Welcome to This Week in Genre History, where Tim Grierson and Will Leitch, the hosts of the Grierson & Leitch podcast, take turns looking back at the world s greatest, craziest, most infamous genre movies on the week that they were first released.
In the past 25 years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, making computers the principal tool for the artform. DreamWorks and others have followed in the Disney company s footsteps, creating visual wonders through this incredible technology. But those often indelible films don t represent all that animation can do. Sometimes, the old-fashioned techniques can be just as powerful.
On Feb. 6, 2009, a company called Laika revealed its first full-length stop-motion animated film, a dark children s adventure based on a Neil Gaiman book.
Laika, the animation studio responsible for
Missing Link,
Coraline, and more, is teaming with
Bowie State University to build the nation’s first stop-motion animation studio at a historically Black college and university (HBCU). The partnership hopes to “enhance BSU’s animation curriculum, with the goal of providing a career pathway for BSU students into the animation industry,” with donations that “will fund upgrades to Bowie State’s green screen studio to allow stop-motion animation production. The art form, one of cinema’s oldest techniques, entails the incremental movement of objects, such as puppets, filmed 24X per second to create the illusion of movement.”
LAIKA Teams up with Bowie State University to Build First HBCU Stop-Motion Animation Studio LAIKA, the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning feature film animation studio best known for
Missing Link,
Kubo and the Two Strings and
Coraline, is partnering with Bowie State University to build the nations first stop-motion animation studio at a historically Black college and university (HBCU). The partnership will enhance BSUs animation curriculum, with the goal of providing a career pathway for BSU students into the animation industry. LAIKAs donation will fund upgrades to Bowie States green screen studio to allow stop-motion animation production. The art form, one of cinemas oldest techniques, entails the incremental movement of objects, such as puppets, filmed 24X per second to create the illusion of movement.
Studio Ghibli is back this week with their first film since 2014’s “When Marnie Was There” (excluding the co-production of The Red Turtle ). The controversial “Earwig and the Witch” represents the landmark company’s first foray into fully 3DCG animated work, and it’s directed by the son of the legendary co-founder of the company Hayao Miyazaki. Goro Miyazaki, director of the company’s “From Up on Poppy Hill,” adapts the book by Diana Wynne Jones (who also wrote the source material for “Howl’s Moving Castle”). It’s the story of a precocious girl named Earwig who is adopted by a mysterious couple and learns she has an unexpected back story of her own. The U.S. dub includes voice work by Richard E. Grant and Dan Stevens and will be available stateside this week after the film’s Japanese TV debut back in December. Miyazaki got on a Zoom call with us to discuss the influences on the film, the state of animation, and how it’s been impacted by the pandemic.
The Trafford creative hub still managing to inspire in lockdown DESPITE lockdowns, Richard Evans, the Creative Industries Officer at Creative Industries, Trafford (CIT) has overseen several successful events. A former freelancer with Redeye, the photography network and the much missed Design Initiative, he joined CIT in 2006, for a while doing all three jobs together. The organisation, which has a staff of four, exists to support artists’ careers and develop their creative skills. It plays a key role in the culture of Greater Manchester and beyond. Richard said: “CIT is the artist development strand for Waterside Arts who hosted our latest successes the Northern Lights Writers Conference and Puppet Masters Animation Conference.”