So some of you may know I finished my essay when I wanted to on Monday morning (yayyyy!) and it was safe to say I was bloody relieved to get away from it, just in time for a city walk with the wonderful Angus.
Tuesday, I had some time to work on some design work that I'm helping with (a blogpost will follow imminently!), which was really just a relief to do some drawing for once, and I will be bringing a sketchbook with me to Vienna - we're going on a school trip there in two weeks so its going to be a lot of fun! I'm looking forward to experimenting with some drawing/writing in the same book, which I think will produce some interesting documentary material. I've never really tried it before since sketchbook days at Foundation, and I really resent uni for putting me off using a sketchbook. It's about time I picked one up again, just for my own practice, whatever that practice is.
Wednesday, Rosa and I finally got to see each other after a really long time. With both of us still working on our respective projects, its been difficult to keep up but we finally had a day together which turned out to contain lots of elements of stop motion.
First we went to see the new Charlie Kaufman stop motion, Anomalisa. I had been really looking forward to it as I'd heard good reviews and really wanted to see how it was made. Technically, we both agreed that it was very impressive. The facial expressions were made out of several parts, a part for the upper part of the face for the movement of eyebrows and eyelids, and one of the lower part for the lips. The bodies were quite realistic, and the movements incredibly smooth. Equally we enjoyed how they had used these material aspects within the storyline; there's a part where the main character's face rapidly changes, and falls off, showing why they used stop motion instead of live-action for the film. But the good parts end there really - the storyline was rather disappointing and frankly quite annoying.
They started off very well, really emphasising the mundanity of the story. Only about 10/20 minutes into the story do you realise that everyone aside from the protagonist, Michael Stone, has the same voice and the same face. The film hits a climatic part when Michael hears another voice, the voice of a young woman called Lisa. They have weird puppet sex, and then he dreams that all the people with the same face are all completely in love with him. When he wakes up and proposes to leave his wife for Lisa, she suddenly starts transforming into everyone else. It ends with Lisa writing him a letter, and as the camera pans up to see Lisa and her friend in the car, you realise the friend has another different face. So at the end of it all, its still a film that is all middle-age-white-man-puppet having a crisis, boo hoo.
The film could have gone super surrealist, there was so much opportunity for the film not to be like that. It could have been all apocalyptic or something, anything more than just same old story surely?! It also didn't continue having a reason to be stop motion animation, and its a shame all that effort went into such a rehashed story with neither a sombre afterthought, or an exciting fulfilment.
So we moved on, and with a few hours to kill before we met Hanswan, we popped over to the Museum of Childhood for the mini Smallfilms exhibition. Ahh, some proper, hearty, imaginative stop motion. I remember loving the Clangers, so it was great to see and read about the detail that Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin went to. Also Peter Firmin is superbly skilled, those Clangers are knitted, with a mechano skeleton! It reminded me that making a great animation is not always about swooshy technical skills, it is mainly about a great story. The best thing about stop motion, and animation in general, is that the world is your oyster, you can make anything happen. You can make people fly, animals talk, walk, be on the moon, anamorphise a car, even with human figures, you can reach a fantastically intimate and emotional level that is humanistic and yet different to film...Why waste the time and energy on a terrible storyline? So although these stop motion animations both have two very different audiences, it is clear which one is the more compelling...
Anyway, a little trivia, Bagpuss was supposed to be orange and white, but they sent pink by mistake! To be honest, I'm glad they went for it! And for some nostalgia (or a new discovery for some of you who've never seen it before!) here's the first episode of The Clangers. I understand there is a new version (??!) which I've not seen yet, but I hope it lives up to its original counterpart!
