Georges Schwizgebel "Les Jeune Fille Et Les Nuages" (2000)

Georges Schwizgebel is a particular delight. His work fuses music and art together quite wonderfully, surreal and witty, though most of all beautiful. Les Jeune Fille Et Les Nuages (The Young Girl and the Clouds) is a variation on the Cinderella story. The opening titles morph into thickly daubed, painted clouds and white birds created in the same style; from there to a beautiful young woman seated enigmatically in an pastoral landscape surrounded by the ever present white birds. We are transported into a different world, a spell cast upon us. The movie really is that bewitching. Two girls apply their makeup and one cleans the floor or sorts the lentils, aided by her feathered companions. Georges changes the speed of the movie. Doing her housework Cinderella moves at a rate of two frames per second, the film moving jerkily save for the white birds flocking in and out of the window. The orchestra plays and we gaze down at couples dancing beneath, the girls’ white dresses billowing out like the clouds, one of which forms itself into a garment discovered by the abandoned girl. As she dresses for the ball the frame rate picks up. There's a moment when Cinderella runs down the black and white steps of the ballroom in time to the music that is so well synchronised. Indeed, the music throughout is perfect -Fugue op35 no5 by Felix Mendelssohn performed on piano by Louis Schwizgebel. The acrylic and oil paint may be thickly applied onto cels but the texture in Georges' work and the economical manner in which the artist builds his scenes is masterful.

Jeff Scher "The Parade" (2009)

One of my regular pleasures is Jeff Scher's series, The Animated Life for The New York Times. It is largely predicable in form, the same technique, the same scintillating mix of a myriad flickering images, each frame subtly coloured, strange additions one hardly notices until the screen grab is made, life as we know it presented in a manner that perhaps we didn't. June 29th was The Parade, described by Jeff as, "A film celebrating the art of walking through crowded city streets, seemingly looking at nothing while seeing everything." He is a great writer too, his prose philosophical, wistful. The faces say it all. Captured in high speed rotoscope, saturated with colour that changes with the speed of thought, the people of New York go about their business immersed in worlds that are their own and yet ours. Shay Lynch, as always, contributes a great soundtrack.

Kara Nasdor-Jones "I Slept with Cookie Monster" (2008)

Today's animation was partly conceived as a therapeutic exercise for a young woman and mother involved in an abusive relationship and yet, as I Slept with Cookie Monster so well demonstrates, handles the subject with gritty realism tempered by some very funny moments. It commences in a florist's shop where Kara Nasdor-Jones meets her soon-to-be husband conveniently working next door, making cookies, hence the title. Using delicately hand drawn and coloured frames, Kara narrates the story herself, sparing little in her depiction of the violence and yet maintaining an almost jaunty sense of dark humour such as her explanation of how very soon into the relationship - and a baby - his physical and mental mistreatment of her led to the logical next step: marriage. The humour is best when dealing with her flights of fancy, his transformation by pregnancy or her wrestling with him in a ring. There is a very funny visual gag when she reveals how unscathed she is by the whole experience. In real life Kara found healing whilst at Boston's Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) and triumphed last year at the Ottawa International Animation Festival winning two awards for Best Undergraduate Animation and the Mytoons Grand Prize for Best Student Animation. A brave woman. Very talented too. Kara describes her method of working thus:
"The abuse sequences were animated in Flash [animation software] and then printed out. I painted over each of the prints with tissue paper and then painted each frame. Color was a lot of emotional significance to me as well. He had his own color scheme and so did I, but we both had touches of each other in the shaded areas of our bodies. Other parts were animated with pastel directly under the camera, which, for me, is a very involved process because I'll work for a five hour session and be completely caked in pastel."

The movie works in two ways. First, it has a positive social message. Second, it is well crafted and a damn fine movie.

Constantin Arefyev & Agmurad Amanov "About Bigmouse" (2007)

About Bigmouse commences with cheerful music, the sun coming up to reveal an idyllic scene with warmly coloured cypress trees, woman brushing in front of her asymmetrical house, children playing, man feeding the birds from the balcony. A discarded can is picked up by the woman, now hovering like some humming bird. Siren sounds and a crowd gathers round a big mouse shaped hole in the house wall. Two minutes into the movie and the credits appear. First line of the poem: "A very very big mouse, settled under our house." She is a lovely lady mouse, very house-proud although her accordian and other antics are disruptive. She is lonely too if her sighs are anything to go by. So the residents purchase a giant cat from afar to rid them of the problem. Things, as one might expect, do not go to plan. Stephen Coates has a pleasing, warmly expressive voice as he narrates the poem by Ludmila Ulanova. Intended for children, who will love the easy rhymed couplets, the ten minute short most certainly must appeal to adults too who admire artwork of the highest calibre, art with style in abundance. It's like one of those children's books where the illustrations draw adults and child alike into the narrative. Scriptwriter and Director is Constantin Arefyev, Artistic Director is Agmurad Amanov, the pair also doing the animation. The music that is so much a part of this enchanting animation is by Dmitry Grazhevich and Igor Melnikov. Quite one of the most charming shorts to be featured this year.

Kathryn Timmons "220 Victoria Avenue" (2007)

220 Victoria Avenue by UCA Farnham student Kathryn Timmons is an atmospheric graduation piece to a rather lovely soundtrack by Paul Harris. Using all the colours in the palette providing they are blue, Kathryn provides a salutary lesson for all those desperate for lodgings and not too proud to share a house with a taxidermist. Following an effective opening with particularly successful use of shadow, highlighting and lighting generally, the stylised piece shows the director willing to slow the pace down, building up the tension.

Russell Etheridge "The Prison Ship" (2008)

The Prison Ship is the second of the promised works from The Royal College of Art. In fact it was the first year’s work for Russell Etheridge - usually I only feature the final graduation piece on the Animation Blog. I found the storyline a touch confusing though the atmosphere of menace generated in the prison ship ploughing through the wide ocean is impressive. The fate of the featured prisoner hangs in the balance at the end, the movie saying something for the power of prayer. The image of the grey ship in towering seas with its cargo of misery is a powerful one.

Rafael Sommerhalder "Flowerpots" (2008)

Two contrasting shorts from London's Royal College of Art, today's being much lighter in tone. Rafael Sommerhalder was awarded the Adobe Design Achievement Award last year for Flowerpots. I have written before that I tend to over-write. By contrast, Rafael is economy personified. Commencing with a root cracking a flowerpot his figure emerges, stands on a horizontal line, hops about inside the pot, emerges from it and then extracts various artifacts from a Tardis-like overcoat. A ladder, spade and stick with which to poke clouds are well used. When the raincloud disgorges rain that rises like Noah's flood, the little guy seems indisposed but that overcoat copes admirably. Less means more and the simply drawn, smoothly animated piece is funny and inventive. Rafael obtained his BA (Hons) Film Studies in 2000 from the University of Art and Design Lausanne, Switzerland and, is alongside Zita Burnett, the co-founder of Zurich's CRICTOR. I haven't used the word delightful for some time: delightful.

Dave Lovelace "Virus Alert" (Weird Al Yankovic 2006)

It occurs to me that following the post earlier in the week concerning Weird Al Yankovic readers of the Animation Blog might have missed one very funny music video made in Flash by Dave Lovelace. Virus Alert gained awards and is a pleasing alliance between two funny men, Weird Al writing lyrics with gags delivered at pace and Dave having the visual talent to punch them home. Every possible problem associated with the computer virus is here. Reading the animator's bio is revealing for he is a man of many talents. Dave's website is worth the visit and the singer is always entertaining!

Andrei Khrzhanovsky "There lived a man called Kozyavin" (1966)

A product of the Soviet State Film School, Andrei Khrzhanovsky's debut film was There lived a man called Kozyavin. This fable of senseless bureaucracy has survived the years amazingly well. Kozyavin is a civil servant who passes incoming pieces of paper from one pile to the next, a mindless routine that is only ended when his boss instructs him to deliver a routine message to fellow employee Sidorov. There follows an unhesitatingly mindless pursuit of that person in a journey that knows no deviation, either of route or in response to any situation requiring independent thought. Thus Kozyavin pointlessly questions the pedestrians passing by on the pavement, a violinist on a stage is interrupted mid performance, a whole construction site ceases activity, a robbery in an art museum is ignored and, most noticeably of all, an archaeologist patiently scrubbing the tip vertebrae of a white and massive dinosaur is approached, Kozyavin walking across the skeleton crunching each segment to dust as he walks. He is oblivious of all the finer forms of life - history, beauty, industry, art, recreation, geography. The movie is a quite marvellous satire on, I guess, the soviet state and one much appreciated at the time by public. It has some remarkable visual metaphors and incident, often surreal, always impeccably drawn. For that reason I have tagged it as classic, for such it indisputably is.

Timothy & Stephen Quay "Street of Crocodiles" (1986)

Since its release in 1986, Street of Crocodiles has intrigued and fascinated film-goers, influencing a whole generation of animators. It is decidedly not an all action movie of thrills and spills. Based on a short story by Polish writer Bruno Schulz and partly improvised, the Quay Brothers set their action, if such it is, in a deserted provincial museum in which the curator, played by Feliks Stawinski, activates a decrepit and ancient peep-show by drooling saliva on the mechanism. The caretaker snips the strings of a puppet man, releasing him to tour the cobweb strewn, labyrinthine factory or ghetto, where in his search he encounters other puppets, dolls with hollowed out skulls, lost in their own world of grime and decay, their universe a long since faded tailors or dress makers factory. Colour is absent for most part though the occasional bright embellishment appears unexpectedly, material pulled from a dusty shelf or a flash of red appearing on the bedraggled puppet's jacket. Nothing is predictable. Unexpected camera angles, loss or addition of focus, silences, bursts of music, bald, china-headed dolls, screws that unravel themselves, strangely unappealing sexual imagery, a puppet's piercing eyes, raw meat à la Jan Svankmajer .. And all the time the puppet creeping furtively, part explorer, part voyeur, part cameraman for the lens switches its view to both track the movements of the protagonist and alight on what he sees. In terms of meaning and interpretation I have read reviews that I scarcely understand, even, as here, by the Brother Quay themselves: "The anonymous offering of human saliva by an attendant caretaker activates and releases the Schulzian theatre from stasis into permanent flux. Myth stalks the streets of this parasitical zone where the mythological ascension of the everyday is charted by a marginal interloper who threads himself through this one night of the Great Season. No centre can be reached and the futile pursuit concludes in the deepest rear rooms of a slightly dubious tailor’s shop.” For its twenty-one minutes one is engrossed in a world of the subconscious, almost as if the figures are backstage in some darkened alternative world forgotten by the main players on stage, performing mechanical, inexplicable tasks. It is world that has no warmth in it, rather shadows, space, futile rituals, and a discordant violin. Born in Philadelphia, USA, but working primarily in the UK, the brothers have a reclusive reputation. Street of Crocodiles remains one of my favourite works of animation, a powerful if enigmatic piece of work (I almost said theatre) to rank with the world's best.