The Motion Juste: Animac

The last projection I attended was “Megunica”, a documentary film by the Italian Lorenzo Fonda about urban art and specifically about Blu, who has developed a peculiar style consisting in painting on street walls. I enjoyed very much the film because it wasn’t just focused on the creative process, which is quite unusual, but showed the relationship between the artist and the spectators of his working activity, their different reactions and their visions about street art. Blu and his companions travel to several South American countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Argentina (hence the title of the film). He paints murals on any-sized walls, he’s often sent away by the land owner or some police forces, he talks with children or adults indifferently about their opinions and interpretations of that kind of art, and he never shows his face to the camera. Their intention when they decided to fly to South America without any kind of script was to expose Blu to new influences and to see how these affected his art.
The film flows very smoothly interspersing the travelling and wall-painting with animations. These animations are very peculiar, usually showing fantastic transformations and transitions from one element to another, mutilations and breakages that look so natural. He tends to use black and white combined with another colour and his style is influenced by comics and graffiti.

Here you can see the trailer and visit their website, here's another trailer and following this link you can access Blu's website and have a look at some of his other works, like MUTO.

At the breakfast with the artists I also had the chance to listen to some members of the “Panique au village” project, the creators of the television series who are about to release their full-length film on 17th June. They talked about their professional experience and remarked the fact that advertisements are currently getting into some kind of new-wave by increasing the number of stop-motion productions. Besides, publicity agencies are becoming really interested in new techniques and are constantly trying to learn them from independent artists and asking them to work on projects for them. That can be seen here in the UK, for instance, where a series of ads done by the directing team of “Panique”, Pic Pic Andre, are being broadcasted for the Cravendale milk campaign.

Focusing on their film, they explained that it had been created by 25 people working during a whole year. They use a 16:9 format to make the film look like a classical western. I was surprised by the fact that they use tiny figures of about 1 cm. Finally, when asked about the film’s plot, they explained that they had had to adapt the usual “madness” of their short works to the film’s length so spectators wouldn’t be stressed out by their usual fast-paced narrative.

I saw the screening of her works and the following day I went to the “Breakfast with the artists” session, a very good opportunity the festival offers to the audience to sit near the animators and listen to their experiences first hand.
She talked about her short films: “Hammam” (1991), “Schéhérazade” (1995), “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs” (2002), “Au premier dimanche d’août” (2004) and “Conte de quartier” (2006).
She pointed out that when she starts working on an animation she has a quite clear idea of its original structure and once she moves on the process turns into a kind of jazz’s jam session. Some of these improvisations are finally deleted from the resulting film: usually a 5% of them, though it was between a 15 and 20% in “Hammam”.
She used digital composing with After Effects for the first time in “Conte de quartier” so she could work with 2 or 3 image levels. She usually works in pastels, though she added oils and sand to “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs”. In “Conte de quartier” she created 4 layers in After Effects: one for the mechanical elements, one for the ads posters, which were real ones she had traced over, one for the secondary characters and another for the main ones. A big advantage she underlined was that she could see the results immediately, something impossible to do when she would film in 35 mm and had to wait for about a month to see the resulting images.
When asked about the noticeable prominence of women in her films and their recurrent nakedness and sensuality, she admitted giving men a limited role in her films, which are easily identifiable as made by a woman since she creates them based on what a woman knows, her own sensuality. She argued that Pavlátová’s films show sensuality from a masculine point of view and admitted that it’s not easy to show this subject. Sensuality should be seen as something natural, a non-forced eroticism and never as something dirty or reprehensible. The pleasure of touching the materials is also transmitted into the film reinforcing this sensuality. Florence explained that actually she’d made some erotic films as an order. She also remarked that animation can soften some things. For instance, Schéhérazade’s massacre and sex scenes would look too macabre in live-action.
She explained to the audience that she did her first 3 films on her own, but required an assistant to create “Au premier dimanche d’août” and “Les oiseaux blancs, les oiseaux noirs” and 3 to work on her last film. She admitted feeling that, while gaining in some aspects, she also lost something in others, such as the desired sensuality.

I attended two sessions dedicated to the French animation school La Poudrière. The first one was a series of screenings showing some of its students’ projects. It was a selection of short films aimed at children.

My favourites ones were “Samare”, by Nicolaï Trochinsky, “Ranas”, by Célia Sacido-Martin, “Rue des abattoirs”, by Mathieu Brisebras, “Le Grand Plongeon”, by Guillaume Delaunay, and “Coup sur coup”, by Julien Bisaro.

The second one consisted in a lecture by Annick Teninge, director of La Poudrière, and Laurent Pouvaret, animator and director of studies, who explained to us how the school operates, its philosophy and the students selection criteria and the tests they must do. They remarked that the school’s philosophy was not to teach animation but to develop the students’ cinematographic language skills, their ability to write scripts, to create stages, to direct actors for voice-overs or to understand the relation between sound and image. Then they can focus on whatever aspect they prefer by doing individual or group projects. They also emphasized how students get to work with and learn from professionals that go each year to the school to share their knowledge and experience with them.

From the two BROU sessions, which consisted in international animation selections, the screenings I liked most were “Guisado de Galinha” (2008), by Joana Toste, from Portugal, the Oscar winner for the Best Animated Short Film “La Maison en petits cubes” (Tsumiki no ie) (2008), by Kunio Kato, and “Procrastination” (2007), by the English John Kelly.

The first one, “Guisado de Galinha”, had a really simple characters design and consisted in a musical based on a fado, a popular Portuguese song. I loved the way the credits were done: the fado’s singer would sing the names of the artists and would mention the job each one had done.

Kunio Kato’s work was excellent; no wonder he’s been awarded the Oscar. His short film was very sensitive and moving. It’s about an old man living in a house he’s built on top of his former ones because of the rising water level. One day he drops his pipe into the water and dives to retrieve it. As he swims deeper and deeper into the water and through his previous houses, he recalls his past with his wife and his daughter. Here are some scenes of the short film and its music, which was also very touching.

John Kelly’s short was an entertaining reflection about what procrastination is and I felt quite identified with it. Because putting off our chores is something we all probably do and much more often than we'd like to.

There was also a funny short by Alexei Alexeev, from Hungary, called “KJFG No 5” (2007). It's a simple animation done in Flash, but the gag is quite funny.

Finally, I'd like to underline Alfonso and Jonás Cuarón's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism", short based on Naomi Klein's book with the same name. Not because of the animation but for its content, since Naomi Klein, jounalist and economist, is characterised for her anti-globalisation works and for explaining important facts general media tend to avoid. I'll try to avoid procrastination and get me some time to read her book, which my father has at home.

I liked very much Pavlátová’s work and I also liked her when she introduced the screening of some of her works. I had already seen most of this Czech producer’s short films on the Internet, but enjoying them in a big screen was a really good opportunity to get a deeper appreciation.

Michaela graduated form the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in 1987 and since then she has worked with both animation and life-action. She has won several international awards and her short film “Reci, reci, reci” (Words, words, words) was nominated for an Oscar. To learn more about her, you can follow this link.

What I like about her works are the characters design, the way she approaches human relations and the freedom of her animated drawings. The characters are simple, very expressive caricatures. The best example, for me, can be found in “Reci, reci, reci”, which she created in 1991. They sometimes look as made of doodles, with quick, thin, black lines shaping deformed figures which remind me of Quentin Blake’s also carefree style. Her drawing style is very personal and recognizable.

BFG, by Blake

That freedom I’ve mentioned can be observed in the variations of shots she uses and the way the “camera” moves along the scenes, like in “Repete” (1995), or in “Karneval zvírat” (Carnival of animals) (2006). In one of its sequences we move forwards in a tracking shot through several windows leading to different rooms with fancy, floating characters. And in “Repete” our vision moves around the characters, which are somehow linked to the others through the quick, smooth transitions.

I also like her shorts contents since they focus on a subject I’m interested in, human relations. Again, my favourite one on this aspect is “Reci, reci, reci”. The scene takes place in a bar, where several emotions, attitudes and habits can be observed in the customers’ conversations. The contents of these conversations don’t matter; they’re all represented by colourful bubbles coming out of people’s mouths. But their intentions and meanings are perfectly identifiable by their looks, their movements and expressions. This way we witness the fragility of a love relationship, where just one nuance can either break the balance or bring it back; the way messages can totally change their meaning when being passed between several people; how gossiping can get out of hand, etc.

Michaela also explores sexuality without complexes, quite naturally and with sense of humour, for instance, in Laila’s short films (2003-2006), made in Flash, and in “Karneval zvírat”, her last animated production.

There’s an interview to Michaela I’ve found in YouTube, done during a cinema festival in Mar del Plata, Argentina. She makes some very interesting points about the role of the animator, who feels like a god when creating and moving his characters, and about animation itself, which makes you feel you’d rather work on something with an equal balance between the effort and the visible result.

Taking a brief break from the Bradford Festival, I want to post a very funny animation I've found while looking up some of the contents of the next Animac Festival taking place in Lleida, Spain, next year.
It's a quick original look at the history of animation, made by Joris Clerté, from France: "Une petite histoire de l'image animée".