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British Animation Awards 6
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Available from British Animation Awards
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Home
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The British Animation Awards website
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Play
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| Silent (and says so on the title card) super simple black line on empty white. Father coaxed to play with/by his son. Not quite enough going on there. |
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Matthew Abbis
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Kamiya's Correspondence
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| Very Japanese. Clean-line (TinTin) style, but with a faded, muted palette. Very clean, very graphic. A girl recites her mundane letter to her mother, sprinkled with odd, seemingly incongruous philosophical observations. She has the letter delivered to her mother’s grave. Restrained and poignant. Beautifully rendered. |
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Sumito Sakakibara
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MC: Revenge is Cold
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Minima Cinema (“MC”) shoots straight from scripts and storyboards by 13-year olds with no editorial or grammatical intervention. In this case, Kevin Pinton, a boy from Camden, who crafts a surreal epic about a cactus and a box of matches who dreams of becoming a lighter. Melodramatic in a spaghetti western style. Great vocal characterizations. Blocky, barely animated cut-out figures set to a Fauxrricone score. Funny and weird. Animated by the guy who did The Wolfman on British Animation Awards 3. |
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Tim Hope
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Bus Stop
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| Same father and son from Play waiting for a bus and enduring the attendant traumas, such as incredibly specific rainstorms, zeppelins dropping bombs, and golems dragging carts full of people too and fro. More humorous than Play, the less is more just doesn’t do it for me, although it is interesting as an experiment in how little you need to convey a gesture or emotion. |
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Matthew Abbis
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Careful
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An overprotective mother sends her girl to the mailbox with a remote-controlled balloon through a landscape of uncertainty and fear. The remote breaks and the girl is blown away into the world. Following weird adventures of a mundane kind, she loses her balloon (which had been hindering her anyway) and returns home, the triumphant adult. Or something like that. Layered minimal blue-print style graphics set to a pulsing, abstract, slithery, Nobukazu Takemura-esque score. Fairly mundane. |
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Damien Gascoigne
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MC: Love then First Fight
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| Script by Thomas Gwyther. Tragic black and white noir melodrama of the mixed fabric shirt (30% silk/70% cotton) and the recovering crimiholic crowbar who loves her. Arbitrarily weird, and somehow not as satisfying as Revenge is Cold. Similarly appropriate stylistically. “I’m not going to kill you. I just want to see your bubble. I showed you mine.” |
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Tim Hope
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Guy 101
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Story of a story of a guy (Keith—”Guy 101”) who once picked up a hitchhiker who robbed and abused him. Ultimately, after the trauma, what he regrets is not getting the hiker’s phone number. Very cleverly told through the imagery of the on-line universe—boxes with gifs and code and email windows and so on. Clever, if disturbing. Nice subtle dissonance between what the guy says he says (“oh”) and what he actually says (“ok”)).
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Ian Gouldstone
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Care
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| Colorful wordless circle-of-life commercial for CARE. Filled in rotoscope to Airy vibe. The travels of the teddy bear—what goes around comes around. |
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Mario Cavelli
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Abba to Zappa
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Wonderful minute-long trip through the alphabet of pop music icons for the Sunday supplement of The Observer. Superflat eyeless representations morph into each other on white—like a Schoolhouse Rock aesthetic mixed with anime-styled figurine character design. Cool and funny and a good trivia challenge. Can’t get C, D, E (Eminem in Jason garb?), H, M (Missy Elliot?), or Y. Very cool. |
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Smith + Foulkes
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Honda: grrr
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| (Hey, they’re hot!). Hyper-colorful Pepperlandish hallucination concerning dirty diesels and the power of hate (all you need is…). Trippy in that oversaturated Peter Max 60’s 7-Up way. Fookin’ hippies over at Honda. |
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Smith + Foulkes
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Motorola: classics
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| Clever trip through classic film timeline. Fun to play name that film with spot-on vignettes featuring a rabbit going through some iconic film moments—everything from Dr. Caligari to Tron, by way of Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, and Metropolis. Lots of fun. Who are these guys? |
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Smith & Foulkes
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Sleep with Fishes
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| Minimal piscine pastiche to fairly annoying Tiger Lillies track (is there another kind?). Mostly black ink on white, with a blue watercolor stripe running through. Yawn |
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Belle Mellor
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MC: Keep on Going
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Another Minima Cinema, with a script by Acai Duang-Arop. The epic quest of an egg in Scotland trying to fulfill his destiny to meet Michael Jackson. He meets an orphan gorilla and they quest. Ironically (tragically?), he meets Jackson at the moment of his death, trampled by an overzealous kangaroo (the gorilla’s kin) in Edinburgh. Cheeky. Oh, the humanity. |
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Tim Hope
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Perpetual Motion in the Land of Milk and Honey
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| Extra nonsensical freak-out in a Residentsy style. Humanoid figures of black with lights (stars?) attached to them stumble through a strange and foreboding landscape rendered largely as a video-game altverse (very Duke Nukemy at times). Aggressively weird. To steal from Uelsmann, “obviously symbolic, but not symbolically obvious”. Tries a bit too hard, methinks, but fascinating to watch. Nuns and eggs and sheep-headed deities, oh my. |
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AL + AL
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Astronauts
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Sparse nearly monochromatic tale of two long-term astronauts and the eternal dilemma of the “do not touch” button, which ejects one of the two oxygen tanks when inevitably pressed, forcing one astronaut into an eternal spacewalk (with a little nudge). The now lone astroboy inadvertently hits the button again. Oh, the irony. Oh, the humanity. Deadpan to the point of boredom. |
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Matthew Walker
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Rabbit
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| Another twisted tale from the creator of British Animation Classic 1's Jukebox. Dick and Janey types find magic idol inside a rabbit that they catch and butcher. The idol turns junk into treasure, they devise a greedy plan by stuffing him with plum jam and selling the diamonds and feathers and ink that he transmogrifies things into. Alas, their plan typically backfires and they are left with crap, covered in bugs, and idol-less. Odd educational style with labels naming everything. Somewhat gross, but fascinating. |
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Run Wracke
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Sony PSP
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| Constantly morphing pomo Rockem Sockem robots cavort through London, battling destructively. They shatter into icons—music, photo, etc. Lively. |
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Alex Rutterford
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Vodafone: mayfly
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| Photorealistic mayflies cavort philosophically through their one day. Become enlightened and use our phones, or something like that. |
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Darren Walsh
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City Paradise
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Wondrously beautiful and impenetrably strange appear to be the themes of this disc, and this piece falls right into place. Distorted photographic odyssey of a young Japanese woman newly transplanted to London and her adventures learning to speak English in her flat and in an underwater fantasy world she reaches by hitting her head on the way to scuba diving class. A beautifully wrought world—engaging and puzzling. Great selectively oversaturated palette. Same woman who brought you Fish Never Sleep (British Animation Awards 5), surprisingly different. |
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Gaelle Denis
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BAA titles
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| Same guy who did previous BAA sequence (British Animation Awards 4). Epic metal band Slaughterhouse rocks like Spinal Tap on a huge needle rock in the ocean. They shred, then stop as they wait for Ozzy to come out of the loo. He falls off rock, band follows. Whatever. Oh and, of course it goes without saying, they're all sheep. |
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Bob Cosford
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| AniFan is a member of the Hypercube collective |
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Home
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copyright 2008 Christopher Earl
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