stayforthecredits:

The look of The Secret of Kells is both eclectic and inventive. Can you tell us about your inspirations for the film?

Co-director Tomm Moore : The main inspiration of course is the Book of Kells itself, which is a national treasure in Ireland and kind of one of the high points of medieval art. So we looked at that a lot and we looked at other medieval art from around that time, but we were also inspired by…comics like Bone and Calvin and Hobbes. Especially Bill Watterson [creator ofCalvin and Hobbes] paintings…But also the painter Gustav Klimt, and Alphonse Mucha. You know the kind of poster artists of the Art Nouveau period? And then there’s a really great, animated feature that was never finished called The Thief and the Cobbler by Richard Williams,who was the animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

keiralove:

Atonement

THE TALE OF THREE BROTHERS

stayforthecredits:

fx guide: Can you talk about the style of animation?

Dale Newton (sequence supervisor): We tried a few things to get a gritty and hand-made feel. The inspiration was the way Lotte Reiniger had the childlike-ness for her animation, but we didn’t necessarily want it to look like a stop-motion piece of animation. Because of the camera moves, we couldn’t always split things down on twos. So we couldn’t rely on any sort of technological roughing of the edges. The one thing we were keenly aware of at all times was the silhouettes which enabled us to play on a certain theatricality. The hands do so much of the talking - Death’s hands for example are almost as expressive as his face is.

When we designed the characters, we tried to purposely design puppets. So we didn’t give the characters, for instance, whites in their eyes. You didn’t want to read them through, say, traditional blend shapes on their heads. It all had to be told throughout their entire pose. We were very conscious that the attitude of the characters at that point had to be read through their entire pose. This forced us into thinking theatrically, and we should feel like we’re watching a very clever puppet show, not a traditional character-animated movie. (via FX Guide)

Pan’s Labyrinth

The Fountain, 2006

The Fountain’s theme of thanatophobia, or fear of death, is a “movement from darkness into light, from black to white”, tracing the journey of a man scared of death and moving toward it. The film begins with a paraphrase of Genesis 3:24, the Biblical passage that reflects the fall of man. Hugh Jackman emphasized the importance of the fall in the film: “The moment Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge, of good and evil, humans started to experience life as we all experience it now, which is life and death, poor and wealthy, pain and pleasure, good and evil. We live in a world of duality. Husband, wife, we relate everything. And much of our lives are spent not wanting to die, be poor, experience pain. It’s what the movie’s about.”

Aronofsky also interpreted the story of Genesis as the definition of mortality for humanity. He inquired of the fall, “If they had drank from the tree of life [instead of the tree of knowledge] what would have separated them from their maker? So what makes us human is actually death. It’s what makes us special.”

Rashomon (1950, dir. Akira Kurosawa)

“[The three assistant directors on Rashomon] found the script baffling and wanted me to explain it to them. ‘Please read it again more carefully,’ I told them. ‘If you read it diligently, you should be able to understand it because it was written with the intention of being comprehensible.’ But they wouldn’t leave. ‘We believe we have read it carefully, and we still don’t understand it at all; that’s why we want you to explain it to us.’ For their persistence I gave them this simple explanation:

‘Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without embellishing. This script portrays such human beings–the kind who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living through a medium. Egoism is a sin the human being carries with him from birth; it is the most difficult to redeem. This film is like a strange picture scroll that is unrolled and displayed by the ego. You say that you can’t understand this script at all, but that is because the human heart itself is impossible to understand. If you focus on the impossibility of truly understanding human psychology and read the script one more time, I think you will grasp the point of it.’”

— Akira Kurosawa

via screencaps

keiralove:

Edge of Love still