Animation 43
Early Man
by Jeremy Clarke. Nick Park and Aardman Animations’ latest epic, out on Blu-ray and DVD, is set in a prehistoric world of cavemen, rabbits and mammoths. For good measure it also throws in dastardly Frenchmen and football. Park coaxes great voice performances out of his all-star cast, while physical animation is in the capable hands […]
Have a Nice Day
by Jeremy Clarke. Set in an unnamed provincial town in South China, director Liu Jian’s Have a Nice Day is a bleak vision of a brutal society fuelled by naked self-interest. It’s hard to think of anything in animation or the wider world of cinema quite like it. The plot suggests a gangster film, but […]
When the Wind Blows
By Andrew Osmond. “They say it’s the correct thing to wear white. People in Hiroshima with patterned clothes got burned where the patterns was and not so much on the white bits. Even the buttons showed up.” “Yes, but they were Japanese.” In the late 1980s, two unusual animated films were released aimed at adults; […]
Mai Mai Miracle: The Origins
By Andrew Osmond. In 2009, Mai Mai Miracle’s director Sunao Kutabuchi released an unusual adjunct to his film, a self-published free magazine called The Days Blown By Mai Mai Miracle. It included his account of the origins and development of the story. As the director explained, Mai Mai Miracle had several starting points. One was […]
Books: Chinese Animation… Again
By Jonathan Clements. As its subtitle suggests, Wu Weihua’s book Chinese Animation: Creative Industries and Digital Culture delves into two specific elements of cartoons in China – the effects of disruptive transitions on a struggling business, and the massive transformations wrought by computers. Both these areas are under-represented in previous studies of the medium, and […]