keyleedaud (REAL ESTATE)

TV Ontario ran two animated features, Perspepolis and Mary and Max , on Saturday Night at the Movies on March 17. As usual, between features, they ran interview footage relating to the films. This segment features Oscar winner Chris Landreth ( Ryan ), Director and animator Robin Budd ( Producing Parker , Ruby Gloom ) and me.

Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis and the co-director of the animated version , gives her thoughts on making a film from comics . "Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they're two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you're always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting. The language of cinema and comics is different, even though they both use images. In comics, you write with images; they're like pictograms. And in a movie you think about movement and sound and music, all those things that are not considerations when making comics."

I want to draw your attention to Stephen Rowley's review of Persepolis , which has only recently been released in Australia. It begins: "Even those who love animation are prone to dark speculation about its shortcomings as a medium. The lack of live actors and the associated hindrance to truly subtle performances, in particular, is often cited as limiting the potential for serious dramatic work in animated films. The fear is that the relative paucity of full length, adult-oriented dramatic features might not only be due to a lack of courage and imagination on the part of directors and studio executives, but might also reflect actual limitations of animation itself. Thank goodness, then, for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis ." Rowley goes on to enumerate the ways that animation is better suited to telling this story than live action would have been. Definitely worth reading.