Film / News
Bristol’s other BAFTA nominee
Aardman are celebrating after their Shaun the Sheep Movie was nominated in the Best Animated Film category at the BAFTAs. But as with all the other film award ceremonies, the little ovine fella faces quite a battle to see off the challenge from Pixar’s Inside Out.
Almost unnoticed, however, another local animator has been shortlisted. Richard Williams’ Prologue is up for Best Short Animation against Edmond and Manoman. Now resident in Bristol, 82-year-old Canadian animator Williams is best known for the ground-breaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for which he won two Oscars. He bagged a third Oscar for A Christmas Carol (1971). Williams also created the animated title sequences for What’s New, Pussycat?, the original Casino Royale and two of the later Pink Panther movies. His latest project is The Animator’s Survival Kit – Animated, which has been described as “the ultimate animation course”.
He animated the six-minute Prologue alone over several years, finally completing it at Aardman’s studios in time to be screened at last September’s Encounters festival. Its wordless story describes an incident in the Spartan-Athenian wars of 2400 years ago, during which a little girl witnesses a battle to the death between warriors.
Of the film’s painstaking genesis, Williams says: “I’ve gone back to 1900 and drawn everything on one sheet of paper. Then it’s polished with state of the art technology. It has taken over 6,000 complex animated life drawings to create this film.”
“We have just witnessed animation history,” declared Aardman co-founder Peter Lord after Prologue’s premiere. “Nobody else alive could have created hand-drawn animation of this intensity and quality.” Other commentators have described the film as “one of the best hand-drawn films of all time.”
The BAFTA ceremony takes place on Feb 14. To celebrate The Shaun the Sheep Movie’s nomination, the Slapstick Festival is offering a limited-time two-for-the-price-of-one ticket deal for its Shaun show at St. George’s on Saturday 23 Jan, at which Marcus Brigstocke will be talking to filmmakers Richard Starzak and Mark Burton and showing clips. Just use the code SLAPSHEEP when booking to take advantage of this offer.
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