AnimaMundi 2008 overview
By eduardo 1 Comments
This year's banner made by Koji Yamamura.
This year's international animated film festival, AnimaMundi, happened last week in Sao Paulo's Latin American Memorial space. I was able to attend four of the five days of the open shows.
At the end of the day on Wednesday, I watched a panel on Ray Harryhausen, the man behind the special effects and stop motion animation in films like Clash of the Titans and It Came from Outer Space. In a very interesting, albeit slow moving presentation due to the poor real time translator on duty, Ray's agent and friend, Arnold Kunert, showed us a lot of the work made in a time where people hardly gave a second look to special effects like stop motion animation.
Thrusday's main event was certainly Blizzard Entertainment's panel featuring James McCoy, one of the heads of animation over at the company. He showed most of the newer cutscenes from WarCraft III (both Reign of Chaos and The Frozen Throne), StarCraft II, Diablo III, World of WarCraft and even StarCraft Ghost, which never saw the light of day. After an hour of presenting the videos, came an in-depth look at the production of a CG cutscene: pre-production, following the animators acting themselves what the characters will do, pre-render simple rigged animation tests and the various phases of shadering, texturing and lighting for some of the scenes shown before, mainly StarCraft II's promotional trailer "Making a better marine", World of WarCraft's intro movie and an example of lip synching for "The Death of Hellscream".
I enjoyed the many short film sessions on Friday, but by far, the funniest one was the last one of the day, especially this short, featuring a simple setup: a bear, a rabbit and a wolf. I'll let it explain the rest for itself. Priceless.
I'm probably starting to sound repetitive, but it is the truth. For Saturday, the best thing I saw was a feature length film that was shown at the end of the day: Bill Plympton's Idiots and Angels. I'm already a Plympton fan from his past shorts like Guard Dog, so buying a ticket for a feature length was an easy decision. The film tells the story of *shock* a pretty mean guy, an idiot, who lives his life being a jerk to everyone. Slowly, though, the heavens play a trick on him, and he starts growing a pair of angel wings on his back. Plympton's humor is plastered all over, and I simply won't spoil it, you have to see it for yourself. It goes for a bit too long at over an hour, but it's worth seeing, for sure.
Funnily enough, I was tired on Sunday, so I took a rest. The festival this year was pretty packed with quality films, with very few cases of some being boring or just plain bad. Sadly, the second feature length film I watched, named Belowars, was pretty bad. It's a nationally made film that "borrows" a lot of things from Genndy Tartakovisky's works, and it was painful to watch, which is a shame, since the production team's short stop motion film called PAX was one of my favorites from 2006's AnimaMundi. It pains me to say that this film was my main low point for this year's AnimaMundi, but we, Brazilians, have got to stop patting people on the back when they make crap and label it 'national productions' with funds from the Government and competitions. Their past production, Brichos, was awful, and Belowars follows the mold. I won't give them another chance.