With the Oscars only days away, Animated News brings together reports from around the web to give you a closer look at the five films nominated for Best Animated Short.
**BOUNDIN’**
Pixar Animation Studios
Bud Luckey
Here’s a story on how strange is life with its changes.
And it happened not long ago…
So begins Pixar’s latest short, told in song, Boundin’ is “”. The film was directed by veteran animator Bud Luckey, “one of Pixar’s original gang of five (along with John Lasseter, Docter, Andrew Stanton and Jeff Pidgeon)”. Luckey is best known at Pixar as the artist who came up with the original design of Woody in Toy Story. Besids directing the short, Luckey also pitched the original story, created the conceptual drawings of the characters, wrote the music and lyrics, voices the jackalope, and performs the song. “For some, Boundin’ is a cross between the vibrancy of Mary Blair and the buoyancy of George Pal. For others, including Pixar’s Pete Docter, who recruited the 69-year-old traditional animator from Colossal Pictures in nearby San Francisco in ’92, Boundin’ recalls the short films about counting Luckey directed during the first season of Sesame Street”. (“For most people who grew up in the early 1970s, hearing a Bud Luckey Street song is a comforting sense of deja vu. His enduring contributions include 14 counting songs, with ‘The Alligator King’ (1,2,3,4,5,6,7 said the Alligator King to his seven sons. I’m feeling mighty down. Whichever of you can cheer me up will get to wear my crown…) and ‘The Ladybug Picnic’ (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, lady bugs came to the lady bug picnic…)”.
“There was lots of research and preparation, including tap dancing lessons. They even sheared a lamb in front of Pixar Animation Studios”. “Though Boundin’ is in many ways one of Pixar’s most complicated projects – the short includes scenes from all four seasons, with bright sunlight, rain and snow – Luckey and the other animators benefited from Pixar’s previous films. Luckey borrowed the Model T in Boundin’ from Lasseter’s in-progress Cars, due for release next year. The mockingbird’s legs came from the fowl in For the Birds. And the waterfall in Boundin’ was a modified version of the water filter in Finding Nemo”.
Boundin’ won the Annie Award for Best Animated Short Film.
Luckey summed up his work at Pixar by saying “I used to teach youngsters about numbers using animation; now I learn from youngsters about animating with numbers”.
for more info and quotes from this article:
– http://www.pixar.com/shorts/bdn/index.html
– http://vfxworld.com/?atype=articles&id=1964&page=
– http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/02/13/DDGQO4UFRC1.DTL
– http://awn.com/oscars04/?type=shorts&id=boundin
**DESTINO**
Walt Disney Pictures
Dominique Monfery and Roy Edward Disney
“In 1946, two legendary artists began collaboration on a short film. More than half a century later, their creation has finally been completed”. “Destino, the fabled collaboration between Salvador Dalí and Walt Disney has finally been completed – just 58 years after work on it began”.
“Though Dalí’s admiration for Walt Disney might seem strange today – for some the name Disney now evokes the opposite of subversive – the outrageous surrealist painter held the animator and studio chief in high-enough esteem to want to make a movie with him. I have come to Hollywood and am in touch with the three great American surrealists – the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney,” the artist wrote to his friend Andre Breton in 1937.”
“Originally conceived as a segment for one of the postwar musical package features, Destino is an adaptation of a ballad by Mexican songwriter Armando Dominguez. Disney planned it as a vehicle for South American performer Dona Luz, who sang ‘You Belong to My Heart’ in The Three Caballeros (1945). Dalí spent eight months, from late 1945 through 1946, working with studio artist John Hench to create visuals inspired by the music”. While working on Fantasia 2000, Roy Disney became intrigued by the project and worked to have it completed. “‘It is a little different [project] for us’, Disney says of Destino’s cryptic artistic merits, which features such trademark Dali images as ravaging ants, eyeballs, melting clocks, the Venus sculpture coming to life as a beautiful woman and two gargoyle heads resembling the artist with turtles’ bodies. ‘But I’m enormously proud that we’ve done this because it is about who we are as artists, how long our history is and how long we respect it'”.
“Baker Bloodworth (Dinosaur), who returned to Disney after a brief sabbatical, served as producer. He says then animation president Tom Schumacher chose the French studio because of its unique sensitivity to the material and that Monfery (The Emperor’s New Groove and Hercules) seemed the most appropriate animator to helm the five-minute short even though he had never directed before. ‘At first Dominique said no’, Bloodworth recalls. ‘Why would you want to finish a project started by Salvador Dali? Are you insane?’ – he said in a polite French way. Two months go by and he finally agreed to do it. I told him to start drawing, just start playing with it and see if something sparks you. He started storyboarding and re-storyboarding sequences that Dali and John Hench had done”.
“The reconstructed Destino is a striking, dream-like collage of images without a conventional narrative. As a dancer moves through bizarre settings, she undergoes a series of transformations, becoming the shadow of a bell in a campanile and a dandelion puff. Her movements relate to dance and baseball, which Dalí described as ‘an obsession’. The backgrounds are filled with classic Dalí imagery: forced perspectives, classical ruins, eyeballs, insects and the signature melting watches”.
“Now, with the Academy Awards only days away, many veteran animators who have long seen Roy Disney as a champion of their art form have a wish: They want Walt’s nephew to win the statuette on Sunday and deliver a nationally televised slap at Eisner and his company, which has laid off hundreds of animators in recent years. ‘I think people are relishing the potential sight of Roy getting up and giving the acceptance speech at the Oscars’, said Kevin Koch, president of Hollywood’s local animation guild and a staff animator at DreamWorks SKG. ‘The irony of the situation is not lost on most people'”.
Destino was nominated for the Annie for Best Animated Short Film, and has won several awards as festivals around the world.
for more info and quotes from this article:
– http://www.savedisney.com/news/se/destino.asp
– http://mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype=all&sort=date&article_no=1761
– http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,60385,00.html
– http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/living/8045453.htm
– http://awn.com/oscars04/?type=shorts&id=destino
**GONE NUTTY** Blue Sky StudiosCarlos Saldanha and John C. Donkin “Here’s a refreshing change of pace: an Oscar-nominated short you can go out and rent. Technically Gone Nutty dates from 2002, when it debuted on home video as part of the Ice Age DVD supplement. Director [Carlos] Saldanha was co-director of the Ice Age feature, which contained as one of recent cinema’s greatest running gags the character Scrat, a sabre-toothed squirrel so high-strung he could break the sound barrier just darting his eyes. Since then this classy Looney Tunes-esque short has screened theatrically and won several prizes at various international festivals, thus qualifying for a well-deserved Academy Award nomination”.
for more info and quotes from this article: |
“Scrat’s mass of facial tics, the way his fur billows in the wind, and the squash-and-stretch durability of those giant eyeballs when squeezed are just a few of the triumphs of animation technique on display in Gone Nutty, another impeccably-timed crowd-pleaser from Blue Sky Studios”.**HARVIE KRUMPET**
Melodrama Pictures
Adam Elliot
“… Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them, and then there are others…”
“Harvie Krumpet is the biography of an ordinary man seemingly cursed with perpetual bad luck”. We see him grow to an old man while throughout his life he copes with his seemingly cursed existence. He is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, but “instead of withering away, Harvie finds rejuvenation and excitement with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient, Hamish McGrumbel. Together they entertain the other residents with their mischievous acts; getting drunk, practical jokes, escaping from the home and naked puppet shows. Despite these high jinks, Harvie’s condition worsens and he falls in and out of hallucinations and depression, almost opting for suicide before being saved by a very special woman who enters his life and steers him to a new realization about life”. Harvie Krumpet is narrated by Geoffrey Rush.
The film was directed by the young celebrated Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot, best known for his short film trilogy Uncle, Cousin, Brother. Elliot suffers from a “physiological tremor that affects his entire nervous system. Everyone shakes, he says, but he does more than most. The disorder is absorbed into his work: his models are bigger than normal, making it easier for him to move them. Perhaps it also accounts for the distinct look his characters have: all wobbly, misshapen body parts”.
The film is 22 minutes long and “there are over 280 separate shots [in it], almost the equivalent to astandard live action feature. The scenes were shot according to a very detailedstoryboard of almost 300 individual panels”.
Harvie Krumpet was the winner of the jury, the audience, an the FIPRESCI prizes at the Annecy International animated Film Festival, the world’s premier animation showcase.
for more info and quotes from this article:
– http://www.harviekrumpet.com
– http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/06/14/1055220811921.html
– http://www.acmi.net.au/BEE4565B6A434557B3E967176E57A0A2.htm
– http://www.sleepybrain.net/adam.html
– http://awn.com/oscars04/?type=shorts&id=harvieKrumpet
**NIBBLES**
Acme Filmworks
Chris Hinton
“Deranged Canadian director Chris Hinton is responsible for a splendid barrage of comic animated shorts going back 25 years, including 2001’s Flux and the 1988 classic A Nice Day in the Country… Hinton is capable of subdividing comic beats into fragments so small hummingbirds are in awe of his timing”. Nibbles “is based on a week-long fishing trip he took with his two sons in northern Quebec”. Hinton says, “In the making of this film I stuck very closely to the central idea and milked the idea to the end. It doesn’t wander all over the place. It’s something that everybody can identify with, especially anybody who has children”. “He calls his creation a blend of documentary and animation – a ‘docu-mation'”.
The film “was closer to a no-budget film than a low-budget film, costing him no more to make than the price of his computer and some off-the-shelf software: ‘I don’t use any trillion-dollar software, it’s fairly inexpensive stuff'”.
“In the U.S., Nibbles was paired in theatres with the Montreal-based comedy feature Mambo Italiano. Otherwise it’s film festivals, late, late night on TV and on Internet sites. Theatre owners, he says, usually prefer that moviegoers spend their time between feature screenings at the concession stand instead of in their seats”. He says, “It’s a labour of love, that’s for sure. You don’t do anything in animation to make money. That’s out of the question. I defy you to find anybody who wants to pay for a short film”.
for more info and quotes from this article:
– http://www.acmefilmworks.com/nibbles_mov.html
– http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/oscars/canada_oscars2004.html
– http://www.recorder.ca/cp/Entertainment/040128/e012829A.html
– http://mag.awn.com/index.php?article_no=2011&page=5
– http://awn.com/oscars04/?type=shorts&id=nibbles
