Tag: drawing

Categories
Art Features Live Action Movies

Tove

Creator of the Moomins

Tove
Directed by Zaida Bergroth
Certificate 12, 103 minutes
Released 9 July

The Swedish-speaking Finnish writer and artist Tove Jansson is best known as the creator of the Moomins, a friendly family of trolls who live in Moominvalley, who appeared in her own books, newspaper strips and plays for children. The Moomins later spawned numerous animated movies, TV shows, and more. Tove also painted pictures, wrote novels, and worked as an illustrator.

Set in the period from the end of the Second World War up to her signing a contract for a Moomin cartoon strip for the Evening News, this drama focuses on both Jansson’s turbulent personal life, and her creation and development of the Moomins during that time.

Born into a family of artists who take pity on all non-artists, Tove (Alma Pöysti) is a free-spirited type at odds with her conventional sculptor father Viktor (Robert Enckell). [Read more…]

Full review published in Reform.

Tove is out in cinemas and in the UK from Friday, July 9th.

Trailer:

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Feeling
From Mountain
And Water
(Shan Shui Qing,
山水情)

Directors – Te Wei, Ma Kexuan, Yan San Chun – 1988 – China – Cert. N/C U – 20m

*****

Against a backdrop of mountains, rivers and the sea, a boy learns to play zither from an old master – available to rent online in the UK & Ireland as part of the Shanghai Animation Film Studio Retro in the Chinese Cinema Season 2021 from Friday, February 12th to Wednesday, May 12th

A bearded man carries a package through a mountainous, water-strewn landscape. A boy gives him a ride on his boat. When the man collapses after leaving the boat, the boy takes him to his house. The package turns out to be a zither. The man plays. The boy learns and is soon playing skilfully.

The plot here, such as it is, is really just an excuse to move the camera around incredible ink and watercolour landscapes and, in places, move objects such as the two main characters, the boy’s boat, fish in the river or water trickling down a mountainside in a style which fits with that. That’s an admirable aim and the film succeeds in spades. 

There are static marks on the screen which you know to be merely brush strokes, yet they convey, for example, an outcrop of rock visible in the snow or a small islet surrounded by water.… Read the rest

Categories
Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies Series Shorts Television

Greenaway
By Numbers

How Peter Greenaway’s obsession with various numeric and other cataloguing systems has led to the creation of highly complex, multi-layered film pieces that joyfully play with audiences

If ever anyone were to make a film about the Dewey Decimal System, it would be Peter Greenaway. He is obsessed with ways and means to classify the world in which he finds himself, systems to organise and make sense of that peculiar world, people’s relationship networks with one another and their movement and actions within that world and those networks.

I first came across him on the theatrical release in Hammersmith of his three hours plus epic The Falls (1980), made in between his early, self-financed short films of the 1960s and 1970s and his first, more conventional in length feature The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). The Falls takes its name from entries in the section of a directory beginning with the letters F A L L e.g. Orchard Falla, Constance Ortuist Fallaburr, Melorder Fallaburr. The directory chronicles survivors of a Violent Unknown Event, VUE for short… [read more]

Full article at DMovies.org in association with Doesn’t Exist Magazine – purchase your copy now.