I hope everyone had a smashing Christmas and that, like me, you got The Jungle Book 40th Anniversary DVD in your stocking. I just watched it - surely one of the finest films ever made, animated or not. Wonderful.
In my last post of this year, I thought I'd post this review of Annecy 2007, which I wrote when I got back in June but for one reason or another never posted. Here's what I wrote:
I have just returned from the Annecy Animation Festival, where I met lots of very nice people, drank beer of questionable quality for unreasonable prices, and saw lots of great, and some poor, animation!Let's start with the screenings: Film of the week, that I saw, was Japanese animated film Paprika. Likenesses can be drawn with Akira, with it's similar intangible power story thread, but it's not as epic as that film. It is staggering though, with warped superhero sensibilities; it's genuinely surprising and baffling, but tightly written so you don't stay baffled. Paprika was in the feature film competition, and I don't yet know what film won, but this deserves it.
Flushed Away was also in the competition, and this was better than I expected, and I'd expected pretty good things. Genuinely funny and very British, if a little rushed to begin with, it could have won the competition if Paprika hadn't been so good.
Out of competition, I also had to endure El Arca, an Argentinian 'irreverent comedy' about Noah's Arc. It is truly one of the worst films I've ever seen. A waste of an opportunity to playfully rib the most ridiculous of Bible stories and, surely, a good premise for any comedy - a bunch of talking animals stuck on a boat. So how did this manage to be so not funny? Who knows. I do know they've ripped off nearly every Disney character, even the ones of different eras, so that the film just looks like a collage of badly drawn Disney characters. And, a note to the writers: shit and fart jokes don't make your film 'irreverent'. I'd also like to make a special mention to the English overdub actors: truly the worst voice acting I've ever heard. Well done.
I did see a genuinely irreverent film, though: Wood & Stock: Sexo, oregano e rock 'n' roll, an animated Brazilian stoner movie about middle-aged hippies trying to reform their old band and find a place in the world. Suitably, the plot's all over the place, the direction is very very slow, and the writing is hilarious. If you get the chance to see it, do.
I attended the Continental Premiere of Shrek The Third. Oh, where to start: please don't go watch it. It's really bad. I mean, it's not as bad as El Arca, but it's really not funny. And when you take the 'funny' out of a Shrek film, all you have left is a skimpish thread of a plot and a very ugly world where a lot of very uninteresting-looking characters live. However, throw in some half-baked sentiment about becoming parents, and the film gets even worse. Unfortunately for us all, Shrek 4 is in development and Shrek 5 will follow it. Someone help us.
I don't know why I didn't post that originally, but it seems fair to post it now, at the end of the year.
This blog's almost a year old. It's funny that at the outset I was meandering a little bit, I knew I wanted to be an animator but wasn't sure how to go about it. I have since changed jobs, which has allowed me to enroll on Animation Mentor as well as take life drawing classes and learn Flash.
I think 2008 is going to be a great year and I hope you continue to read this as I start my Animation Mentor (and therefore, animation) career!
Thanks for reading.
