|
|
ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 5.9 - DECEMBER 2000
|
Fresh from the Festivals: December 2000's Film Reviews
The Suspect The story involves four quite different characters who find themselves together in a train compartment. An older man, reading the newspaper, comes across information about a mysterious railway killer. After a chubby middle-aged lady and a svelte young woman enter the compartment, a rough-looking man takes a seat. As the foursome travel across a stretch of tracks, the man becomes ever more suspicious that the younger fellow is in fact the wanted killer. Deliberately slow pacing, with a lot of attention given to the movements of each model, allow us to sense the personalities of each character. Largely silent, they often regard each other with telling eye movements. It is perhaps the way the eyes move, plus some other aspects of the film (such as the character design of the older female character), that prompt the comparison with Aardman's work. Director Jose Miguel Ribeiro, together with Luis Da Matta Almeida, developed the idea for the film and began to write its screenplay in 1995. Over a two-year period, they finished the script and began development of their independent puppet animation studio, Zepplin Films, which opened in September 1997. Voices were recorded in June of the following year, and shooting and post-production ran September 1998 through November 1999. Although the film seems perfect to me at its present length, a fifteen-minute version is being edited for use in theaters. The film's dialogue is Portuguese, but the version I saw has English subtitles (unfortunately, white ones, so not all could be read -- still, the visuals tell the story clearly, so that was not a major problem for me).
The Periwig-Maker Impressive sets and props lend a great deal to the visuals in the film. A long tracking shot opens the film, taking the viewer from an exterior that includes the water of the Thames and the London Bridge through the streets of London in which the action occurs. The entire set, which is given depth with the use of false perspective, measured 4.5 meters wide by 10 meters long. It contains eleven houses based on historical drawings, which contain hand made and fitted tiles, walls made of individual miniature bricks and other examples of detailed miniature work. Citing the influence of legendary puppet animator Jiri Trnka, the filmmakers used a minimalist approach to puppet making, relying on body movements rather than facial changes to create expressiveness. Only the eyes and eyelids of the puppets' faces could be moved. Body movements were enabled through the use of metal armatures under polyurethane foam, silicone rubber and foam latex exteriors; wigs were hand-made of mohair. The puppets were built by Mackinnon & Saunders, in England, using a scale of 1:5, with the largest puppet measuring 36 cm. Along with animated objects, real flames are used to provide light from candles, a fireplace and other sources. The 15-minute film was created over a six-year period at Schäeffler's Berlin studio, Ideal Standard Film, which the director founded in 1994, with sister and producer Annette Schäeffler; together, they adapted the story from Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year." Though this is the team's first animated film, they previously created several live-action shorts and a documentary. The Periwig-Maker has been well-received, with screenings at over sixty festivals and numerous awards since its release in late 1999.
Father and Daughter Aesthetically, the film has similarities to The Monk and the Fish, both in terms of its simple color scheme (in this case, black, white and sepia) and even the look of its images. This time, de Wit has composed his visuals using pencil and charcoal, along with ANIMO software. The director's memories of Holland and its countryside, where he was born and raised, influenced his background design in the film, which runs 8.5 minutes in its theatrical version (slightly shorter for television). A partly lively, partly mournful accordion score accompanies the images in Father and Daughter, which are without dialogue. Normand Roger, in collaboration with Denis Chartrand, takes music credit for the film, while Jean-Baptiste Roger was responsible for sound. Altogether, the film took two years to create, though its production was spread over four years. The film is a British and Dutch co-production, including producers Claire Jennings of Cloudrunner in London and Willem Thijssen of CinéTé Filmproductie bv in Amsterdam. Michael Dudok de Wit now works out of his London-based studio, where he has created numerous commercials. He also illustrates books and teaches animation at art colleges in England and abroad. 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).
|
||||||
1 | 2 |
