Week 1:
The animation or film that inspired me?
I'm not sure it's an animation as such but I remember being completely taken in the opening scenes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927). The special and visual effects team present us with a glowing misty cityscape of the future; advertisements light a busy scene of towering buildings interlinked by extravagant bridges full of traffic (they still have traffic jams in the future) and aircraft weaving between them in the air. Not quite a tilt-shift effect but it hinted at scale and depth, and definitely appeared to be a 3D space. I guess it combined both models and artwork, probably painstakingly rendered on the film cells or perhaps overlaid with a second strip of film. The effects were compelling, believable, the execution decades ahead of its time until echoed in the beautifully atmospheric Blade Runner (1982).
A definition of animation?
To breath life into an inanimate object/art/model/simulation. Manipulating a puppet or toy for one of my children, I might even be visibly there holding its arms, but its movement draws their eye away from me, the puppeteer, and I know my audience is focusing (knowingly) on the object. There is a fleeting magic, momentary, I can see them believing and I get to believe it too.
Follow up films.
Any Studio Ghibli production.
My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
The Triplets of Belleville (2003)Bagpuss (1974)
The Jungle Book (1967)
Fantastic Planet (1973)
