Tag: Annecy

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Passer-by
(De Passant)

Director – Pieter Coudyzer – 2020 – Belgium – 16m

*****

From the Annecy 2020 Online Animation Festival

This is a film about our interconnectedness or lack of it. And impossible to review without spoilers – be warned before you read on. Thomas is a typical teenager studying for exams. He needs to be woken up in the morning by his mum or he’d lie in bed all day. Confronted with a textbook of maths equations, he’d rather keep drawing that portrait he’s been working on for his friend Karen. His mobile rings. It’s Karen. He agrees to take the drawing round and meet at the bus stop. He tries to sneak out, but mum spots him. He’s forced to admit it’s Karen. Don’t be long, his mum admonishes him.

And out he goes on his bicycle, stopping en route to chat to a neighbour working in his garden. A little further on an irritating, yappy little dog runs after him. Thomas moves across the road narrowly missing an oncoming fellow cyclist. He apologises. He keeps going. A car pulls out. He hits it, goes flying across the bonnet, lands on the pavement beyond. His drawing flies up into the air, carried on its currents.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Movies Shorts

The Battle Of San Romano

Director – Georges Schwizgebel – 2017 – Switzerland – 2m 26s

*****

The Battle Of San Romano is the fourth of 13 Original Short Films in the Annecy Festival 2020’s selection for We Are One: A Global Film Festival.

This film is based on the eponymous painting by Paulo Uccello in London’s National Gallery which has produced this helpful filmed talk about it. The painting’s subject matter is a 1432 battle between two regional Italian armies. The camera as we know it today didn’t exist at that time and had it done so, Uccello might anyway not have been very interested in using it to record an historical record as such. He seems to be more interested in constructing representational images, forms, and the illusion of three dimensional space.

What interests Schwizgebel is not so much the subject of the painting but the painting itself. It’s a study of the painting in much the same way that painters make studies of subjects with a view to exploring them, perhaps for use in a larger composition. Whether he is employing animation in quite the right medium is debatable. When I say medium, I mean that of the short film.

This short feels less like a film with a beginning, middle and end and more like a cycling loop of images which could go on for ever, so much so that I’ve found myself going back to it and re-watching in whole or in part.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

I Lost My Body
(J’ai Perdu
Mon Corps)

Director – Jérémy Clapin – 2019 – France – Cert. 12a – 81m

****1/2
A severed hand searches for its body while a boy searches for the girl who he only knows from the sound of her voice in this French animated feature – from the BFI London Film Festival then in cinemas on Friday, November 22nd and on Netflix from Friday, November 29th

This unique 2D animation opens with a discussion about how to catch a fly before splitting into two parallel narratives. In one, a severed hand goes on a quest in search of the body from which it has become detached. In the other, boy meets girl. This is the boy who at a later point in the film will lose his hand in an accident. The opening fly discussion turns out to be a flashback of the boy.

The hand shows great ingenuity as it escapes rats in a subway, climbs medical skeletons in a storage room and duels with an aggressive pigeon in a roof gutter. It has a pretty hard time of it physically. And when it eventually finds its body, reuniting with it proves far from simple.

The boy, Naoufel (voiced by Hakim Faris in the seen French version and Dev Patel in the upcoming English dub), is working as a pizza delivery boy, a job to which he isn’t particularly suited.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Relative Worlds
(Ashita Sekai
Ga Owaru
To Shitemo,
あした世界
が終わる
としても)

Director – Yuhei Sakuragi – 2019 – Japan – 93m

***

Teenage romance, parallel worlds and dysfunctional families are the main ingredients of The Relative Worlds, Yuhei Sakuragi’s uneasy cross between a mawkish boy meets girl tale and a sci-fi action picture in the James Cameron mould. The romantic, emotional parts are gentle and almost hesitant. The science fiction, fantasy and action parts are fast, full on and frantic – and indeed in places quite hard to keep up with. The dysfunctional families are more a background plot device than anything else. That said, if you’re prepared to get on its wavelength (or wavelengths, plural) it’s an enjoyable enough romp, with action that looks great on a big screen… [read more]

Full review at All The Anime.

Trailer:

Festivals

2019

Scotland Loves Anime

Annecy International Animation Festival

Categories
Animation Art Movies Shorts

Memorable
(Mémorable)

Director – Bruno Collet – 2019 – France – 12m

*****

The techniques used in this remarkable short include both computer and puppet animation, with all the surfaces of both the puppets and the sets resembling that of a canvas painted with oils. It’s the perfect artistic form in which to express the story the film wishes to tell.

Louis is a painter suffering from dementia. Neither he nor his wife and model Michelle are coping well. He struggles to recognise different items of food by name at the dinner table – a bit of a problem when Michelle asks him to pass the pepper – and attempts to eat a banana without taking the skin off it first… [read more]

Nominated for Best Animated Short at the 2019 (92nd) Oscars.

As part of my Annecy 2019 coverage, I review Memorable (Mémorable) for DMovies.org.

Categories
Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Buñuel
in the Labyrinth
of the Turtles
(Buñuel
en el Laberinto
de las Tortugas)

Director – Salvador Simo – 2018 – Netherlands – 80m

***1/2

Streaming on BFI Player (extended free trial offer here) from Thursday, July 16th 2020 – with more Buñuel movies here.

Following the success of his surrealist film L’Age D’Or / The Age Of Gold (1930), film director Luis Buñuel finds his main source of funding cut off when the strongly Catholic mother of his primary investor puts pressure in the latter. At the same time, a stranger named Eli Lotar strikes up a post-premiere conversation with the director, saying he saw no influence of Dali in the film and presses a book Las Hurdes into Buñuel’s hands.

Frustrated at the lack of funding for his films, Luis decides to film the book, which details the appalling living conditions of poor people in a remote village in rural Spain.

As part of my Annecy 2019 coverage, I review Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles for DMovies.org.