Tag: Will Vinton

Air

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 4 April 2023
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Director – Ben Affleck – 2023 – US – Cert. 15 – 112m

***1/2

In 1984, a Nike executive lifts the company out of its financial rut by building a line of running shoes around an unknown basketball player named Michael Jordan – out in UK cinemas on Wednesday, April 5th

A curious combination of sports movie and corporate drama, this retells the story of how, in 1984, the failing Nike corporation managed to successfully reinvent itself by signing a sponsorship deal with the then-unknown basketball player Michael Jordan and building a product line of running shoes around him. Jordan would go on to become a huge cultural icon in the US and Nike a hugely profitable multinational, due in no small part to its Air Jordan running shoes, which the player endorsed.

This is a Warner Bros. movie and that Studio already has a long-standing connection with Michael Jordan through Space Jam (Joe Pytka, 1996), the live action / animation composite feature that combined basketball with Looney Tunes characters and spawned a sequel in 2021. Air isn’t a Michael Jordan film as such: as a character, he barely appears, but there’s a sense that he’s at the centre of the events portrayed as everything here revolves around him.… Read the rest

Animation Features Movies

Guillermo del Toro’s
Pinocchio

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 9 December 2022
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Pinocchio
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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

Tags accent, action, adaptation, afterlife, anteroom, assistant, bad contract, bereavement, blue fairy, blue wood sprite, bring to life, Burn Gorman, Burn!, burning, Carlo Collodi, Cate Blanchett, Catholic, Catholic Church, Catholicism, child, Christoph Waltz, church, churchgoer, conscience, contract, cricket, crucified, David Bradley, death, drunk, drunk parent, earnings, Ewan McGregor, fairytale, fascism, fathers and sons, feet, Finn Wolfhard, fish, Frank Passingham, fun, goodness, Gregory Mann, Guillermo del Toro, home, island camp, Italy, James Bond, Jesus Christ, Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, local church, maltreat, Mark Gustafson, miniature, miniature sets, model, model animation, monkey, monster, mortality, musical, narrator, nose, one night releasing the last of their bomb, parent, planes, politician, politics, priest, puppet, puppet animation, puppetry, religion, right and wrong, Ron Perlman, school, sea, showman, sky, snake tail, soldier, songs, statue, stop-frame, stop-frame animation, stop-motion, stop-motion animation, Tilda Swinton, torso, training, travelling, tree, US, war, Will Vinton, wonder, wood, wood sprite, woodcarver, World War Two

Animation Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Claydream

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 23 June 2021
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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