flashlight. Thus the film’s process mirrors the alchemical nature of chemical and material experimentation.Read More »

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A religious zealot mother kills herself to try and find her dead son and escape with him from Hell. Music by Jim Becker and filmmaker Brent Green.Read More »

Little Momi’s father has left to be a soldier and his letters are eagerly anticipated by his family at home. In one of them he recounts the adventure of little highlander Berto, who saved his mother from an attack by the Austrians by running to warn the Italian troops. Momi is impressed by the tale and falls asleep on the sofa, hugging his favourite toys, agile Trick and violent Track; as soon as the child is sleeping Trick, Track and their troops unleash a battle with a vengeance, featuring heavy artillery, chemical weapons and air attacks. Finally, in the vehemence of their clash, Momi is involved as well and prodded with bayonets. Nevertheless… it is only a rose thorn and the battle was only a dream. Momi confidently keeps looking forward to the return of his father from the front, together with his mother and grandfather. This masterpiece by the wizard of “special effects” Segundo de Chomón is a war story, divided into a first live-action part and a second animated one in stop-motion, with a skill that still leaves one gaping even today. Visual inventions and sophisticated technical solutions follow each other: from the bellows sucking in the fumes of the chemical attack to the soda bottle used to extinguish fires in the city of Lilliput after the air incursion. Read More »