MUTO wall painted animation

Run Wrake’s Anyway

Run Wrake,winner of last year´s Bafta for his short film “Rabbit”, made this film during his staying at the Royal College of Art. Beautifully crafted. It’s hard to find films like this nowadays.

Zbigniew Rybczynski: “Tango”

amazing polish film from the 80´s. Enjoy

PDA: Petits Dibuixos Animats (aka Small Cartoons)

Here is my first experiment with children. They were aged between 7 and 10 and they have a small script, which they wrote and have to animate. Their learning process is pretty fast as long as kept simple and all made like a game to play. They all obviosly love cartoons and to draw, and they seem to understand the principle of moving image, previous a demonstration of my own. so far we started with construction of a drawing they made, there is no moving within the space, but thats gonna be the next aim, trying to get them to move things around. Flickbooks are very handful to make them understand the process. Check out PDA on the menu above if u want to know more about the project.

Segundo de Chomón´s Japanese Acrobats 1907

Segundo de Chomón was a spanish pioneer in filmmaking alongside George Meliés on the early twentieth century. His investigations in film effects and exquisite sensitivity and understanding of the filmmaking language and its possibilities place him as a revolutionary figure within the medium. Unfortunately he has become hugely unknown, probably because of his spanish origins, since his best work was done in France. Another great spanish artist forced to move outside Spain since seems this country never had any foresight for their emerging and poignant artists. And this time we cannot blame the civil war since he died way before, in 1929. Enjoy this fantastic piece.

“TOT NEU” Tv Ident

This is my first commercial job as a director. Very low budget tv Ident for Andorra television’s prime program about the world of snow,as you can see. It was all mostly made by filmstriping in photoshop and rotoscoping live action shots of skii surfers and snowboarders.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken nine year old Marjane that we see a people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power – forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, she outsmarts the “social guardians” and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable.

I’ve been always quite careful when it comes to adaptation from novels or in this case graphic novels to cinema. I do agree with the author in her making of interview that when they set out to do Persepolis in animation they din’t want to take the comic book as the straight storyboard in motion. This has been the case for instance in Frank Miller’s Sin City where the same shots used by the author in the original comic book are translated exactly the same in film. This is a wrong approach since cinema has its language on its own, and graphic novels, although being closer in the visual point of view, have another one. By doing that that author is just a mere translator from one medium to the other and adds nothing to the piece. So, regardless of Persepolis being an interesting story in the first place(out of gratuitously action packed heroes with superpowers) it is and independent entity from its original format where one could stand alone without the other. What came first doesn’t matter.
It is worth to mention that the animation is impeccable. Not to exaggerated, not to poor, not too realistic, not to much cartoon. A very good balance out of the nowadays full of cliches animation that unfortunately the major animation studios got us used too. All done by hand, in the traditional way like the old days, no signs of any major flash cold perfect crisp line and motion tweening. A good piece fit to stand the past of time, that is more that i can say for the 90% of the animation feature films made today.Good for the french!

Norman McLaren’s Boogie Doodle

Playful and simple. Not one of my favorites McLaren´s animation but still u get so much with so little.

Len Lye’s Trade Tattoo

Another classic animation by Len Lye. Always so refreshing to watch on this motion saturated days.

Len Lye’s Colour Box

who doesn’t like a bit of Len Lye animation.