an owlish girl: animation

Showing posts with label animation. Show all posts

Sunday Short: 'An Object at Rest' by Seth Boyden

It's been a while since I recommended a short film as a part of Sunday Short, but this one was too good to pass by. I've always been pretty partial to inanimate objects being imbued with human characteristics, and this short about the life of a rock is pretty darn magical.

When Marnie Was There

The other night, I had the total pleasure of catching the newest Studio Ghibli film, When Marnie Was There at Dendy Portside Cinemas.

The story focuses on Anna, a twelve-year-old girl who gets shipped out to the countryside to be with her foster mother’s family after suffering a panic attack in the city. In the country, she finds a new friend in the mysterious Marnie and together they overcome their deepest fears.

It’s a beautiful film, languidly told with a compelling plot and the gorgeous animation that makes Studio Ghibli a household name. I particularly loved the gentle dynamic to Anna’s relationships with the people around her. Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi seemed to understand them intimately, and the relationships in it are always pushing and pulling and, very occasionally, tearing each other apart. It’s a wonderful story, terrifically told. It makes me want to live in it for a while.

One of the things that surprised me though was how much it felt like a new start to the studio. There’s been a lot of talk of late of Studio Ghibli shutting down, and When Marnie Was There being the final output of the place.

As a final chapter, I can’t help but think The Wind Rises and The Princess Kaguya were better and more compelling conclusions. To end with two masterpieces from the old guard makes sense for a studio ready to close its doors. In a lot of ways after all, When Marnie Was There feels like a new start – a modern story exploring modern themes of childhood isolation, rejection and fear.

It’s a new and younger voice for the studio (which is a little weird to say given director Yonebayashi is 41, but keep in mind Miyazaki and Takahata are both in their seventies), but it’s not one that feels like a hopeful one to end on.

It feels like a strong film in a director and a studio’s career, but a middling one.

Studio Ghibli’s pretty renowned for constant threats of shutting down. I mean, Miyazaki himself has been promising retirement for how many years now?

I really hope it’s not Studio Ghibli’s final film. I guess that’s what this is getting at. While I loved the movie itself, it doesn’t feel like a bookend to the breathtaking Nausicaa or Laputa: Castle in the Sky (depending what you consider Studio Ghibli’s first film to be).

I hope there’s more. I hope Studio Ghibli continues to be a cultural powerhouse all of its own. I hope it continues to shed a light on the internal lives of girls and the way they touch magic, whether they mean to or not. I hope the studio keeps making movies.

Friday Finds

I've been working on a couple of exciting projects lately which I'm looking forward to unleashing on the world in the coming weeks. So stay tuned! Get excited! Hopefully! I know I am.

Your week in trailers: The Tribe looks terrifically compelling. New Crimson Peak is looking amaaazing. The Supergirl trailer is making me super happy too. NEW MUPPETS!! Eeee.

- These photos of Frida Kahlo's locked away wardrobe are beautiful.

- 50 awesome art and culture documentaries free to watch on YouTube.

- Also I really need this backpack.

- Which fairytale do you belong in? Apparently I'm set for Little Red Riding Hood.

- 32 bookish things every bibliophile needs in their home.

Nyala Ali does a terrific job of breaking down the exploration of motherhood in Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's stirring comic, This One Summer.

This interview with Amy Poehler is the best because Amy Poehler is the best.

And start your weekend with this beautiful piece exploring the anti-war themes in Hayao Miyazaki's films. And hell, then go see When Marnie Was There. I know I will.

Friday Finds

I love a good cover song and only recently got exposed to The AV Club's Undercover series. The Decemberists' version of Sugar's If I Can't Change Your Mind has basically been my jam all week.

- The erasure of Maya Angelou's sex-worker history is an important read, and a good one for the weekend.

- As is the drama surrounding E3 Ubisoft's decision on stopping a female character in the new Assassin's Creed.

- Boxtrolls! I love both Coraline and Paranorman, so am pretty stoked for Laika's newest output.

- On the awesome animated movie front, Lauren Faust is doing a Medusa movie! Ahh! I'm super excited.

- Straight Boys Texting might actually be my new favourite thing.

- No, wait, Art History: 500 Years of Women Ignoring Men is my new favourite thing.

As Told by Ginger, Appendicitis and the Nature of Memory

If you celebrated your prime pre-early teen awkward years back in the early noughties like yours truly, you might have run across a show called As Told By Ginger. The series focused on Ginger Foutley, the eldest child of a single mother, who tries to come of age in an American middle school. It was a pretty excellent series that explored hard themes of absent fathers, social acceptance and the obstacles of friendship, and was one I inhaled greedily as a thirteen year old growing up in sunny Brisbane.

Ginger for me was formative. She was ballsy and sweet and loyal; a sister, a friend and, maybe most importantly, a writer. I was so invested in this character because she wasn't a saddle clubber or a dance academy student or a worst witch, she was a normal girl from a low socio-economic background who found solace in writing - something I could identify with.

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the power of character to provide hope and acceptance for people of all backgrounds and personalities, but that's probably a different story all together. The point of this post is to say that my appendix swelled twice it's size last Thursday, and in all my fevered haze, my sharp, toe curling pain, all I could think of was the episode where this happened to Ginger.

I haven't thought about As Told by Ginger in years - not even fleeting thoughts really, but that's the thing I guess about memory. It finds ways to sharpen and target moments all on its own, to latch onto something relative in the unusual. My body maybe couldn't recognise this stabbing pain in my side, but it could remember where it had seen something like it before and it hit the control-f of my brain to summon up the episode and tell me maybe this was more than period cramps or overwrought muscles from a workout.

In the episode, Ginger's long-time best friend, short-time boyfriend reveals he's been cheating on her since he got his braces off and became a stud, and Ginger recoils from family and friends, hurt, until her figurative pain turns into something literal. I have a sharp memory of her mother finding her in bed, curled in the fetal position and sweating out a sickness, and when I awoke to myself Thursday, it was a position I found mirrored in myself. So I did what Ginger did. I called my mother.

Eighteen hours later, I was appendixless and munching on plain cornflakes in a hospital bed. I'm recouping steadily at the moment. Stretching out against the constraints my stitches have made in me and feeling alternately elderly or too impossibly young to manage. That's the nature of these things, I guess, and this morning I found myself downloading the whole As Told by Ginger series on Itunes, either for nostalgia or to find some other half-formed bouts of wisdom, I'm not sure. Either way, I'm looking forward to it.

Friday Finds

There's some really, really great literary art prints over here. This Hemingway one is my favourite (and also something I require in my house).

Letters of Note recently posted correspondence between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his editor, Maxwell Perkins, regarding early drafts of The Great Gatsby. I'm a pretty huge fan of Fitzgerald generally, and it's such an interesting glimpse inside his writing process and his relationship with Perkins. Check it out over here.

I'm basically in-love with the character design of ParaNorman and the team behind that recently released a pretty awesome featurette on bringing this guy to life. It's super great.

- i09 has done an awesome post on great opening sentences from classic fantasy novels. Also I'm pretty sure my to-read list just doubled.

- Also, people should go and check out the Polli sale. They have some pretty fantastic jewellery, and it's definitely worth a look.

Adspace: Wes Anderson, Jake Ryan & the Robots that Live Inside Xperia Phones

I go on and off advertising - sometimes I love it, can find the thought-out and well-scripted ads so compelling and wonderful bits of micro-cinema, but a lot of the time too watching an ad feels like being hammered with information you don't really care about in a very small space of time.

That said, the great stuff can be really, really special. Adweek has put together 10 Great TV Spots Directed by Wes Anderson, and they're all pretty great, but this one is just wonderful.

In creating the campaign, "Anderson asked more than 75 kids what they thought goes on inside Xperia phones and recorded their answers. One kid, 8-year-old Jake Ryan from from Long Island, gave a particularly magical response."

Colosse

This is so sweet, and really hits all my buttons in a short film. Over on the website, director Yves Geleyn lists The Iron Giant as an inspiration, and given that that's an all time favourite of mine, I feel like it deserves a bit of a highlight.

Crayon Dragon

I love animation for a lot of reasons really, but this short by Toniko Pantoja embodies most of them. Creatively, emotionally and artistically, this is a pretty special little film. via io9