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October 12, 2008
Looks like a little company called Project 760 Productions in San Francisco used to produce a neat little cable show called World of Anime back in the day. Check out this clip featuring an interview with anime scholar, Fred Schodt then hop on over to their YouTube channel to watch more archival clips. Previously on fps: WFAC 2008 - Fred Schodt, John O'Donnell and Brian Ruh to Discuss Grave of the Fireflies Labels: anime, Fred Schodt, Osamu Tezuka, San Francisco, World of Anime  Oooo...Now I'm getting really excited! I can't wait for November 13th, the kick-off of this years Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema in Kitchener-Waterloo. We've just found out that Fred Schodt (writer, translator, interpreter and anime scholar supreme) will be in attendance to lead a panel discussion about and following the screening of Ghibli masterpiece, Grave of the Fireflies. Sitting on the panel with Schodt will be Grave's North American Executive Producer, John O'Donnell and Anime Research editor, Brian Ruh. We expect further details to be announced shortly, along with a complete list of the films screening at the festival. Labels: Anime Research, CPM, Fred Schodt, Grave of the Fireflies, Studio Ghibli, Waterloo Festival for Animated Cinema I have to admit, I'm not much of a video game player. On top of that, I've never cared much for RPGs. But I'll gladly make an exception and dive stylus-first into a Nintendo DS when the design and animation of the hand-held role-player are by Studio Ghibli and the music by my hero, Joe Hisaishi. From Ghibli World: Ni no Kuni: The Another World follows the adventure of a 13-year-old boy whose actions lead to the death of his mother. One day, the boy encounters a fairy who gives him a book which promises to lead him to the mysterious world of Ni no Kuni, a reality parallel to his own. There he encounters alternate versions of people he knows (for example his neighbor's cat is a king there) and attempts to save his mother. Labels: Joe Hisaishi, Nintendo DS, Studio Ghibli, video games October 7, 2008
 Ryan Larkin, who animated Walking, and who was also the subject of the Oscar-winning Ryan, has a posthumous co-directing credit on Spare Change (with Laurie Gordon). The film will be showing at the Festival du nouveau cinema. It will also be showing before the feature, All Together Now, a documentary about the Beatles and Cirque du Soleil, which is also premiering at the FNC. Spare Change will precede the feature as it screens across Canada in the next week: October 10 Vancouver: Ridge Theatre Toronto: Royal Québec City: Cinéma Quartier Sherbrooke: La maison du Cinéma October 12 Montreal: Cinema Du Parc Labels: Festival du Nouveau Cinema, festivals, National Film Board of Canada, NFB, Ryan Larkin October 1, 2008
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, WFAC September 26, 2008
 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:
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, WFAC September 25, 2008
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
September 24, 2008
 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 September 22, 2008
 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 |
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