folktales

This will be a very short post. I just wanted to share a short animated film by Yuriy Norshteyn, one of my favorite animators.

His technique is quite unique. He and his wife paint all of the elements that will make the film on celluloid, and cut them out. They then created characters much the same way one would make a paper doll. Norshteyn has drawers and drawers filled with cut out mouths and eyes, arms and legs. All the elements for a frame are composited, using multiple layers of glass, each layer containing different celluloid cut-outs. Every glass layer can move towards or away from the camera creating photographic depth.

If you like this short film, then check out Tale of Tales, a true masterpiece.

02/24/2009

Recently I have been reading folktales from around the world, mostly found through online repositories. These repositories are usually a horribly organized list of unsearchable links (sending you to some sort of HTML Hell). As it happens, I came upon a really horrible web page, born from the same family tree of terrible design, but full of awesome ‘Japanesey’ folktales, written by third graders. → Want more?

02/19/2009