I had an interesting time at the Manchester Animation Festival yesterday! Unfortunately I can't afford to attend all three days this year, but I did get to see a few interesting things.
Will Becher from Aardman presented a few clips and behind-the-scenes footage from the forthcoming Early Man, which seemed fun enough, although to be honest I don't find Nick Park's work particularly engaging (heresy, I know, considering that I'm living in Preston!) Of more interest to me was his information about the making of The Pirates! In an adventure with Scientists!, in my opinion a rather underrated film. The amount of love and care and hidden in-jokes inserted in the production design was wonderful. I am a huge fan of physical sets for stop-motion, and those in Pirates! were both beautifully detailed and impressively big.
Mark Mullery from Cartoon Saloon went into a great level of technical detail about their latest film, The Breadwinner. I'm not a digital animator, so I didn't understand a lot of the detail; nevertheless, I was impressed by the huge number of layers, textures and effects piled on top of each other. In my own opinion, it was overly digital, making it look like cheap Flash animation or a computer game, and would have benefitted from a more hand-made touch. In particular, certain segments of the film were designed to look like traditional Afghan puppets, and a huge amount of computer work went into making it look like real paper. But why not just use real paper? It would have looked a thousand times better and more authentic! The concept of the film did seem quite interesting, and reminiscent of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis; however, I do think it's slightly problematic having a realistic Afghan experience of war portrayed by an Irish company. Cartoon Saloon's previous films, The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea, were uniquely Irish, and I can't help but feel that they ought to stick to that sort of content.
I also watched Loving Vincent, which was absolutely fantastic. The story of Vincent van Gogh's life always makes me emotional, and in this film it was told in a very touching way. At times, the animation did look overly rotoscoped and uncanny, but well, it would be impossible to animate via oil paintings without using rotoscoping, so I can forgive that. The amount of work that went into the animation is absolutely staggering; the visuals, especialy the colour schemes, were beautiful, and I do hope that it wins the Oscar for Best Animated Feature!
Other than that, there were of course plenty of entertaining short films, time to see some familiar faces, and of course delicious food! All in all a wonderful time.
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