Animation and Illustration Links

Manga Impact (5th – 15th August 2009)

To find one’s way on the website of the Locarno International Film Festival is always quite exhausting, so let me put the good news upfront: Pom Poko (1994) by Isao Takahata will be shown on the Piazza Grande (Thursday, 6th August 2009) in the context of a large anime retrospective called “Manga Impact”. Especially interesting is the focus on pre-Ghibli films dating back to the 1920s, some of them newly restored.


Illustrative 09 Berlin (16th October – 1st November 2009)

This year the International Illustration Forum „Illustrative 09” will take place in Berlin “to celebrate the cutting-edge works of contemporary graphic art for the fifth time around. From the 16th of October to the 1st of November, works ranging from drawing, graphic prints, painting and monumental mural collages to graphically inspired 3D-illustrations, book art and animation will be on show.”

Check the website (www.illustrative.de) for more information.

The deadline for the Swatch Young Illustrators Award 2009 is September 30th, 2009. You can also submit animation! All the nominees will be invited to Berlin, which is always worth a visit.

On the illustrative blog, David O’Reilly posted an interesting essay about his approach to creating coherent worlds. He’s discussing his latest (award-winning) short Please Say Something which I have seen in Annecy. Although I didn’t particularly like the film, I agree with most of what David writes about aesthetic coherence.

His basic premise is “that the key to aesthetics is coherence. In 3d we essentially create artificial models of worlds, I contend that what makes these worlds believable is simply how coherent they are; how all the elements tie together under a set of rules which govern them consistently.”

In much the same way as Sita sings the Blues, O’Reilly’s Please Say Something “makes no effort to cover up the fact that it is a computer animation, it holds an array of artifacts which distance it from reality, which tie it closer to the software it came from. This idea is in direct opposition to all current trends in animation, which take the route of desperately trying to look real, usually by realistic lighting and rendering, or by forcing a hand-made or naive appearance. At the time of writing, this trend shows no apparent signs of ceasing.”

Read the whole essay here.

(via Cathrin Täffner)