Tag: animator

The King and the Mockingbird
(Le Roi et L’Oiseau)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 5 August 2024
No Comments on The King and the Mockingbird
(Le Roi et L’Oiseau)

This triple review was originally published in Third Way, April 2014.

The King and the Mockingbird (Le Roi et L’Oiseau)

Director – Paul Grimault – 1980 – France – Cert. U – 83m

UK release date 11/04/2014

*****

Wrinkles (Arrugas)

Director – Ignacio Ferreras – 2011 – Spain – Cert. 15 – 89m

UK release date 18/04/2014

*****

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu, 風立ちぬ)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2013 – Japan – Cert. PG – 126m

UK release date 09/05/2014

****

Animation is all-too often regarded – if not dismissed – as a children’s medium, yet it’s no more (or less) so than live action. Animated features aimed at a grown-up audience are rare. Incredibly, three are released this month.

The first, The King and the Mockingbird (1980), originally released here thirty years ago as The King And Mr. Bird and known equally by its French title Le Roi et L’Oiseau, may contain nothing you wouldn’t want children to see but is actually a remarkable fable about overcoming a totalitarian regime. Considered among the greatest animated films ever made, it’s a major influence on Miyazaki (see below). This labour of love by director/animator Paul Grimault, based on a poetic screenplay by Jacques Prévert (Les Enfants Du Paradis, Marcel Carné, 1945) deals with a despotic king in a towering castle festooned with trap doors which he uses to dispose of anyone and everyone who disagrees with him.… Read the rest

Animation Features Movies

Wrinkles (Arrugas)

This triple review was originally published in Third Way, April 2014.

The King and the Mockingbird (Le Roi Et L’Oiseau)

Director – Paul Grimault – 1980 – France – Cert. U – 83m

UK release date 11/04/2014

*****

Wrinkles (Arrugas)

Director – Ignacio Ferreras – 2011 – Spain – Cert. 15 – 89m

UK release date 18/04/2014

*****

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu, 風立ちぬ)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2013 – Japan – Cert. PG – 126m

UK release date 09/05/2014

****

The first, The King and the Mockingbird (1980), originally released here thirty years ago as The King And Mr. Bird and known equally by its French title Le Roi Et L’Oiseau, may contain nothing you wouldn’t want children to see but is actually a remarkable fable about overcoming a totalitarian regime. Considered among the greatest animated films ever made, it’s a major influence on Miyazaki (see below). This labour of love by director/animator Paul Grimault, based on a poetic screenplay by Jacques Prévert (Les Enfants Du Paradis, Marcel Carné, 1945) deals with a despotic king in a towering castle festooned with trap doors which he uses to dispose of anyone and everyone who disagrees with him.… Read the rest

Animation Features Movies

The Wind Rises
(Kaze Tachinu,
風立ちぬ)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 2 August 2024
No Comments on The Wind Rises
(Kaze Tachinu,
風立ちぬ)

This triple review was originally published in Third Way, April 2014.

The King and the Mockingbird (Le Roi Et L’Oiseau)

Director – Paul Grimault – 1980 – France – Cert. U – 83m

UK release date 11/04/2014

*****

Wrinkles (Arrugas)

Director – Ignacio Ferreras – 2011 – Spain – Cert. 15 – 89m

UK release date 18/04/2014

*****

The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu, 風立ちぬ)

Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2013 – Japan – Cert. PG – 126m

UK release date 09/05/2014

****

Tags 2D animation, aeronautical displays, ageing population, aircraft, aircraft designer, animation, animator, care home, castle, comic, designer, despot, égalité, elderly, fictionalise, flying machines, France, fraternité, Hayao Miyazaki, Ignacio Ferreras, Jacques Prévert, Japan, Joji Horikoshi, king, liberté, liberté égalité fraternité, manga, marriage, Mitsubushi, Mitsubushi Zero, novel, Paco Roca, patients, Paul Grimault, poetic, printed comic, private life, reach for the skies romance, relatives, residents, sanatorium, Second World War, Spain, Studio Ghibli, taboo, talking bird, Tatsuo Hori, TB, terminally ill, test flights, Three Colours, tower, trap doors, war, wartime, World War 2, World War II, World War Two, WW2

Animation Art Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Exhibition on Screen:
My National Gallery

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 4 June 2024
No Comments on Exhibition on Screen:
My National Gallery
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Director – Phil Grabsky, Ali Ray – 2024 – UK – Cert. U – 98m

*****

Employees, punters and celebrities choose their favourite painting in London’s National Gallery – out in UK cinemas from Tuesday, June 4th

There have been documentary films about the UK’s National Gallery before, notably the wonderful, three-hour-long National Gallery (Frederick Wiseman, 2014), so, in a way, it’s a brave subject for the Exhibition on Screen people to take on. And yet, as a British production company making movies about art in art galleries, it was inevitable that they would tackle the subject sooner or later. Their version commences with a likeable enough establishing montage of what one might call ‘behind the scenes’ and ‘footfall’ – shots of various National Gallery employees at work opening the door, looking after various aspects of the art housed in the gallery and even putting out tasty-looking croissants in the cafeteria.

There are satisfying little touches throughout. A shot of The Feast Day of Saint Roch, Canaletto, with out of focus people passing in front of it, makes it feel like you’re really there in the scene depicted.

Alan Allison, security officer and gallery assistant (pictured on the front of the trailer, below) wears black clothing with a striking, patterned blue tie.… Read the rest

Tags “the Python foot”, air raid, Ali Ray, animator, architect, aristocracy, art, art galleries, art history, ballet school, behind the scenes, bereavement, British Sign Language, British society, broken string, BSL, Canada House, Canaletto, celeb, children, classical piano concerts, closing announcement, collector, colonial bubble, Crown Estates, Dame Myra Hess, deaf, diplomacy, diversity, Edgar Degas, Exhibition On Screen, fathers and daughters, feminism, film festival, Florence, footfall, Giovanni Bellini, grandad, grandfather, grandma, grandmother, hang, Hetty Feather, horror film, horror movie, Houses of Parliament, Humphrey Jennings, Impressionists, Italy, Jacqueline Wilson, John Nash, Jonathan Conlin, Kenneth Clark, lack of representation, lute, Madonna, Michael Palin, monsters, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, mothers and sons, Narcotics Anonymous, National Gallery, Nelson’s Column, nineteenth century, occult, one-painting show, painter, parents and children, Phil Grabsky, Pierre-August Renoir, Public Record Office, punctuation, pyramid, Royal Academy, safe storage place, science fiction, seventeenth century, Sir George Beaumont, skull, slave trade, Stewart McAllister, Syphilis, Terry Gilliam, the City of London, The Strand, Trafalgar Square, Turner, twentieth century, university, venereal, Venus, Westminster, witchcraft, witches

Animation Features Live Action Movies

Stopmotion

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 31 May 2024
No Comments on Stopmotion
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Director – Robert Morgan – 2023 – UK – Cert. 18 – 93m

***1/2

The bereaved daughter of a stop-frame animator attempts to complete her late mother’s last film – out on Shudder UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand from Friday, May 31st

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: this is not what it says on the tin. Anyone expecting another Mad God (Phil Tippett, 1987-2021, and a long-standing Shudder favourite) or Junk Head (Takahide Hori, 2021) is going to be disappointed. This is not a stop-motion film; it’s a stop-motion / live action combination film, with the physical stop-motion component of the production forming maybe a tenth of the whole.

Unless, of course, you’re looking only at story or script. In which case, this film is all about stop-motion animation and obsession. But executed in live action. Because, after all, who would want to spend all their time moving a puppet a bit, then shooting a frame, then moving it a bit more, and taking another frame, and so on when you can shoot live action and capture a shot of whatever length on film? (The answer is, anyone who loves animation generally and stop-motion animation in particular.)… Read the rest

Animation Features Movies

Junk Head

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 21 April 2023
No Comments on Junk Head
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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