Genius Party Beyond 2nd trailer! from Quiet Earth on Vimeo.

Studio 4°C’s Genius Party Beyond has just been confirmed for fps as one of the many delectable films on the menu at this years Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema. This is an incredible treat for fans of the studio who brought us Tekkon Kinkreet and for animation enthusiasts alike as the anthology film has seen very few screenings on North American shores.

Festival details, further film listings, and more will be available soon on the official Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema site! We'll post a full schedule here on fps as soon as it's confirmed.

Labels: Genius Party, Studio 4C, Tekkon Kinkreet, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema

Big news for Ontario Otaku - The new Rebuild of Evangelion film, 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone will have its premiere at the Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema in Kitchener-Waterloo, November 13th-16th.

All films at the festival are screened from 35mm prints or in Hi-Def at The Gig Theatre (the old Hyland theatre), 137 Ontario Street North, Kitchener.

The Evangelion film joins an incredible list of animated gems being screened at the festival:

• Genius Party
• Sita Sings the Blues
• Idiots and Angels
• Nocturna
• Prince Ahmed
• Egon and Dönci
• Grave of the Fireflies
• Piano Forest

and many more to be announced in the coming weeks!

Kitchener-Waterloo is approximately 100km, or less than an hours drive from Toronto and can be reached easily by Greyhound bus, Airways Transit and Via Rail.

Labels: anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema

I had never seen this amazing show before the "best-of" presentation, There's A Party In My Tummy: Yo Gabba Gabba!, last Saturday at the Empire Cinema. What can I say? It changed my life. This show features some of the best contemporary songwriters crafting little ditties for children set to some of the most charming and innovative animation I've seen in ages.

Luckily for us, Nickelodeon has been kind enough to schedule a DVD release for October 14th. I'm not sure what we'll get for our $12.99 but at 98 minutes long, you can safely assume a best of (which wouldn't be such a bad thing, to tell the truth) or approximately 5 episodes from Season 1.

Amazon Link - Yo Gabba Gabba: Dance Dance Bunch

More videos after the jump:

Frequent fps contributor, René Walling and I rolled into Ottawa from Montreal fairly late on Friday night, both disappointed to have missed out on The New Wave Of Japanese Animation that had screened at 7pm that evening. Our options limited, we set ourselves toward the Empire Cinema across the street from our shared Novotel room, where we had quickly shed our luggage. We were just in time to catch a screening of one of the films in the running for best feature of the fest: a little independent CG number called, Terra.

Terra sets itself up as an alien invasion tale turned on its head. Happy little, sentient tadpole people float blissfully through their naive lives in a Miyazaki film/Flight GN inspired world of flying whale-things, gliders and airships until the fateful day when a "god" appears in the sky. The god turns out to be a giant, spinning spaceship carrying an invasion force of humans, desperate to take the planet as their new home. Amidst an explosive torrent of sci-fi action and Planet of the Apes riffing revelation, we follow fishy, doe-eyed Mala (voiced by Evan Rachel Wood) through a step-by-step Campbell-style "Hero Journey" to fulfill her destiny and save her people from extinction. To its credit, the film manages to throw enough plot and character curve balls to keep the structure from being too cookie-cutter familiar but rarely ascends beyond anything more than a simple story twist, illustrated with a collection of elements cobbled together from an animation fan's nerd-moist-dreams.

Read more after the jump:


Which leads me to question who the audience is for this film? It lacks the depth that adults require of character pieces like Ghibli's Only Yesterday or the internal consistency of the better sci-fi/fantasies like Ghost in the Shell or Macross (the filmmakers never manage to bridge the gap between the fantasy-science of the tadpole Terrans and the real-worldish science of the humans). We're constantly asked to suspend belief beyond reasonable realms (Mala is able to, within minutes, build an atmospheric containment chamber large enough to house a grown adult spaceman) while being led by the nose from plot point to plot point, all the while suffering a perpetual head-clubbing by the hammer of the films "message". There isn't much subtlety in Terra. Is that because it's made to appeal to children? I can't say for certain that my eight-year-old nephew would care for it either (This review would have been so much easier to write if he'd been with me!) The pseudo-science concepts that much of the plot hinges upon may be too technical for youngsters to grasp, keeping them at arms length from the main thrust of the narrative. Add to that a potentially inappropriate level of violence and death and Terra becomes a film that my sister might not appreciate having screened for her little boy.

For what it's worth, the full-length movie from artist/director Aristomenis Tsirbas is a minor triumph in that the quality of the Maya (character animation), LightWave 3D (modeling, texturing, lighting, rendering) and Modo (additional modeling, bridging) animation is such that it can compete at the box-office with larger studio films. Both design work and animation quality are uneven (humans have a distinct and well designed Pixar style to their faces and a completely flat and formless shape to their body and dress) but not so offensive that children or less discriminating adults will take notice. The combination of the inconsistent writing and animation was certainly distracting enough to pull me out of the feature at times but I felt that I might have been in the minority in the theatre. After all, it won the Grand Prize for Best Animated Feature at the fest.

Labels: Aristomenis Tsirbas, CGI, Lightwave, Maya, Modo, Terra

This amazing clock was up for auction on eBay. Very expensive, but very beautiful. I'd love to receive incredible little Ghibli goo-gahs for my birthday, you know. It's December 28th, in case you were wondering.

Via Aint It Cool

Labels: Studio Ghibli, Totoro

Hot on the heels of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, the Cinematheque quebecoise is offering a festival highlight in Montreal. Jonas Odell's retrospective, Revolver Bang! Bang! will be shown on September 24th, and it repeats on September 26.

I've provided a loose translation of Marco de Blois's description on the CQ website.

In 1981 in Stockholm, three students who loved illustration and animation formed a studio they named Filmtecknarna. Initially, Jonas Odell, Lars Ohlson and Stig Bergqvist dedicated their activities to production and direction of short auteur films. But a few years later, a new opportunity presented itself for the directors. Private television stations in Sweden had a demand for content that the studio worked to satisfy. Therefore, the founders threw themselves into the direction of television animation, commercials and music videos, as well as returning periodically to short films.

Imprinting an incomparable stylistic cohesiveness to their productions, Filmtecknarna attained international reknown. When one has clients, for example, like Ikea, BMW, U2 and Franz Ferdinand, one can meaningfully consider one's notoriety.

Another key moment in Filmtecknarna's history occurred in 1993 when festivals the world over attacked by an unidentified object, Revolver, which brought together the three founders and Martti Ekstrand. Even today it exerts a fascination the holds the spectator: this strange black and white film, made with looped movements and evoking the aesthetic of Muybridge and the Fleischer brothers, reveals a story of the world with nothing left but a few mysterious fragments.

Odell went on to follow a fruitful career in music videos, without abandoning short auteur films, deepening his approach in which the desire to seize the real applied itself on his sense of design that, paradoxically, has little to do with realism. In Family & Friends, he dives into his memory to create the coloured portrait of jaded people he has met in which the memory haunts him still. For the acclaimed Never Like the First Time!, winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2006, he provides a graphic counterpoint to real interviews with people who recount a defining moment of their existence: their first sexual encounter.

The programme, curated by the filmmaker himself, is composed of Revolver, My Best Friend Plank, Family & Friends, Never Like the First Time! and a series of music videos created for Franz Ferdinand, U2, Goldfrapp, The Hours, Audio Bullys, Erasure, Feeder et Mad Action. The Cinémathèque acquired a new 35mm copy of Revolver in 2006 thanks to the five generous donors. In addition, the filmmaker has a special surprise, his most recent film, Lies, which just had its world premiere at the Mostra de Venise.

Here's another video directed by Odell: Smile, by The Cobbs.

Labels: Filmtecknarna, Jonas Odell, music videos, shorts, Sweden

ADAPT 2008 started today in Montreal. The conference for digital artists has proved a success right from the start and drawn talent from the media and gaming industry. This year's keynote speaker is Andrea Deja.

Here's an interview with Andrea Deja by Emru from last year's visit to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for the Once Upon A Time Walt Disney exhibit. So you can guess when he discusses the film he can't name it's The Princess and the Frog.

ADAPT continues until Friday, with special presentations from Walt Disney Studios, Animation Mentor, Syd Mead and more.

Labels: ADAPT, Andreas Deja, Disney

It's been a crazy year, but I have been looking forward to the Ottawa International Animation Festival, well.. since the last one ended. This is always the case.

Emru will miss his first festival since 1988, but Brenden Fletcher, Rene Walling and I will be taking in the fest, and we'll try to bring some of it back to you, too.

As usual, there lineup is exceptional. I don't know how I am going to make to all of the special screenings and retrospectives. Just a few of my must-see list items include the Michael Sporn and Jonas Odell retrospectives, Brainwashed! Cartoons That Tell Us What To Think, and The New Wave of Japanese Animation.

Richard Williams' presentation (in interview with John Canemaker) would be in my list, but it's sold already out, which is altogether unsurprising considering the circumstances. If there are any seats left 15 minutes before the event, rush tickets will be sold, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. I will have to satisfy myself with a special screening of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? instead. I'm also looking forward to the Yo Gabba Gabba! presentation on Saturday.

I haven't even gotten into the masterclasses, workshops and panels. Honestly, it's like trying to bail out the ocean with a bucket. I'm going to enjoy trying!

Labels: features, festivals, Jonas Odell, Michael Sporn, OIAF, Ottawa International Animation Festival, Richard Williams, shorts

Mamoru Oshii's latest film is an adaptation of Hiroshi Mori's novels of the same name, and tells the story of an ageless pilot, Yuichi Kannami, who transfers to a remote airbase controlled by a cold, self-destructive young girl named Suito Kusanagi afflicted with the same condition that keeps him eternally youthful. They also share an affinity for aerial dogfighting, and the relationship between the two ace pilots deepens as Yuichi slowly recollects fragments of his mysterious past and gets to know the odd denizens of the surrounding countryside.



The plot for Oshii's latest film sounds strangely peaceful for a film about war, and it is. The film unfolds at a leisurely pace (it lasts a lavish 122 minutes), with plenty of time to show the viewer intimate details about the alternate Europe that Yuichi and his fellow pilots inhabit. Oshii clearly holds high regard for Mori's fictional environment and sough to reproduce it with love and attention. The simple but startling beauty of the countryside, the quiet shadows of an abandoned city, and the cramped quarters of a converted manor house all resonate sharply in photorealistic animation and perfect sound.

And, of course, there are the dogfights.

Oshii's films, even his live-action work, are known for their sudden swerves into shockingly elegant violence. This is no different. The title is apt: these pilots are insects crawling across a sky that is vast and deep, limitless and unforgiving. While the dogfights are less visceral, perhaps, than the first scene of Innocence, they do communicate the dizzying, nearly nihilistic quality inherent to aerial combat: Yuichi survives because he is a good pilot, not because he's an arrogant flyer who likes to show off. This isn't Top Gun or even Macross Plus: Yuichi has no special moves, no prototype plane, nothing but skill and experience.

But his experience is the heart of the film, as we discover that there is more behind the "Kildren" -- people who, like Yuichi, remain eternally adolescent -- than a simple genetic disorder. There are clues layered throughout, and Yuichi's realizations come slowly but surely, a story that he pieces together rather than a sudden, shocking recollection. The film's ultimate conclusion is surprisingly hopeful for an Oshii film: eternity is not a life sentence, but a chance to start again.

However, there are some standard Oshii issues: a striking lack of exposition, and a lyrical pace that favours characterization and setting over plot or coherence. The story is secondary to the sentiment, but the story is also pure Oshii: a dreamlike exercise in issues of memory, identity, and the role of the military in a peaceful society. Along the way we get a heartbreaking love story, an endearing environment, and several references to Oshii's past work and anime in general (even the afore-mentioned Macross Plus). The story is not about an alternate universe; rather, the universe is the story.

Thankfully, The Sky Crawlers manages to avoid the long, drawn-out mindgames that feature so prominently in Oshii's other work. Gone are the painful, film-interrupting chunks of classical quotations, and gone are the belaboured references to Oshii's beloved Basset Gabu. (Don't worry; Gabu shows up, but as a dog and not an advertisement.) We get a tiny nod to Camus, but the script is remarkably clutter-free.

Featured above is the six-minute promotional trailer available at the Ghibli Museum. Studio Ghibli worked alongside Production IG on the film, and the whole film is infused with expertise from its auteur director to the Skywalker Sound work. Sony Pictures just picked it up, so hopefully we'll see distribution soon.

Labels: anime, TIFF