Frosted cel was the big discovery in London in the 80’s - I guess Back’s film - & the work of Caroline Leaf & Joan Gratz - inspired a great deal of very painterly TV commercials in London at the time.
Richard Williams Studio pushed a lot of more painterly / illustration styles from the late 70’s & into the 80’s, starting with “A Christmas Carol” - incredibly labour intensive but possible in large part due to the revenues from commercials that funded experimentation.
Mar 22·edited Mar 22Liked by Animation Obsessive Staff
This is an incredibly rich article that's I'll be milling over for days.
I've woken up in the night and have been watching a remastered version of Greenaway's 'Prospero's Books' (1991) on Youtube, which was edited in Japan using Hi-Vision video inserts and Quantel Paintbox , clearly Greenaway's attempt to move beyond the linearity of film editing and splicing... but which was a limitation imposed by a very human materiality. It ends up feeling abstracted and metaphysical where Stanislav Sokolov's stop-motion 'Animated Tales' version of 'The Tempest' (1993) feels earthy and fibrous.
I really appreciate how much attention you give here to form - especially having gone to university in a period in which the Humanities were still pretty beholden to the textual turn of the 1990s.
Interesting that you omit films like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” where pretty much everything animated was analogue cel animation with a great deal of analogue multi pass compositing to achieve the required level of dimensionality to the 2D characters so that they would seem to “sit” convincingly in the live action backgrounds.
Those short-lived excursions into live-action combined with animation might be a good future subject to explore, from the Tom & Jerry + Gene Kelly to “Mr Limpet” onwards.
You got an amazing blog, wish I found it sooner!
About to go watch Bill Plimptons new feature at the Am Doc and Animation festival! He’s doing a Q&A afterwards too!!!!
Frosted cel was the big discovery in London in the 80’s - I guess Back’s film - & the work of Caroline Leaf & Joan Gratz - inspired a great deal of very painterly TV commercials in London at the time.
Richard Williams Studio pushed a lot of more painterly / illustration styles from the late 70’s & into the 80’s, starting with “A Christmas Carol” - incredibly labour intensive but possible in large part due to the revenues from commercials that funded experimentation.
This is an incredibly rich article that's I'll be milling over for days.
I've woken up in the night and have been watching a remastered version of Greenaway's 'Prospero's Books' (1991) on Youtube, which was edited in Japan using Hi-Vision video inserts and Quantel Paintbox , clearly Greenaway's attempt to move beyond the linearity of film editing and splicing... but which was a limitation imposed by a very human materiality. It ends up feeling abstracted and metaphysical where Stanislav Sokolov's stop-motion 'Animated Tales' version of 'The Tempest' (1993) feels earthy and fibrous.
I really appreciate how much attention you give here to form - especially having gone to university in a period in which the Humanities were still pretty beholden to the textual turn of the 1990s.
Interesting that you omit films like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” where pretty much everything animated was analogue cel animation with a great deal of analogue multi pass compositing to achieve the required level of dimensionality to the 2D characters so that they would seem to “sit” convincingly in the live action backgrounds.
Those short-lived excursions into live-action combined with animation might be a good future subject to explore, from the Tom & Jerry + Gene Kelly to “Mr Limpet” onwards.