keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

The Worldwide Short Film Festival is currently running in Toronto. I attended a program today that included Chris Landreth's new film, The Spine , as well as the latest Wallace and Gromit half hour, A Matter of Loaf and Death , directed by Nick Park. Both films are consistent with their creators' previous work. The Spine Landreth's approach to animation is a sort of German Expressionism. While the German films of the 1920s expressed their characters' emotions through their surroundings, Landreth uses the characters' own bodies as expressions of their mental and emotional states. This film has to do with a marriage, where the partners are deformed in ways that relate to their experiences and needs. The problem with this approach is that it requires that the characters be tormented in some way, and that makes each Landreth film an appointment with dysfunction. In addition, Landreth is more enamored of technique than he is of character. The husband and wife eac...

Courtesy of Harvey Deneroff' s blog, here's a link to an interview with Nick Park from The Guardian . In the article, there are some interesting comments about the relationship between Aardman and DreamWorks, including the following: Aardman fought hard to retain the rights to [Wallace and Gromit], which left DreamWorks feeling uncomfortable about losing control of an area almost as important to the bottom line as the box office take. "They found it difficult working with characters they didn't own," says Park. "They were trying to respect that at the same time as trying to completely dictate to us. There was a sense of tension."