Ryan keeps marching on. It was awarded with Honorable Mention in Short Filmmaking. Courtesy of Copper Heart Ent. and the National Film Board of Canada.

This year the Sundance Film Festival grouped animated shorts into their own program, giving animation buffs and the general public an opportunity to view the best examples of this art form at one seating. The program showcased not only the diverse techniques being used to create animation, but the imagination, humor and assorted talents of the creators. Kudos to the Sundance programmers for providing an enlightening and thoroughly entertaining experience.

Ryan
In a program so exceptional, it’s hard to pick a favorite, but I must admit that the creative imagination in director Chris Landreth’s Ryan blew me away. It must have also impressed the Shorts Jury. They awarded the film an Honorable Mention in Short Filmmaking. Challenging accepted notions of animation and documentary, the film is a biography of pioneering Canadian animator, Ryan Larkin, who, 30 years ago, created some of the most influential animated films of his time, before his fall into drugs and alcohol contributed to his creative demise and led to a life on welfare, panhandling for change. Yet despite Ryan’s obvious shortcomings, the film reveals an artistically brilliant man acutely self-aware of his demons.

Landreth’s animation style is interpretive. The film uses the real voices of Ryan Larkin and the people who knew him to tell the story, but surpassing photo-realism, Landreth’s visualizations of characters exist in a pioneer realm, a realm that he calls “psycho-realism.” In this world the appearance of the 3D characters is bizarre, twisted, broken, disembodied and can be humorous or disturbing. This distorted appearance visually reflects the characters’ evolving “pain, insanity, fear, mercy, shame and creativity.”

Ryan is a 3D computer animated 35mm film produced by Copper Heart Entertainment in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada and in association with Seneca Collage Animation Arts Centre. Although the characters and sets have detailed realism, there is no live-action footage; everything was modeled using CGI tools. Centre graduates collaborated with Landreth to create the unique look of the film. Alias Maya 4.0 animation software was used for the modeling, rigging, animation, lighting and rendering of the 3D world. Other tools used were Discreet’s combustion 2.1 for all compositing and 2D effects, Adobe Photoshop 7.0 for painting and texturing and Adobe Premiere for creative development and editing.

Landreth came to animation as a second career, working as an engineer before changing to computer animation. At Alias|Wavefront, he tested animation software and created animated short films, including the Academy-award nominated The End (1995) and the Genie award-winning Bingo (1998).