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ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.02 - MAY 2000
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The 3rd Brisbane International Animation Festival "I personally find the Australian retrospective very interesting," opines Moyes, "because it has early advertisements that we have all grown up with and are very much in our national conscious." Complementing this aspect of animation was the inclusion for the first time of the National Commercials Competition. "It was to bring in industry interest and try not to just isolate animation as art," reasons Moyes, "but also to highlight the artistry in commercial and advertising animation. It’s also a way of us financing ourselves a little." The inaugural winner was Captain Pecker, featuring a karoke singing penis which was also featured in the festivals’ ‘Out of the Closet’ session.
Works from the ‘Puppets to Pixels’ session featured on the tour included Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Old Lion (1932), whose workmanship and attention to detail still managed to amaze even today’s jaded audiences. Counter-pointing this was Chris Wedge’s Academy Award winning Bunny, in which computer animation was used to tell the tale of an old rabbit that is pestered by a persistent moth. "It was basically to draw a link between the work of people like stop-motion pioneers and the newer technology," advises Moyes. "One way of looking at it is that CGI animators create their models in the computer, so in a sense it’s paying respect to the early stop-motion animators for what they’ve lent to 3D computer animation."
The Guest of Honor
If any reassurance was needed, the final night of the tour allayed any doubts. Dedicated to his career, Harryhausen’s seminar in Sydney was in such high demand that he agreed to put on an extra one in an attempt to satisfy demand. While his models of skeletons, dinosaurs, flying saucers and Medusa elicited the expected rounds of applause from his fans, even they were surprised at the artistry of his pre-production drawings. "I had to learn how to draw to put my ideas on paper so that other people could see them, otherwise they would remain locked up in my head. My biggest influence was Gustav Dore’s illustrations. I still draw in the manner of an engraving rather than a sketch, using a powdered charcoal technique to pick out the highlights. That was something Willis O’Brien taught me." Herein lies the strength of BIAF, in that it is the only festival in Australia that deals with all forms of animation. As Moyes concludes, "We’ve been missing out on a lot. Other festivals have animation components, while others only deal with one technique, like digital. I would like to suggest that before us, there hasn’t been the same focus on animation, the same concentration, and therefore not the same kind of quality, and not the same kind of reach. Because we’re looking specifically at animation, it’s our top priority." Stephen Lynch has written about the various aspects of filmmaking for books and magazines throughout Australia, England and America, as well as co-hosting Flicks, a weekly film review program. |
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