Bristish Animation Awards 3

British Animation Awards 3

Available from British Animation Awards

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Rien

An illustrated French lesson—learning to pronounce “rien” (“nothing”). Sparse Plymptoony opening gives way to grid with soundwaves interspersed with Frenchy icons and girl struggling with pronunciation. So so.

Kunyi Chen

The Littlest Robo

Primitive sketchy computer animation about a boy what travels with his father while dad works on oil rigs. Sad story of a father and son dysfunction. Boy’s only friend is a boxy little robot who breaks the sink and then sacrifices himself to save the boy from the ensuing flood. Father and son—still not speaking—drive off. Open-ended. Depressing. Book ended by French café gypsy music.

Richard Kenworthy

Ferment

Old man dies in a park. His soul travels across town in an instant to the birth of a baby. Impossible live action hyper bullet time. Long pans in which everybody’s frozen while fragments of natural sound weave throughout—not stills, but people frozen in place (multi-plane). Amazing and impossible. Also reminiscent of Zbig’s I Can’t Stop in a way, as an original way of showing extended land/cityscapes, documentary style. Frozen pans capture the gamut of life—the mundane (shopping, watching television) to the sublime (sex and crime). Fantastic.

Tim Macmillan

The Wolfman

Retelling of the classic wolfman narrative through a scientist with florid 19 century prose and odd 3-D paper cut-out style. Great classic horror genre opening. Scientist is seduced by the moon and unleashes his ravenous id which destroys the earth. A cautionary tale, no doubt. Also check out his Miniema Cinema series on British Animation Awards 6.

Tim Hope

6 Weeks in June

An animated sketchbook of a band’s tour of the USA. Very sparse and sketchy, with lots of text fragments too quick to read and random ambient sounds from the tour bus. Moderately interesting way to illustrate the disjointed alienation of life on the road. Sparse and evocative.

Stuart Hilton

Silence

A Holocaust survivor’s tale, alternating between stock footage and photos in beginning and stark black and white drawings for Germany with colorful scenery for escape to Switzerland sequence. The survivor is told to stay quiet, and does so for 50 years. Thoughtful and original take on the Holocaust.

Orly Yadin + Sylvie Bringas

Love is All

Odd black and white super glam font animation. Sort of Vaughan Oliver mixed with David LaChappelle. Stylized ice queen mouths sweetly saccharine song by Deanna Durbin in cameo chiaroscuro while hyper ornamented text grows and explodes in fireworks and frost patterns. Quite interesting.

Oliver Harrison

Deviant!

Totalitarian Metropolis state dictates everybody’s movements (up, down, right, left, etc). Inhabitants (blobby marshmallows with only eyes) blindly obey. Until night, when the deviants come out. But they are bound just as tightly to disobey. Ironic, no? Funny, until one gets killed by the police. Ends with “no laughing” sign. Alternates between tragic/romantic orchestral music and spunky country-billy. Good mottled textures.

Eoin Clarke

Pleasure of War

Same stark extreme black and white with tiny patches of primary color (red and yellow, in this case) as her Death and the Mother (British Animation Awards 2). Same bleak, depressing abstraction of human frailty and depravity. Some sort of muddled sex/war metaphor with blowjobs and maps and so on. Pendereckiesque score. War, death, sex, life, sword sodomy, decapitation. Good family values.

Ruth Lingford

Wife of Bath's Tale

Sketchy, minimally colored rendition of Chaucer’s tale by the woman who did Girl’s Night Out on British Animation Classics 1, obviously part of a larger program. Classic “what do women want” tale. Turns out they want the upper hand in all matters. Duh. Done in a vibrating Plymptoony style, though not as broad. Serviceable.

Joanna Quinn

Vibrant: colour excites

Bright, beautiful, lively, dare I say vibrant commercial for detergent. Overlapping layers of gloppy oil paint dancing in abstract ecstasy. Expressionism-hop. Short and sweet. Lots of catchy and familiar vocal bites. Peppy.

Clive Walley

Orange spots

Three different black and white and orange spots for cell phones. Different styles, all quite serviceable.

Philip Hunt + Mark Craste

The Man with the Beautiful Eyes

Interpretation of a Bukowski “poem” about boys and a mysterious house and the birth of paranoia animated by the Finding My Way dude (British Animation Awards 1). Similar style of mixing text fragments with flat, childish, Howard Finisteresque drawings. The realization of corruption. The birth of cynicism. The fear of the exceptional by the ordinary. Powerful and haunting.

Jonathon Hodgson

Jolly Roger

Another of his patented flat cubist Boteroesque animations (see British Animation Classics 1 + British Animation Classics 2), this time a pirate pastoral. Funnier than his others, thanks to a fiery Italian woman in black and a repeating parrot. Zany antics on the high seas. Best Baker yet. Quirky, appealing, diverting, and everybody dies. What’s not to like?

Mark Baker

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