Animation of the week: Screenplay-Barry Purves

This is another one from my Christmas wish list, this time taken from the excellent first volume of the anthology DVD British Animation Classics (featuring some top notch independent animation which doesn't skimp on the female animators either-Joanna Quinn, Alison Snowden, Erica Russell, and Alison de Vere are all represented).

Purves is a master director, writer, and animator of mainly puppet based animation and has done work with countless animation studios including Aardman, Pixar, Dreamworks etc. Despite the fact that his own independent work only amounts to six short films he has been nominated for countless awards and is highly regarded in the British film and animation industry. He embraces a strong tradition of animation that stems from the likes of Ladislas Starewicz, Ray Harryhausen, George Pal, Lou Bunin, Jiri Trnka, etc, and carries on to the present day in the works of The Brothers Quay, the Bolex brothers, and Suzie Templeton (among others).

Screenplay is one of his two works that embraces the art and tradition of the setting for the story being told. The other example being Achilles which is obviously inspired by Greek art but is also staged like a Greek tragedy.

The title 'Screenplay' literally refers to the used of traditional Japanese screen painting as part of the storytelling process. The story is adapted from the legend of The Willow Pattern, a famous British ceramic pattern designed around 1790. The story is a Chinese romantic fable invented in England which follows the classic formula of star-crossed lovers of a different class who ultimately meet a tragic end.

Purves seems to create a fantastic sense of staging. The play part of the title is also highly appropriate as it feels like this is what we are watching, and the smoothness of the action and of the transitions almost make us forget that we are watching an animation. Scenery changes are swift and inventive and movement despite being stylised (due to the obvious influence of Kabuki theatre on the film, along with the English sign language narration) is fluid and believable. The use of everything from traditional umbrellas and pieces of material to represent everything from water to blood, and the constant use of a revolving/floor set keep the action confounded to one space very effectively.

It seems appropriate that Purves's films were chosen to be shown as part of a special season on Japanese puppet master Kicachiro Kawamoto back at the Watershed in Bristol in 2008, his influence on this film is very obvious although I think Purves adds a certain amount of wit to the tradition as well as making a massive improvement on the usual pacing. The action is quite fast but still you don't miss a beat. A truly beautiful piece of film!

(watch it here)

Animation of the week-The Old Man and The Sea (Alaksandar Petrov)

It's been a bit quiet here for a while as I have been busy with my own comics, but I intend to resume posting, if not at my original post, then at least a couple of times a week.

Quite a while ago I picked up a book called Who's Who in Animated Cartoons by Jeff Lenburg from The Last Book Shop in Bristol, a bookshop where everything is priced two pounds and you can occasionally find an obscure treasure amongst the more mainstream reads. This particular book is something a mammoth tome, a Bible for anyone with more than a passing interest in animation. As well as listening every single significant major or minor player from the most famous animation studios, it lists more obscure and experimental animators such as John and Faith Hubley, John Canemaker, and Kihachiro Kawamoto.

Another one of the animators listed in the book Alkesandar Petrov was a Russian animator who developed a very unique, and very tricky, animation technique that only a handful of animators ever mastered. Using a slow-drying oil paint he would paint his animation onto multiple layers of glass in order to give depth to his visuals using his fingertips instead of a brush. To have such control with his fingers is a very astonishing and enviable skill and because of the level of work you can see going into it it gives you the impression that his animation was done in the 60s or 70s when in fact he was working from the 80's until the end of the 90s.

Stylistically he employs a romantically tinted realism which suits his work as a lot of it is literary adaptions of Puskin, Platonov, and Dostoevsky. However arguably his finest work is his twenty minute adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea with its warm colours, its shifting sense of scene and its relaxed tropical pace at the beginning. Of course this is just the impression I get from the opening clip viewed on youtube which you can view here, as with a lot of the more obscure animators in the book, his work is hard to come by and more expensive, but you can get The Old Man and The Sea for about £35 on Amazon.

Animation of the week: The Seperation-Robert Morgan)

Ok so Robert Morgan very clearly wears his influences on his sleeve here (Brothers Quay, Jan Svankmajer, bolexbrothers) but when the result is as good as this who am I to complain. This is a creepy, atmospheric, and well paced (the movements are incredibly smooth but don't suffer being Disneyfied because of this) tale of two separated conjoined twins who can't bear to be apart. A particularly nice touch is the gloss of sweat on their aged faces that really makes them believable despite the slightly fantastic plot line. The set pieces and lighting are also gorgeous reminding me of an even more sinister Blade Runner or perhaps Brazil. Watch it here.



I originally found this recommendation through master of comic book/movie sleaze Rick Trembles and the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal (which looks fantastic, and where Rick Trembles has his own animation film Goopy Spasms debuting).

Animation of the week: Great-Bob Godfrey

One of the only decent people I share my last name with (sorry family) is British animation legend Bob Godfrey who was responsible for such childhood favourites as Henry the cat and the chaotic Rhubarb and Custard (both of which had amazing theme tunes).With a career spanning more than fifty years*(1) (Richard Williams is another British animator who can boast this) his less child friendly work carries a tongue in cheek British sensitivity to sex like Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em and the Carry On films but at times could be a little bit more risque (see Karma Sutra Rides Again or Dream Doll, which was made in collaboration with another renowned animation and film studio Zagreb Film based in Croatia)

The animation of his I have chosen for my animation of the week is his 1975 short Great (view part one here), a musical comedy about the life of famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Like his earlier satirical look at animation and commercial advertising The Do-It-Yourself Animation Kit, this uses the cut out technique where collage and cut outs are used alongside as well as instead of fluid drawings. This technique is sometimes mistakenly identified as being invented by Terry Gilliam but really it was Godfrey who had a huge influence on the Python animator and not the other way round*(2) (you can also see Godfrey's influence on Gilliam in the huge letters in the title sequences to all the Python films). Although Godfrey handles the subject matter and especially the Victorian period with a colourful irreverence (making fun of the empire's colonial powers amongst other things) you can tell that when it boils down to it it is tackled with love. Bright, cheerful, packed full of innuendo and achieves the near impossible feat of being a musical with not a single annoying song (not to mention the fact that it's educational!). There are some real strokes of genius in here, from 50's style rock and roll singers and found footage techniques that remind me a bit of Ralph Bakshi, to Freud calling Brunel 'a paranoiac with a pronounced phallic inferiority complex'. Also worth watching is this old BBC 2 documentary on Godfrey which was part of a series called The Craftsman. Click here.

I couldn't find any decent images of the film to post here but trust me it's worth watching.
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*He also worked on Yellow Submarine, an experience his more traditional disciplined training made it hard for him to handle, as there was no real script to work to.
(2)*I'd say that Godfrey was perhaps one of the first British animators to use this technique but you can see it in a lot of Russian and Polish animation of the early 60's-70's as well.