Film
Encounters 2018: The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb + Intro
- Director
- Dave Borthwick
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 60 mins
The winner of a heap of film festival gongs, including an Evening Standard British Film Award and Best Director at the Sitges international fantasy film festival in Spain (“an entirely original hour-long masterpiece” enthused judge and renowned horror expert Kim Newman), bolexbrothers studio co-founder Dave Borthwick’s brilliant feature combines live action and stop-motion animation in a truly innovative way to tell the macabre tale of an unwanted tiny fella who’s born into an insect-infested slum and is then kidnapped for gruesome medical experiments in a freak-filled laboratory. There are few points of reference to the real world except in an hilarious, instantly recognisable pub skittles scene, peopled by monosyllabic Bristolians. Future Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep director Richard Goleszowski was among the extras recruited from among the bolexbrothers’ Aardman chums up the road for this sequence. “You can go into pubs in Bedminster and hear people having conversations like that, without actually saying anything at all,” remarked Borthwick.
This rare big-screen outing for the darkest feature animation ever to come out of Bristol marks the film’s 25th anniversary. To celebrate, this Encounters festival event features an introduction by bolexbrothers studio co-founder Dave Alex Riddett (now Director of Photography at Aardman) and the film’s production manager Mike Gifford. Go here for tickets.
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