Drawings move, paintings come to life and puppets take the stage, one painstaking frame at a time.
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Screened as part of NZIFF 2018
Animation NOW! Handmade
Aug 11 | |
Some animators just want to see their drawings move, their paintings come to life and their puppets take the stage. To these animators – and they are legion – animation is very much a hands-on medium created with the most physical of materials. They simply know no other way. This programme is our annual tribute to the very best of these works. In them resides a passion to create with one’s own hands and a heroic patience sufficient to build a world and tell a story, one painstaking frame at a time.
Michael Cusack’s After All infuses a poignancy into his puppets that bounces unpredictably like a pinball between gallows humour and the reality of life’s most fundamentally irreducible truth. No less bracing, Anita Lester’s I’m Still Alive treads a similar set of boards but with a deeper, wider history seeping into it. And we simply could not resist opening with the brand-new, Oscar-nominated marvel Negative Space. By Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata, it’s a beautifully rendered study in the simple magic of animation’s ability to find, and depict, beauty in the simplest of ideas. — MT
Negative Space 2017
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There is a beautiful and precise artform to packing a suitcase – and as we all know, art transcends science.
The Battle of San Romano 2017
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Master animator Schwizgebel brings his magic to this adaptation of the Paolo Uccello triptych depicting an infamous 15th century battle outside Naples.
Still Alive 2017
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A moving, superbly crafted film tribute to Eva, a woman who emerged alive but forever broken by her experiences of the WWII death camps.
Deyzangeroo 2017
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Deyzangeroo is a ritual performed in the fishing town of Bushehr to ward off evil spirits and take back the moon. It works every time.
Silent London 2017
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A visual ode to the grabbed, found and overheard sounds of London, delivered in an intensely rendered water-coloured canvas.
Travelogue Tel Aviv 2017
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A diverse, animated visual journal of the varied sights and sounds of Tel Aviv as seen through the eyes of an urban explorer.
Evening 2016
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Time for a clean-out. Everything must go. The race is on.
After All 2016
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A poignant, sometimes hilarious look at the inevitable journey a middle-aged man must make in coming to terms with the loss of his mother.
An Echoing Memory of a Tongue 2017
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Words are just sounds that we have ascribed meaning to. But words are finite; the sounds we can generate are probably not.
War Marks 2017
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In a world on a constant war footing, the power of beauty and the need for permanent vigilance constantly intertwine.
Strange Case 2017
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A bold, breathtaking, painterly film streaming images, thoughts and memories of random experiences.
Lost Property Office 2017
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A clerk at a lost property office is faced with unexpected change, and plans an unconventional response