Total animation

Last week, an international animation festival in Ansi was held. Maria Tereshchenko, who has just returned from France, is about how today's animation turns into something more than a cartoon.

The author's animation (like any author’s cinema) has never been particularly cheerful, but recently a degree of gloom and oddity is growing in it every year. The reason is simple: most directors who can and seek to do funny, cute, beautifully go to the commercial sector, which since the 1990s expands at an unimaginable speed. Over the past 30 years, the volumes of animation produced in the world have not even increased by several times, but by a couple of orders of magnitude, animation techniques began to be actively used in feature films, computer games, applications and on websites. As a result of such a paper, a range of styles, aesthetics and animation areas, intended for a wide viewer, expanded.

If even 20 years ago, even a cheerful children's fairy tale had a little chance to turn into a full -length cartoon, today a big movie is being shot on a variety of topics. For example, the prize of spectator sympathies in Ansi received a cartoon dedicated to Van Gogh - not even the life of the artist as such, but to the investigation of his death. “With love, Vincent” - the grand cream products of Poland and England - was done seven years and was completely written in oil paints, a frame behind the scenes, 65,000 paintings in the style of Vincent Van Gogh. The plot is built around the attempts of Arman Rulen (the hero of several portraits of Van Gogh) to figure out the mysterious events caused by the artist’s death.

A German film about life in Tehran (Tabu Tehran), the animation biography of the parents of Raimond Briggza (Ethel and Ernest), anime about the deaf girl and her classmate, who first poisoned her poisoned her, and then made friends with her (“Sundant Voice”) competed (“Sundant Voice”). Among the prize -winners (jury prize) was another difficult Japanese cartoon, telling about the life of Hiroshima at the end of the Second World War (“In this corner of the world”). His heroine - Yang Suzu - a young girl who married an unloved. An absurd, poorly able to maintain economy, too romantic and artistic (she loves to draw), Young Suzu does not quite succeed in his family life. The war is around, shells are torn, hunger ... The film, already gloomy, ends with the truly terrifying paintings of the city after the explosion.

With the expansion of the thematic and aesthetic spectrum of full -length cartoons, a short meter becomes more and more as a refuge of marginals. In this timing, only some mature artists continue to work, usually animators from countries where commercial animation is not yet too developed, Chinese animators who do not want to integrate into too bright and aesthetically unequal of commercial sector, youth and convinced (and few) experimenters.

The global trend was noticeably reflected in the short competition of this year, the benefit of Ansi's program director Marseille Jean not only does not hide it, but even emphasizes in his programming. So, for example, a couple of years ago he introduced an Off block into a short competition Limits , which includes not even experimental cinema (there is a lot of it in the main program), but cartoons, about which it is not very clear whether it is cartoons. For example, “manually painted No. 2” of the famous Chinese artist Lei Lei, who bought on the flea market and manually painted black and white photos. Or the short film “1960 :: Cinema :: Skad”, where the same short -high film fragments are collected on 10 screens, the same photographs of Witti Monica (from the “Adventure” of Antonioni). One polyescrane is replaced by another, and the general meaning is in an artistic study of the difference between a static photograph and a mobile image.

The innovation of this year was the competitive block “Perspective”, which contains mainly cartoons from countries that do not have a stable animated tradition: Ghana, Lebanon, Syria, Colombia (however, France with Belgium also found a place). Most of the films did not differ in skill, but it sounded acutelycely. For example, the “building” Pablo Half water is very funny depicts corporate construction: the scheme begins with one person producing cubes, and then expands to a huge pyramid in which the conveyor already produces something, and the people who have become sealed, engage in a continuous bureaucracy. A simple visually, but bribing the sincerity of the story “Black Barbie” tells about the problems of a black girl who does not want to be black. The film begins with how black heroine gives a black barbie in childhood and how a girl is not able to love her doll because of her skin color. Later, the storyteller confesses, admits that she tried to straighten her hair and whiten her own skin, but in the final she nevertheless accepted her black beauty.

Even with a cursory look at the program of the current Ansi, it is clear that the trend related to social and documentary animation not only did not decline (but it seemed that he would last five years old), but, on the contrary, gained momentum. A good third of the films was somehow connected with real stories and a social aspect. The same -sex love (“I love girls”), military operations in Iraq (“train to the world”), inventions of Nikola Tesla (“Light of the World of Tesla”), the story of Kazimezh Mocharsky (“Mocharsky’s case”) - modern animators turn to the most seemingly non -interpretation topics and stories, making their short -term clipping out of them. The most amazing cartoon in this sense should be called a three -minute student work "Clitor". “Women are lucky. In their body there is an organ that is responsible only for pleasure, ”says a gentle female voice at the beginning of this playful pink cartoon, in all colors and with a great fantasy telling about the clitoris about everything - from its structure to the history of the opening (“ Ancient Greeks knew about the existence of the clitoris ”).

Finally, in addition to Lebanons, Syrians and students, puppeteers also remove short animation. Unlike computer technology (which is implemented in full -length and serial production) and drawn (on which adult series and series for schoolchildren are built), puppet Stop - Motion is not very in demand in the commercial sector. It was the dolls that won the current festival, while both in the short and in the student competition. The “Crystal” in a short meter went to the Swedish musical “The burden”. Here, two fish at the hotel sing each about their loneliness, two mice beat off a tank in the facedfood that closed the establishment, and the monkeys in the office advertise their company's services and yearn that life passes by.

In the student program, the victory went to the German film “SOG” , depicting an uncomfortable rocky world where black shaggy creatures live. And without that they do not live too much, and here, after the flood, the fish got stuck on the trees and screams with their screams violate the peace of black creatures.

Animation is changing - the festival itself changes, becoming more commercially oriented. Despite the fact that many animators from around the world are still considering Ansi's short competition as the main bait (it is he who collects the most complete halls), more and more people are going here after another. Every year, the film market at the Imperial Hotel, offering more and more training programs, pitching, meetings, conferences and other business events, expands. At the festival venues, panels and presentations of large studios, events on the exchange of experience, master classes on VR and TILT are held Brush . And here, in Ansi, maybe anywhere else you can see how the animation is rapidly and actively expanding, how new interesting technologies come to it, how it turns into a equivalent partner from the stepdaughter of full -time cinema, which can soon outdate game cinema. And if some 30 years ago the short film was almost the main genre for animation, now the word “project” is increasingly sounding-and this word can mean not only the clock of animated action, but also a whole huge world, including video games and toys, applications and sites, accompanying goods, quests and everything that can present human imagination in general.