ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.10 - JANUARY 2001

Fresh from the Festivals: January 2001's Film Reviews
(continued from page 2)

Passport. © Royal College of Art.
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Passport
Passport is yet another accomplished student film from the Royal College of Art, which seems to be doing more than a little right, judging by the number of excellent productions that have emerged from it in recent years. This post-graduate thesis film employs cutouts on multiplane scraper boards, black and white imagery, dimmed lighting with chiarascuro-type effects, and sound elements to set the scene for a family's ill-fated trip on a night train.

The film's director, Siri Melchior, studied art history and graphic design in Denmark before going to the U.K.'s Royal College of Art and acknowledges the influence of Russian animation upon the work. This influence is clear in the overall look of the piece, which brings to mind the visual design and even the animation style of Yuri Norstein. The story itself, which runs almost 7-minutes in length, also seems to be set within an Eastern European context. A family escapes a crowded, highly secured train station, boarding a train car after showing documents that officials accept cautiously, after scrutiny. As the family sleeps, though, a thief takes the passports from their room. Officials arrive and force them off the train, so they apparently lose their chance for freedom.

Like the other films reviewed this month, Passport is without dialogue. The film's score was created by Danish composer Soren Sigumfeldt Eriksen. Passport's production was supported by the Royal College of Art as well as Danish student grants. The film has been well received in competition, having won best student work awards at both the Ottawa and Stuttgart festivals in 1999.

The Scarecrow. © Cheryl Meier.
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The Scarecrow
American Cheryl Meier has created a very different student work with her 1.5 minute film, The Scarecrow. This senior thesis for the Ringling School of Art and Design was created using Maya 2.0. It tells the story of a scarecrow who decides to break out of his place in life and does so with the help of some crows. Meier says she was inspired to create the film when she drove past two real scarecrows standing guard in a sunflower farm. To get the sense of what a real scarecrow might feel as it tugged at the wooden boards that hold it up, she rigged herself to hang from a post!

Though Meier cites Disney and Pixar as influences in terms of story and visual design, her work is actually a lot softer and atmospheric than most of the computer animation work I associate with those companies. She employs soft colors and a kind of hazy fog that hangs just above the ground and gives depth to the scene. On the other hand, Meier's ability to instill a lot of character into the scarecrow within a short time would seem to reflect her study of personality animation created by the two studios. Through movement and the setting of small goals that the character sets out to achieve, viewers are able to identify with this character's struggle for freedom, which occurs in less than two minutes. Sound effects lend a hand at establishing the aesthetics of the film, as the scarecrow finally is able to hobble off, having employed the posts that originally held him captive as legs that now set him free.

The Scarecrow has been screened at SIGGRAPH and a variety of other showcases, and will be featured in an upcoming episode of Exposure on the Sci-Fi Channel. Meier is currently working on a feature film, Helgo, A Hero's Journey, at Fathom Studios, which is located in Atlanta, Georgia.

Maureen Furniss, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Film Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California. She is the founding editor of Animation Journal and the author of Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics (John Libbey, 1998).

 
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