Veteran British animator Bob Godfrey (1921-2013) answers the question "What Is Animation?" His answer is by turns witty, iconoclastic and insightful and all the while is acted out by a tiny man in a bowler hat.
This hand-drawn film is based upon an interview recorded by Martin Pickles in 2006 at Bob’s Acme Studio in South East London.
An earlier version of the film was made especially for the Bob Godfrey retrospective at the Bradford Animation Festival in November 2013.
Meeting Bob Godfrey at Animafest Zagreb in 2004 inspired Martin to become a full-time animator and to study Animation at the Royal College of Art.
Waltz with Bashir is a 2008 Israeli animated war documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories of his experience as a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon War.
This film and $9.99, also released in 2008, are the first Israeli animated feature-length films released theatrically since Alina and Yoram Gross's Ba'al Hahalomot (1962). Waltz with Bashir premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it entered the competition for the Palme d'Or, and since then has won and been nominated for many additional important awards while receiving wide acclaim from critics. It won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature. The film is officially banned in Lebanon.
The film took four years to complete. It is unusual in it being a feature-length documentary made almost entirely by the means of animation. It combines classical music, 1980s music, realistic graphics, and surrealistic scenes together with illustrations similar to comics. The entire film is animated, excluding one short segment of news archive footage.
The animation, with its dark hues representing the overall feel of the film, uses a unique style invented by Yoni Goodman at the Bridgit Folman Film Gang studio in Israel. The technique is often confused with rotoscoping, an animation style that uses drawings over live footage, but is actually a combination of Adobe Flash cutouts and classic animation.Each drawing was sliced into hundreds of pieces which were moved in relation to one another, thus creating the illusion of movement. The film was first shot in a sound studio as a 90-minute video and then transferred to a storyboard. From there 2,300 original illustrations were drawn based on the storyboard, which together formed the actual film scenes using Flash animation, classic animation, and 3D technologies.
The original soundtrack was composed by minimalist electronic musician Max Richter while the featured songs are by OMD ("Enola Gay"), PiL ("This is Not a Love Song"), Navadey Haukaf (נוודי האוכף )("Good Morning Lebanon", written for the film), The Clique ("Incubator"), and Zeev Tene (a remake of the Cake song "I Bombed Korea", retitled "Beirut"). Some reviewers have viewed the music as playing an active role as commentator on events instead of simple accompaniment.
The comics medium, in particular Joe Sacco,the novels Catch-22, The Adventures of Wesley Jackson, and Slaughterhouse-Five, and painter Otto Dix were mentioned by Folman and art director David Polonsky as influences on the film. The film itself was adapted into a graphic novel in 2009.
That Dragon, Cancer is a video game created by Ryan and Amy Green, Josh Larson, and a small team under the name Numinous Games. The autobiographical game is based on the Greens' experience of raising their son Joel, who was diagnosed with terminal cancer at twelve months old, and though only given a short time to live, continued to survive for four more years before eventually succumbing to the cancer in March 2014. The game is designed to have the player experience the low and high moments of this period in the style of a point-and-click adventure game, using the medium's interactivity and immersion to relate the tale in ways that a film cannot. The game initially was developed to relate Ryan and Amy's personal experience with Joel when they were uncertain of his health, but following his death, they reworked much of the game to memorialize and personalize their time and interactions with Joel for the player. Alongside the game, a documentary Thank You for Playing, documenting both the last few years of Joel's life and the development of the game, has been filmed to be aired in 2016.
That Dragon, Cancer was initially aimed for release as a time-limited exclusive for the Ouya, who helped to fund the game's development. With expanded funding and a larger scope to the game, the developers engaged in a Kickstarter crowd funding, in association with Ouya, to secure additional funds to complete the game and assuring simultaneous release on other platforms including Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. The game was released on January 12, 2016, on what would have been Joel's seventh birthday. The game was praised for being a raw autobiographical experience from the parents' view, making the player deal with the difficult emotions and the strength of the Greens' faith.
A documentary about the Greens and their development of That Dragon, Cancer was announced in April 2014, entitled Thank You For Playing. The film was produced by David Osit and Malika Zouhali-Worrall independent of the game's development. The documentary was picked up by PBS as part of their "POV Documentary" series, to air in 2016, while a preview airing was shown in August 2015 at the PAX Expo. Through a successful Kickstarter, the film will also have a limited theatrical run before its digital release in March 2016. That Dragon, Cancer and Ryan Green were also featured in the 2015 documentary GameLoading: Rise of The Indies.
Drew Christie’s second film in the programme is Psychedelic Blues, an animated interview with ‘freak folk band’ Holy Modal Rounders which explores their formation and early days. This is a non-stop, acid- and amphetamine-fuelled celebratory rollercoaster of music and absurdity. The characters move fluidly between their old and young selves, caught up in moments that they’d never forget, if only they could remember. The gonzo glory of the memories is tempered by a twinge of sadness, evoked by the fragility in the voice of the ageing, drug-saturated narrator, allowing an openness in terms of how the film can be received.
BABA from joel kefali on Vimeo.
Baba is a colourful and entertaining short by New Zealand filmmaker Joel Kefali, in which his grandfather describes his experience of arriving in the country as a Turkish immigrant many years before. The film successfully captures the experience and character of an exuberant man, baffled by certain cultural oddities but ultimately filled with humour and joy of life; able to take the world on and adapt to his strange new environment.
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