Alma - Short Film

Alma is a beautifully animated short directed by Rodrigo Blaas. It's the Spanish director's first short film, and it's an award winner. It's set in Barcelona, Spain (notice the Sagrada Familia in the first few seconds of the film and of course the Gaudi inspired shop) and it is faultlessly animated.

The plot plays on childhood nightmares made real - but I won't ruin the surreal plot, just watch it! The website mentions that the video won't be up for long, so be quick and watch it while you can! If not I've taken some stills of it.

Alma from Rodrigo Blaas on Vimeo.

Incidentally, Alma means 'soul' in Spanish...

Cliff Roberts

Cliff Roberts illustrations have cropped up on many design blogs of late and feeling left out I thought it was time to feature him here.

Roberts was a cartoonist and animator in the 1950s+, working for companies and clients such as Sesame Street, Playboy, Ford Times Magazine and The New Yorker. Later on in life he also worked as a photographer and had work featured in the 1964's World's Fair and also wrote, animated and directed popular Saturday morning cartoons such as Scooy-Doo, The Smurfs and The Pink Panther.

I really love this style, where everything is broken down to simple, basic forms and colour palettes. Even though the images are flat they are still so charming and American in aesthetic. Cliff was born in 1929, retired in 1993 and sadly died in 1999.

I haven't managed to find much information about Roberts, but I did find this gem from Todays Inspiration blogspot. It shows one of the newspaper comic strips that Roberts created in the 1970s for the Children's Television Workshop, Sesame Street, which was still fairly new then. For the strip, he created two characters called Jasper and Julius, a comedy duo.

Among my research I also discovered that he illustrated these beautiful and rare editioned books in 1955 and 1956: The First Book of Jazz by Langston Hughes and Thomas by Mary Harris.










Thanks to davidgeorgepearson at flickr.com for the The First Book of Jazz images and lemon.wonder at flickr.com for the Thomas images.

John "Pugwash" Ryan, R.I.P.

I've just heard on the news that John Ryan, the British animator, died today at the age of 88. He created one of the best-loved children’s television programmes of the 1970s Captain Pugwash. The eponymous hero – Captain Horatio Pugwash – sails the high seas in his ship called the Black Pig, ably assisted by cabin boy Tom, pirates Willy and Barnabas, and Master Mate. His mortal enemy is Cut-Throat Jake, captain of the Flying Dustman.

Captain Pugwash started as a comic strip in The Eagle in 1950. The BBC then commissioned the first TV series in 1957-1967. This TV series was beautifully crafted with a unique real-time animating technique called “captions”. Captions were basically cardboard cutouts of the characters laid on painted backgrounds which were pinned/glued/sellotaped to cardboard levers to make the figures "move". About 50 or so captions were made for each episode, and took over a fortnight to make.

The TV series was revived in 1975 in colour and again reanimated in 1997 (see last picture) and also made into children's books. In 1991 Ryan sued The Guardian and the Sunday Correspondent for wrongly accusing the series of having sexually suggestive names – such as Master Bates, Seaman Staines and Roger the Cabin Boy. These double entendres were all incorrect and actually made up by university students in the 70s for “rag mags”, and somehow became urban myths.

Studio AKA

BAFTA award winning and London based animation production company, Studio AKA, have created some of my favourite TV advertising such as the National Lottery's Big Win and Lloyd's TSB For the Journey series.

I love the innocent feel, vintage style and grainy texture of these beautifully animated ads and the music is a perfect marriage to the 'look'. The characters have a very French style that I have seen many (French) illustrators capture.

Incidentally, last year, Studio AKA also animated Oliver Jeffers book Lost and Found and Helen Ward's Varmints into 24 minute shorts. They both translated very well into animations.

Aardman

Today I met Wallace and Gromit, the quintessentially English claymation characters from Aardman Animations. They came to my office to show us their new show reel and to introduce us to their most loved (and some of my favourite) characters - Wallace, Gromit, Shaun and Morph. These particular models were from their latest film A Matter of Loaf and Death - apart from Morph of course, who is best known as Tony Hart's sidekick :D