Tag: stop-frame

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Tetsuo II:
Body Hammer
(鉄男II
Body Hammer)

Director – Shinya Tsukamoto – 1992 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 83m

*****

The Iron Man Tetsuo is back… and this time, he’s got a wife and child – sequel to the cyberpunk classic was first released November 10th 1992, when this review appeared in Manga Mania.

On Arrow Channel from Friday, September 22nd.

Where Tetsuo: The Iron Man is shot in raw black and white, Tetsuo II: Body Hammer‘s bigger budget enables a thematic reworking with not only colour film stock but also vast improvements in special effects technique (although these retain the no-budget, hands-on quality that renders them so compelling). The sleazy sexual imagery is jettisoned, the terrorized salaryman (Tomoroh Taguchi again) paired with more respectable wife Kana (played by Nobu Kanaoka, Iron Man’s subway attacker) replacing the terminally randy girlfriend. The couple now have a young child.

Tetsuo II thus launches its attack on nuclear family rather than single salaryman, with the infant kidnapped (and subsequently rent asunder) before his eyes early on in the proceedings by muscle-bound heavies hailing from the local smelting factory (occasioning much imagery of both high fetishist body building and equally high temperature molten metal varieties). Once again, Tsukamoto himself plays one of the salaryman’s opponents, on both occasions wearing a vest marked with an “X”.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Live Action Movies

Tokyo Fist
(東京フィスト)

Director – Shinya Tsukamoto – 1995 – Japan – Cert. 18 – 87m

*****

Shinya Tsukamoto ventures outside his Tetsuo trappings to deliver further explorations of the ‘New Flesh’ in boxing movie garb.

On Arrow Channel from Friday, September 22nd.

This review is an amalgam of my reviews for What’s On In London and Manga Mania.

Right from its opening angled camera of gym sparring partners, everything about apparent boxing movie Tokyo Fist is relentless. Apparent because this is the latest highly idiosyncratic offering from Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto, the crazed genius behind the brilliant if unhinged Tetsuo films. Don’t be fooled by the boxing gloves – this is another round in the director’s ongoing engagement with the ‘New Flesh’, minus the science-fictional surface trappings.

Underpinned by another memorable Chu Ishikawa score, it opens in typically bravura fashion with slanted tracking camera shots of sparring partners in a gym, morphing moments later into a visual wipe in the manner of a knockout punch as a fist hurtles towards the viewer and the images disintegrates via a stop-motion iris constructed of offal.

The plot has an insurance salesman whose career is foundering run into an old school friend who is now a professional boxer.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

The Old Man
Movie
Lactopalypse!
(Vanamehe Film)

Directors – Oskar Lehemaa, Mikk Mägi – 2019 – Estonia – Cert. 15 – 88m

***

A farmer and his grandchildren must recapture his unmilked cow before its udders burst into lactopalypse – stop-frame epic is out in UK cinemas on Friday, June 2nd and currently screening in previews

Estonia’s answer to Britain’s Shaun The Sheep, this feature spin-off from long-running, popular, puppet animation TV comedy series Vanamehe Multikas (Old Man Cartoon) shows Estonian sensibilities to be very different from those of the British. This is aimed at not as you might expect children but rather the young adult market – it’s stuffed full of sexual innuendo and toilet or other bodily function humour. Since I can imagine it being an uproarious experience with the right audience, it’s a shame to have first seen this online rather than in a packed movie theatre owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bookended by black and white newsreel of Old Milker’s disastrous failure to stop a cow’s unmilked udders exploding into a lactopolypse complete with milk mushroom cloud, the plot has three kids sent to stay with their grandpa on his farm for the summer. Their family car back seat introduction shows us teenage boy Priidik and girl Aino constantly on their mobile phones while their pre-teen boy sibling Mart has built an incredible, fully functioning, miniature robot cow for grandpa.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Junk Head

All images: ©2021 MAGNET/YAMIKEN

Director – Takahide Hori – 2021 – Japan – Cert. 15 – 101m

****1/2

A cyborg is dropped from the planet’s surface into its depths by his immortal but impotent masters to investigate the beings who have evolved in the levels below – feature length, stop-frame epic is out in UK cinemas on Monday, April 24th

More, I suspect, by accident than design, Junk Head looks and feels like the wandering little sister of Mad God (Phil Tippett, 2021). The latter was made by a top Hollywood stop-frame effects animator as a 34-year, independent, labour of love, the former by a Japanese visionary as a seven-year, independent, labour of love. Hori had worked on puppetry at Tokyo Disneyland and became obsessed with stop-motion, inspired by Motoko Shinkai’s one-man debut 2D animated production Voices of A Distant Star (2002). He made a half hour version Junk Head 1 in 2013, and used it as a building block to this version, which he completed in 2017.

The production mode of stop-frame can be a solitary one involving one person alone in a room with a camera and armatured puppets, the approach typified by Willis O’Brien, Ray Harryhausen, the bolexbrothers, Jiri Trnka, Kihachiro Kawamoto, the early David Lynch and many others – a single person or very small number of people producing the work, either complete films or stop-frame effects sequences within live action films.… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Shazam!
Fury Of The Gods

Director – David F. Sandberg – 2023 – US – Cert. – 130m

***1/2

Three Daughters of Atlas enter present day Philadelphia to repossess a staff which contains power that has been stolen from them; immature teenager recast as adult superhero Shazam! and his six superhero companions must stop them – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 17th

Something of an oddity in the DC Comics canon, Shazam! concerns Philadelphia teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who inadvertently absorbs superpower energy which enables him to transform into the adult superhero Shazam! (Zachary Levi) by merely uttering the word “Shazam!” However, despite the adult physique, he still thinks like a teenager. Outside of superhero life, he is one of seven orphans who, since the end of the original Shazam! (David F. Sandberg, 2019), have had the same thing happen to them. So, seven children, seven superheroes. And their two put-upon foster parents, Rosa and Victor Vásquez (Marta Milans and Cooper Andrews).

To be honest, I could take or leave the title character (as played by teenager Angel and adult Levi) but the other kids are likeable enough – at least to the extent that their characters are fleshed out here… and some are fleshed out far more than others in the narrative.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Marcel The Shell
With Shoes On

Director – Dean Fleischer Camp – Co-Creator – Jenny Slate – 2021 – US – Cert. PG – 90m

***

A man makes a documentary about tiny, stop-frame animation shell character Marcel and his granny, the rest of whose family have mysteriously disappeared – out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 17th

Expectations are a funny thing. I’m a huge admirer of both stop-frame as a medium and films which mix up animation and live action. This film does that in a fresh and original way. At its core is a cute little critter named Marcel, part extraordinary visual conceit, part improvised voice over by actress and co-creator Jenny Slate, continuing a long tradition of women voicing small boys in animation.

Slate didn’t just voice the character, though – she originally created the voice as a joke and then Dean Fleischer Camp, suddenly needing to shoot a short film quickly for a commission, threw together a shell, an eye and some tiny shoes to create a unique and, indeed, distinctive-looking character. The character and the short film in which he starred became an internet sensation.

For this feature, the pair have crafted a story in which documentary filmmaker Camp (playing himself) finds himself living in the house which tiny Marcel (voice: Slate) occupies with his ageing and vulnerable grandmother Connie (voice: Isabella Rosellini), their quite considerable extended family having mysteriously disappeared.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Guillermo del Toro’s
Pinocchio

Directors – Guillermo del Toro, Mark Gustafson – 2022 – US – Cert. PG – 114m

*****

Created as a puppet by a bereaved, religious woodcarver father, a little wooden boy must make his way in a world of ruthless show business, Fascism and war – stop-frame puppet movie is out on Netflix on Friday, December 9th

Co-helmed by Will Vinton alumnus Gustafson, del Toro’s Carlo Collodi adaptation sees him return to the theme of the Catholic Church collaborating with Fascism that he previously explored in Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The story roughly follows the familiar template of Disney’s Pinocchio (1940), even down to punctuating the action with songs, but with the loosely defined place and time of a fairytale shifted to a very specific Italy before (briefly) and during World War II, with Pleasure Island replaced by a boys’ military training camp. The emphasis has shifted, too, from the notion of the narrator cricket character as conscience to coming to terms with mortality, although the idea that just because things appear to be fun they may not necessarily be good is knocking around in there too.

A narrator who will later identify himself as Sebastian J. Cricket (voice: Ewan McGregor) introduces us to churchgoing woodcarver Gepetto (voice: David Bradley), who is working on a statue of Jesus Christ crucified for the local church, raising dutiful son Carlo (voice: Gregory Mann), an equally religious child with a true sense of wonder at the world around him, including planes in the sky.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Claydream

Director – Marq Evans – 2021 – US – 96m

****

The rise and fall of stop-frame Claymation pioneer Will Vinton and the Portland, Oregon animation studio that bore his name – out on digital from Monday, November 21st

Will Vinton, founder of Will Vinton Studios and the man who made Claymation a US household name, is in the middle of legal proceedings between himself and Phil Knight, founder of multimillion shoe company Nike. How could these two very different individuals have come into contact with one another? Well, they had a number of things in common. Both were residents of Portland, Oregon who had built up businesses there based on a successful brand name.

In the sixties, while studying architecture at Berkeley, Vinton discovered Gaudi’s organic sculptured shapes which were to influence his animation work. Borrowing his dad’s 16mm camera, he started shooting anything and everything going on around campus. At an experimental film community he set up tabletop clay animation sessions, which would often turn out pornographic footage. He became fascinated by the magical process which imbued this material with life.

Closed Mondays

He built a studio in his house where in collaboration with artist and sculptor Bob Gardiner he made the short film Closed Mondays (1974) as an excuse to show off the techniques developed by the pair.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Mad God

Director – Phil Tippett – 1987-2021 – US – 83m

*****

A man in a gas mask descends into a dark, dangerous world on a mysterious mission, encountering strange creatures, humanoids and societal constructs along the way – stop-frame epic 34 years in the making – as of Tuesday, June 28th, has become the most watched premier of 2022 on Shudder, where it plays in both the UK and the US from Thursday, June 16th; also plays London’s Prince Charles Cinema Tuesday. July 5th to Friday, July 8th and from Monday, December 5th is on Blu-ray, DVD and digital

My immediate reaction after watching this was two-fold. On the one hand, wow!!! On the other, how on earth do I put the experience of watching this into words? Mad God definitely has a structure, yet what’s amazing about it is the visuals, the animation, the effects. Even though I’m familiar with the work of its director Phil Tippett (as one of the heirs apparent to stop-motion maestro Ray Harryhausen in the world of visual effects – career highlights include RoboCop, 1987; Jurassic Park, 1993, Starship Troopers, 1997) this film is something altogether different (even if its roots can be seen in his VFX work).… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Scenes With Beans
(Babfilm)

Director – Ottó Foky – 1976 – Hungary – 12m

*****

A metal space bird approaches the bean planet to observe various aspects of life upon it before being discovered then shot at with a missile in this remarkable stop-frame short – out on MUBI as part of the animated shorts season Fables, Folklore, Futurism: Visionary Hungarian Animations on Monday, September 20th

Framed by a story of a giant alien metal bird observing a planet from space, this is primarily an excuse to create numerous scenarios using animated kidney beans and butter beans to stand in as people in a 3D, model animated world. It’s the sort of film where you constantly marvel at the inventiveness of shooting scenes in a particular style of animation which, were they shots in a live action documentary, would simply appear banal – but in the form here presented prove completely compelling.

A crescent moon resembling nothing so much as a croissant floats past the planet. The approaching giant bird looks like it could have wandered in from the Clangers stop-frame BBC TV series (Oliver Postgate, 1969-72, 1974) except that it’s less a character like that show’s fabled Soup Dragon than a tech-equipped space opera craft with a visual recording device that has a calibrated viewfinder like a camera or a periscope.… Read the rest