Go feast your eyes on The Book Of Life directed by Jorge R Gutierrez in the theater this weekend. It is rare to see an animated feature film with this level of visual personality. And the story is as personal and heart felt as the visuals. It takes incredible talent, persistence, patience, and heart, supported by an incredible team to pull something like this off. This film took Jorge 14 years to get made. It brings to mind the work of Tim Burton (Nightmare Before Christmas) and Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville) - some of the few animated features that have been made at this level while maintaining such a personal style. Watching these features is like seeing an incredibly talented artists sketch book brought to life. Jorge and I were at CalArts at the same time, studying Experimental Animation, burrowed deeply into making. Jorge had already been slaving away at CalArts for a year before I got there; I still remember visiting the school and wandering into the stop-motion studio and seeing Jorges amazing sets and characters for his short film, Tequila Macho. Seeing student work being made at that level was one of the reasons I decided to go to CalArts, and inspired me as I was starting to make stop-motion. Jorge then disappeared into the computer labs for a few years, and finally emerged with another short film, Carmello, which won a student Emmy in 2001. Im putting links to both his short films in the comments. For anyone interested in filmmaking, Id highly recommend checking out both of Jorges student films, and see how they come together in The Book of Life. There is that same level of personality and point of view that comes straight from the heart. Go see it on the big screen and soak in a lifetime of beautiful details.
Posted on: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 18:03:53 +0000
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