Wednesday 20 February 2013

Mary And Max


Mary And Max is a full length clay-animated feature by Adam Elliot (2009). "A tale of friendship between two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York." (imdb). This film has had a lot of mixed reviews due to the amusing anecdotes and hidden jokes that mask the depressing undertone of the piece. When watching this I felt very uneasy as I wasn't sure whether to find it amusing or tragic. Elliot's work have been dubbed "clayographies" as his work is all based on the stories of individuals and often based on his own relatives or friends. Among other things his work creates awareness of disability in an entertaining and engaging format.





http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978762/

A Trip To The Moon



A Trip To The Moon by George Méliès (1902) is a short film in which
he envisioned what a trip to the moon would be like. The film runs for 14 minutes if projected at 16 frames per second, which was the standard frame rate at the time the film was produced (Wikipedia). This film was produced in both black and white and a hand coloured version which has only recently been rediscovered, it was thought to be lost forever.

At the time A Trip To The Moon was one of the most technologically innovative films to date and it also was one of the first few films to use a narrative structure. Many films at the time were just images of small events whereas George Méliès used a short narrative for this short providing the first known science fiction film. I really like this short I thought it was very abstract and unusual it has also influenced many things in popular culture today such as "The Mighty Boosh" who use a similar image of the moon in several of their episodes (see clip below). Méliès is also featured in the film "Hugo" (2011) based on the book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret" (see clip below).







http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Trip_to_the_Moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invention_of_Hugo_Cabret