Academy Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro reinvents the classic tale of the wooden marionette who is magically brought to life in order to mend the heart of a grieving woodcarver named Geppetto. This whimsical, stop-motion film directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson follows the mischievous and disobedient adventures of Pinocchio in his pursuit of a place in the world.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is an upcoming stop-motion musical fantasy film directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson, based on Gris Grimly’s design from his 2002 edition of the 1883 Italian novel The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi. The film was written by del Toro and Patrick McHale.
Produced by Netflix Animation, The Jim Henson Company and ShadowMachine in co-production with Pathé, El Taller del Chucho, and Necropia Entertainment, Pinocchio was announced by Del Toro in 2008 and originally scheduled to be released in 2013 or 2014, but the project went into development hell. In January 2017, McHale was announced to co-write the script, but in November 2017, the production was suspended as no studios were willing to provide financing. The production was revived the following year after being acquired by Netflix.
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio is scheduled to be released in select theaters in November 2022, followed by its streaming release on Netflix in December 2022.
This 1949 animation by Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren is a moving vision of jazz activity. Featuring a soundtrack by the Oscar Peterson Trio the film ebbs and flows in unison with the energy of the performers. This is the explosion of color you’ve been waiting to hear.
Norman McLaren was a Scottish Canadian animator, director and producer known for his work for the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). He was a pioneer in a number of areas of animation and filmmaking, including hand-drawn animation, drawn-on-film animation, visual music, abstract film, pixilation and graphical sound.
His awards included an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1952 for Neighbours, a Silver Bear for best short documentary at the 1956 Berlin International Film Festival for Rythmetic and a 1969 BAFTA Award for Best Animated Film for Pas de deux.
Felix Colgrave is an Australian director, animator, cartoonist, filmmaker, artist, and musician. Distribution of Colgrave’s work has, to date, been focused on YouTube where his channel has 1.38 million subscribers. Colgrave mainly uses Adobe After Effects for his animations.
A film in four parts. In In the Room, a man and a woman in outlandish garb are sitting in a claw-foot bathtub smoking, while the man abuses a doll in various ways. In They Stopped to Think, the filmmaker focuses on a woman trying to position a stool upon which to sit next to a wall. The filmmaker talks in voice-over about filming the scene, and his current relationship with the people shown in the film. The scene shifts to a pier where a man and woman are filmed, playing to the camera. In It Began to Drizzle, a man and woman are lounging in a street-side patio. The scene then shifts to a man and some children doing chalk drawings on the sidewalk, and how others respond to what they are doing. In The Spirit of Listlessness, a man lounging on an urban rooftop is playing with balloons while he plays to the camera.
Outrageous yet tender, the film begins with the skip of a cracked 78 rpm record and a handmade title festooned with streamers and lettered in dripping red. In vignettes continuing in this vein, characters occasionally stumble on glimmers of beauty in their bleak existence: a view from the roof and kids drawing on the sidewalk. The scenes are unsettling in their immediacy. Jacobs embraces the New York City streets as his stage and improvises props and costumes from castoffs. The characters, including Jack Smith and Jerry Sims, are completely at ease with the camera. They cavort, they pose, they affront, and they demand our attention. Like it or not, we are made part of the scene.
For many years Jacobs played 78s at screenings, again transforming poverty into a live-performance asset. A grant from Jerome Hill facilitated by Jonas Mekas enabled Jacobs to add voice-over to the middle section and create a sound print. By this time, his relationship with Smith had soured, and he had lost touch with most of those pictured. Jacob’s narration, presented self-consciously as anything to distract you from talking to each other, acts as a remembrance of things past. The closing vignette, shot on a New York rooftop on a crystalline day, shows Smith clowning with a balloon to the tune of Happy Bird. In Little Stabs at Happiness, moments in the sun do not last.
Ken Jacobs is an experimental filmmaker, who, along with Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Maya Deren and others, helped spearhead the American avant-garde film movement. His impressive filmography spans more than 60 years and 45 films, utilizing just about every experimental technique imaginable. In the ’60s, he helped redefine the notion of domestic (home) movies, and along with it, domestic space—pioneering work that expanded the parameters of art cinema, and also, coincidentally, the gender expectations of male artists. Jacobs has also experimented with found footage, creating such memorable works as Star Spangled to Death, a nearly seven-hour epic charting an alternative U.S. history. Most recently, he has been reformatting, reworking, and altering silent films to give illusions of depth, creating experimental, heavily stroboscopic abstract cinema, and 3D. At every stage of his career, Jacobs has sought to push the technology as far as it can go and to challenge his audiences to think about politics, gender, class, race, documentary, and movies differently. This series provides a rare opportunity to see the work of one of the greatest living American filmmakers.
A film made by Felix Colgrave with elephants in it, and a bunch of other things too. This was his third year film at RMIT University, Bachelor of Animation and Interactive Media, and the winner of Best Australian Film at MIAF 2014.
Felix Colgrave is an Australian director, animator, cartoonist, filmmaker, artist, and musician. Distribution of Colgrave’s work has, to date, been focused on YouTube where his channel has 1.38 million subscribers. Colgrave mainly uses Adobe After Effects for his animations.
