Category: Animation

Categories
Animation Art Features Movies

Son
Of The White Mare
(Fehérlófia)

Director – Marcell Jankovics – 1981 – Hungary – Cert. 12 – 86m

*****

Based on Hungarian folk legends, tells the story of three sons of the white mare who must free three princesses from their dragon husbands and restore the kingdom from chaos – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival in the Special Screenings – Annecy Classics section

This has a script sourced from Hungarian folk tales. While it’s very cinematic, the writing is similar to religious texts like the Bible or mythological stories like the Iliad where events are related in a paired down, straightforward way no matter how far removed from everyday experience they might be. Thus, there’s a prologue about three princes begging their father for their inheritance so they can marry, only for their foolish new brides to disobey the patriarch and explore all the castle’s locked doors until they unwittingly unleash a dragon and are sucked into its domain.

In the ensuing chaos, the only hope comes when the white mare births two sons then escapes into the woods pregnant with a third. She weans him for eight years until her milk makes him strong enough to uproot a tree. Drained of milk, she dies.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Art Movies Shorts

Opera

Director – Erick Oh – 2020 – South Korea – 9m

*****

Compelling, Oscar-nominated schematic of a self-contained society’s infrastructure behaviour and movement of groups of people within it over a day and a night – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival in the Short Films In Competition section – Official 4

This feels like it ought to exist as an art exhibit in a gallery playing over and over again. Watching it online, I went back and immediately rewatched bits of it until I’d seen the whole thing about five times. It’s like a massive moving painting where the camera starts at the top and slowly works its way down to the bottom before slowly panning up again. It makes me wonder if an installation version exists without the panning where visitor can just watch the whole thing on repeat until they’ve taken it all in.

It’s a picture of a self-contained society with the ruler at the top (and a deity above him/her), an elite, the workers at the bottom and several strata in between. In the space of nine minutes, we watch the sun come up and the society go through its daily ritual from morning to night then daily renewal in the morning.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Features Movies

Lamya’s Poem

Director – Alex Kronemer – 2021 – US, Canada – 88m

****1/2

A young Syrian girl becomes a refugee at the same time as she explores the writings of 13th century poet Rumi in her dreams – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival in the Official Competition section

Lamya (Millie Davis) is a young girl living with her mum (Aya Bryn) in a city in Syria, her dad having been killed when he went out on a protest. Her tutor Mr. Habadani (Raoul Bhaneja) lends her a thick book of selected poetry by Rumi knowing her to be a voracious reader who will both get much out of the book and take good care of it.

Distant bombing raids seem to come closer every day until one day everyone needs to evacuate the locality. The day in question, Lamya has begged her mum to let her go to the shops with friends. Buying treats, she puts her backpack containing the poetry book on the floor only to find it gone seconds later.

The thief, a young boy named Bassam (Nissae Isen), is reprimanded by his mother and told to return the bag. A bomb raid turns the locality upside down. Unaware of Bassam and what’s been happening with him, Lamya finds the returned bag in the wreckage.… Read the rest

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
Animation Features Movies

Calamity.
A Childhood
Of Martha Jane Cannary (Calamity.
Une Enfance
De Martha Jane Cannary)

Director – Rémi Chayé – 2020 – France – 85m

****

A young girl dresses as a man to survive in the Wild West in this extraordinary 2D, colour animated film – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival

Martha Jane Cannary is travelling across the US in a wagon, part of a larger convoy, with her father and her two younger siblings Lena and Elijah. Leading the train is Abraham, an austere and traditional man who isn’t good at taking criticism. Martha Jane has frequent arguments with his son Ethan. Her dad Robert is generally looked down upon, a situation scarcely helped by his wagon’s wheel coming off on a hillside road causing the convoy to grind to a halt or his attempt to lasso a horse to show that he is skilful which ends in his getting two broken ribs and a broken leg when the horse gets out of control.

With her dad unconscious in the back of their wagon, she is assigned Ethan as driver and manages to persuade him to let her try driving. She also borrows a pair of her dad’s jeans as she finds them much easier to get around in than the dress she’s supposed to wear.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Black Barbie

Director – Comfort Arthur – 2016 – Ghana – 3m 36s

*****

In the programme Today, African Animation – A Tribute To The African Continent – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival hybrid and online editions

This is structured around a reading of a poem by a girl whose mother gives her a Black Barbie doll for her birthday. She hates it – “I want the white one”. Using a variety of 2D animation styles and the occasional bit of human pixilation, Arthur produces simple, arresting images of black girls alienated from the physical basics of their existence by a society that constantly tells them white skin colour is significant and black skin and curly hair is something to deny. The film maker lifts all this above the level of mere polemic by making her images, some of which are no more complex than animated child’s drawings, constantly arresting, doing both her cause and the medium in which she’s expressing it proud.

This film is not suitable for children.

Festivals

2021

Annecy Animation Festival special hybrid and online editions:

Monday, June 14th to Saturday, June 19th.

Festival Trailer:

2020

Annecy Animation Festival special online edition:

Monday, June 15th to Tuesday, June 30th.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Archipelago
(Archipel)

Director – Félix Dufour-Laperrière – 2021 – Canada – 72m

****

A journey along an estuary traversing its archipelago, perhaps real, perhaps imagined, a trip into an obscure territory of the mind – from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival in the Official Competition Contrechamp section

Defying easy categorisation, this is a conversation between a woman on a journey and a man trying to convince her of her non-existence. The woman’s shape first appears as a framing device – through the moving shape that defines her we see locations, places and more. Eventually we see her too, as her representation changes from a moving window shape to a simple animated line drawing defining her features against what can be seen through the window of her shape.

Numerous elements jostle for attention as the film proceeds. On one level, it’s a journey along the Gulf of St Lawrence in the French-speaking part of Canada, the estuary of the river which connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean. A train journey is represented by the view through a carriage window. There are numerous islands, some of which may be real. There are clips from black and white and occasionally colour travelogue documentary films.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

The Very
Hungry
Caterpillar
And Other Stories

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Director – Andrew Goff – 1994 – UK – Cert. U – 35m

*****

VHS tape review from What’s On In London sometime back in the mid-1990s, republished here to coincide with the sad news of writer / illustrator Eric Carle’s death at 91.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Other Stories is based on the stories of German writer / illustrator Eric Carle and genuinely manages to make infant learning a fun experience. The title story, for instance, traverses days of the week, basic numeracy and simple sentence structure at the same time (“On Monday, he ate one apple, but he was still hungry. On Tuesday, he ate two pears…”) aided by a Roger McGough voice over that would stand up pretty well as a pre-recorded audio cassette in its own right.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar

The film has further fun still with the animation medium. The caterpillar is cleverly reconceived as a series of joined-up flat shapes, while the cut-out animation techniques used prove not only the perfect vehicle for Carle’s material, but are imaginatively used which renders them watchable over and over again by adults and children alike.

Other Carle stories featured include The Very Quiet Cricket and I See A Song.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

Snow Kid
(Xue Hai Zi,
雪孩子)

a.k.a. The Snow Child

Director – Lin Wenxiao – 1980 – China – Cert. N/C – 20m

***

A mother and her daughter build a snow child which comes to life and later saves the girl’s life – 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

Made a couple of years ahead of the perennial British Christmas TV animated favourite The Snowman (Jimmy T. Murakami, Dianne Jackson, 1982), this similarly has a story of a child making a snowman which then comes to life. A mother rabbit and her daughter live in a small house near the woods. The mother prepares food while her daughter plays with a rocking toy then suggests she and the child make a snowman, so they go outside and do exactly that.

After the mother has coaxed the child into using for the snowman’s eyes two precious longan seeds the child plans to plant next Spring, the girl tries to add a nose, but when her back is turned, the snow child pulls the carrot off and throws it on the ground.… Read the rest

Categories
Animation Movies Shorts

If Anything Happens
I Love You

Directors – Will McCormack, Michael Govier – 2020 – US – 12m

*****

A couple and their spirit selves are haunted by a tragic loss from their family’s past in this beautifully economic, drawn animated short about grief and loss – on Netflix and winner of Best Animated Short at the 2020 / 2021 (93rd) Oscars

Drawn animation. A couple eat at home. Meatballs and spaghetti. Silently. Drawn in stark, gloomy black and white lines. Behind them, in sharply outlined areas of black smudge, the shadows of their spirit selves or perhaps their memories argue. This relationship is in trouble.

They go about the business of everyday living, in empty black and white, trying to snatch moments of individual joy where they can. He wanders round the outside of the house, noticing once again that bit of plasterwork he really should get fixed. She tends the potted plants and takes the laundry out of the machine, picking up the child-sized blue t-shirt. He sits watching the TV with a can of drink. She wanders into the bedroom with the empty bed and somehow the record player and a pop song gets turned on.

Happier times, playing football with their daughter (10) in the garden, the ball taking off a chuck of the wall cladding.… Read the rest