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will80sbyers · 28 days

Note

Do you still have the list of movies that inspired ST4? I had a picture of it but I lost it and I haven't been able to find it since. Please and thank you in advance.

Yep!

Long post warning lol

300

2001: A Space Odyssey

47 Meters Down: Uncaged

12 Monkeys

28 Days Later

13th Warrior

Ace Ventura: Pet Detective

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls

Altered States

Amelie

American Sniper

Analyze This

Annihilation

Aristocats

Armageddon

Assassins Creed

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Arrival

Almost Famous

Batman Begins

Batman V. Superman

Basket Case

Battle at Big Rock

Beauty and the Beast

Beetlejuice

Behind Enemy Lines

Beverly Hills Cop

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey

Billy Madison

Black Cauldron

Black Swan

Boondock Saints

Borat

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Burn After Reading

Broken Arrow

Blade Runner

C.H.U.D

Con Air

Cast Away

Congo

Constantine

Children of Men

Cabin in the Woods

Crank

Casablanca

Carrie

Crimson Tide

Clueless

Dukes of Hazzard

Don’t Breathe

Death to Smoochy

Doom

Dark Knight

Dogma

Deep Blue Sea

Dreamcatcher

Drop Dead Fred

Die Hard

Die Hard 2

Die Hard 3

Don’s Plum

Dances with Wolves

Dumb and Dumber

Edward Scissorhands

Enter the Void

Ex Machina

Event Horizon

Emma (2020)

Forrest Gump

Fargo

Fisher King

Full Metal Jacket

Ferris Bueller

Fallen

Fugitive

Ghost

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Ghostbusters

Good Fellas

Girl Interrupted

Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Get Out

Good Will Hunting

Hackers

High Fidelity

Hellraiser 1

Hellraiser 2

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Hidden

High School Musical

Hurt Locker

Heat

Hunger Games

Highlander

Hell or High Water

Home Alone

I am Legend

It’s a Wonderful Life

In Cold Blood

Inception

I am a Fugitive from Chain Gang

Inside Out

Island of Doctor Moreau

It Follows

Interview with a Vampire

Inner Space

Into the Spiderverse

Independence Day

Jupiter Ascending

John Carter of Mars

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

James Bond (All Movies)

Julie

Karate Kid

Knives Out

Kingsmen

Little Miss Sunshine

Labyrinth

Long Kiss Goodnight

Lost Boys

Leon: The Professional

Let the Right One In

Little Women (1994)

Mad Max: Fury Road

Magnolia

Men in Black

Mimic

Matrix

Misery

My Cousin Vinny

Mystic River

Minority Report

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

Neverending Story

Never Been Kissed

No Country for Old Men

Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors

North by Northwest

Open Water

Orange County

Oceans 8

Oceans 11

Oceans 12

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Ordinary People

Paddington 2

Platoon

Pulp Fiction

Papillon

Pan’s Labyrinth

Pineapple Express

Peter Pan

Princess Bride

Paradise Lost

Primal Fear

Prisoners

Peter Jackson’s King Kong

Reservoir Dogs

Ravenous

Rushmore

Road Warrior

Rogue One

Reality Bites

Raider of the Lost Ark

Red Dragon

Robocop

Shooter

Sky High

Swingers

Sword in the Stone

Step Up 2

Spy Kids

Saving Private Ryan

Shape of Water

Swept Away

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

Superbad

Society

Swordfish

Stoker

Splice

Silence of the Lambs

Source Code

Sicario

Se7en

Starship Troopers

Scrooged

Splash

Silver Bullet

Speed

The Visit

The Italian Job

The Mask of Zorro

True Lies

The Blair Witch Project

The Lord of the Rings Trilogy

Tangled

The Craft

The Guest

The Devil’s Advocate

The Graduate

The Prestige

The Rock

Titanic

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Fly

Tombstone

The Mummy

The Guardian

The Goofy Movie

The Peanut Butter Solution

Toy Story 4

The Ring

The Crazies

The Mist

The Revenant

The Perfect Storm

The Shining

Terminator 2

The Truman Show

Temple of Doom

The Cell

To Kill a Mockingbird

Timeline

The Good Son

The Orphan

The Birdcage

The Green Mile

The Raid

The Cider House Rules

The Lighthouse

The Book of Henry

The A-Team

The Crow

The Terminal

Thor Ragnarok

Twister

The Descent

The Birds

Total Recall

The Natural

The Fifth Element

True Romance

Terminator: Dark Fate

The Hobbit Trilogy

Unforgiven

Unbreakable

Unleashed

Very Bad Things

Wayne’s World

What Women Want

War Dogs

Wedding Crashers

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

Welcome to the Dollhouse

Welcome to Marwen

Wet Hot American Summer

What Lies Beneath

What Dreams May Come

War Games

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Weird Science

Willow

Wizard of Oz

Wanted

Young Sherlock Holmes

You’ve Got Mail

Zodiac

Zoolander

#stranger things #ask #st4 #st4 movies

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friendsthatdontkiss · 1 month

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On the topic of Chaos Theory- I’ve been curious about these dinosaurs that we see in the trailer. They look to be mainly carnivores, and we only see one herbivore. Obviously, the Atrociraptors will be a big part of the show because it seems like they cause problems for all of the campers (sneaking into Sammy’s house, chasing after the campers, getting punched by Kenji!) These seem like they’ll be the main dinos we will be faced with. They are different from Blue, Delta, Echo, and Charlie and Ben mentions how the antagonist is using these Raptors to hunt them. So maybe they were raised in captivity to obey our villian.

The Allosaurus seems to be like another big part of the story as well with it chasing after Darius to create a parallel scene to Claire from Jurassic World.

But, I have one important thing to say- In the poster, focusing on the dinosaur, it almost looks more like the Indominus than the traditional Allosaurus. With the way it is roaring and especially looking at its head shape, and maybe the arms as well, it looks like a lot like the Indominus Rex in the poster- Possibly they used that as a base? Because it doesn’t resemble the hybrid as much in the physical trailer. Unless the villain somehow got Indominus Rex DNA and made a modified version of the Allosaurus, I don’t see why they wouldn’t just create a new base for this different dinosaur.

There’s also this very QUICK scene in the trailer where a dinosaur comes running out of the clearing and Allosaurus’ are usually fast reaching speeds up to 34 mph while the Indominus only had 30 mph. But it *doesn’t* look like an Allosaurus- It’s white, fast and spiked- Sound familiar?

Now I’m not saying it is a hybrid- Just if I didn’t know my dinosaurs as I do so much. I wouldn’t think it was supposed to be an Allosaur. We know that Wu gets the Indominus sample and uses it for the Indoraptor but I don’t think he’d trade that information over to the villain.

But as I, Darius Bowman, I do not want to deal with more hybrids. I don’t think any of my second family does either. And I’d love to see the Allosaurus be a main dinosaur without any modifications. We had other strong dinosaurs like the Carnotaurus, Ceratosaurus, without them having to be hybrids. If you been following with the JW franchise- A juvenile Allosaurus has been seen in Fallen Kingdom and it was seen again in the short film “Battle at Big Rock” so it is no stranger to Jurassic World.

We have other supporting dinosaurs too like:

- Becklespinax (Trailer)

- Majunasaurus (Wiki)

- Nasutoceratops (Wiki)

- Pachyrhinosaurus (Trailer)

- Stygimoloch (Wiki)

- Suchomimus (Wiki)

Lots of variety! The wiki is hard to trust sometimes but if it is accurate we should expect more variations of dinosaurs!

AND IS THAT BIG OR LITTLE EATIE???

I’M GUESSING BASED ON THE SCAR PLACEMENT IT IS LITTLE EATIE BECAUSE BIG EATIE HAS MORE SCARRING BUT I WILL BE UPSET IF THEY DON’T ANIMATE ALL THE SCARS IF IT’S SUPPOSED TO BE BIG EATIE. SHE FOUGHT A LOT.

But this raises another question- Why is she here? We know Bumpy is back too because we see her standing behind Sammy, Ben and Darius- We might talk about this some more but for now it raises a few questions- If Big/Little Eatie is here does that mean that Mantah Corp island was invaded and something happened to Mae? Dr. Turner would 100% put her life on the line for those dinosaurs, and if someone came and took them all, she wouldn’t let it happen willingly. Does this mean they have Pierce and we will see him?

Kentrosaurus’ are so fascinating….But I hope he is okay! Do they have the Spinosaurus, or that lone Baronyx?

So many dinosaurs, so many theories! Chaos Theory is going to kill us!

(Figuratively and literally.)

If you couldn’t tell, this post was made by Darius!!

#camp cretaceous #chaos theory #darius bowman #trailer #rant post #jurassic world chaos theory #theory #dinosaurs #jurrasic world #jwcc #analysis

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grantgfan · 2 months

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Zoe Drake, did you the Jurassic World short called Battle at Big Rock, where a family camping out sees some Nasutoceratops and the crying baby got the attention of an Allosaurus?

Zoe: i saw too

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imthepunchlord · 1 year

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What's your opinion on Jurassic Park? I'm at a dinosaur Park and is... disappointing. I liked th lego series though, never saw the movies, but planning to.

I like Jurassic Park. I agree with the many that it's the best of the Jurassic franchise. A lot of the characters are likable, you care enough that you want to see them survive, and it's a really good suspenseful horror.

It's actually something I wish Jurassic as a franchise stuck with, I think it better performed when it was a suspenseful, surviving horror story, cause by set up, it should be. These are revived ancient creatures that we have limited understanding of, and because there are modifications that don't have them matching up with the true dinosaurs, there's even less understood and more unpredictability cause what we know now may not even fit with these chimeras. And Jurassic Park was a forewarning to humanity being proud and zealous enough to play God and that's part of the appeal of horror, some of it is a forewarning to what could come or choices, like, Alien is a forewarning to letting in disease without real caution for it. There's also some forewarning the dangers of climate change.

Either way, nowadays Jurassic franchise is more suspenseful action. Which, some of that action is good, like, World's climatic fight was amazing to watch. But many of it doesn't have that same hit that JP has, and I think a big part of that is a loss of the horror aspect. Like, much of World, you don't fear for people's safety, and some of the choices made are... kinda dumb. Like Dominion, you got dinosaurs loose on the world, no fences, they can be amongst the people, walking into cities, disrupt livelihoods, sets up dino apocalypse is happening! But no, the locust are the BIGGEST threat and it's... what? I was so ready to see civilization uprooted, what would be done, the chaos of it all and it's like no, let's focus on the big bugs. The dinos are good, they're not a threat or the major focus.

I was so mad.

I think the only ones that got close to old JP level of quality was Camp Cretaceous s1 and s3, and the short film, Battle at Big Rock; all three were suspenseful and nerve wracking. Especially BaBR, that was scary to watch the first time, and it made me so pumped of what Dominion might've been bringing in.

Anyway! Jurassic Park, amazing. It still holds up great, I also think it was better than the book, more with the characters being more likable and more rooting for their survival. The book I was rooting for the dinosaurs more cause I didn't like most of the characters or root for their survival. Though I'll give the book was more terrifying and had some really gory gruesome deaths, some of which I'm ok with the movie not including.

And I wish the rest of the franchise kept in that horror aspect of old JP; I do think the only ones that came close where those 2 specific seasons of Camp Cretaceous and Battle at Big Rock.

#ask Punchie #Punchie rants #jurassic park #jurassic series

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brokehorrorfan · 2 years

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Jurassic World Dominion will be released on Steelbook 4K Ultra HD, 4K Utlra HD, Blu-ray, DVD, and Digital on August 16 via Universal. It includes both the theatrical cut and an extended cut with 14 minutes of additional footage.

The 2022 third entry in the Jurassic World trilogy (and sixth installment in the Jurassic Park franchise) is directed by Colin Trevorrow (Jurassic World), who co-wrote the script with Emily Carmichael (Pacific Rim: Uprising). Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Laura Dern, Jeff Goldblum, Sam Neill, DeWanda Wise, Mamoudou Athie, BD Wong, and Omar Sy star.

Jurassic World Dominion is presented with DTS: X audio. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Theatrical cut (146 min)

Extended cut (160 min) with 14 minutes of additional footage, including an alternate opening

Battle at Big Rock - Short film directed by Colin Trevorrow set one year after the events of Jurassic Park: Fallen Kingdom

A New Breed of VFX featurette

Dinosaurs Among Us: Inside Jurassic World Dominion

Together for the First Time featurette

Underground DIno Market featurette

Mayhem in Malta featurette

Spit Take: The Return of the Dilophosaurus featurette

Inside the Dimetrodon featurette

Creating a Plague featurette

Passing the Beta-n featurette

Giga-bite featurette

Final Night featurette

Jurassic World Dominion takes place four years after Isla Nublar’s destruction when dinosaurs roam the Earth again. Facing the cataclysmic consequences of a planet once again dominated by prehistoric predators, two generations of Jurassic heroes unite as doctors Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern), Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) and Alan Grant (Sam Neill) return to join Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) for an incredible adventure that will determine the destiny of humans and dinosaurs once and for all.

Pre-order Jurassic World Dominion.

#jurassic world dominion #jurassic world #jurassic park #jeff goldblum #laura dern #sam neill #chris pratt #bryce dallas howard #dvd #gift #jurassic world: dominion #colin trevorrow #dewanda wise #bd wong #omar sy

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thevictorianghost · 2 years

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What Jurassic World: Dominion should have been about

(Because I’ve watched not only Dominion but also a Jurassic movies marathon last weekend on TV. So I got dinosaurs on the brain lol. And while I enjoyed Dominion in theaters, the more I think about it, the less the story makes sense, and didn’t deliver on the DINOSAURS IN OUR WORLD plotline we deserved).

Here we go!

Prologue. 65 million years ago, dinosaurs live their best lives, wild and free. We witness a fight between the T. Rex and Giganotosaurus. Giga wins and kills the T. Rex. 65 million years later, after the events of Fallen Kingdom, the T. Rex attacks a drive-in theatre, causing panic and chaos.

(AKA we keep the Prologue that Universal released on Youtube a few months ago. Because it’s awesome. Seriously, go check it out if you can!)

We see the NowThis segment on TV, with a little more scenes that weren’t already in the Dino Tracker added. Just to keep things fresh.

Ellie Sattler, Alan Grant and Ian Malcolm are all called as dinosaur experts to investigate dinosaur attacks in this new Jurassic World. We see the dinosaurs attack random people (like in the short film Battle at Big Rock that is also on Youtube and that is also awesome). Ellie, Alan and Ian go to investigate.

Meanwhile, Owen Grady, Claire Dearing and Maisie Lockwood are living off the grid in the house Owen built himself during and after the events of Fallen Kingdom. He’s been keeping track of his velociraptor Blue’s whereabouts, especially since she had a baby and he feels responsible for their safety.

When Blue’s baby gets kidnapped by poachers, it’s up to Owen, Claire and Maisie, as a family, to save Beta.

Ellie, Alan and Ian eventually discover that Lewis Dodgson, the man who hired them to investigate the dinosaur attacks, the owner of the company BioSyn, is cooking up a new dino in their lab: the Giga Indotosaur. The genetically-engineered dinosaur can track down dinos in the wild. BioSyn can then swoop in, capture the dinosaurs Giga Indotosaur hunts, and “protect our fragile ecosystems from these new apex predators” as Dodgson puts it.

(Or to sell the dinosaurs. That works too.)

The kicker? Our characters never go to the Biosyn lab. The audience sees some scenes there, including the return of InGen’s Dr. Henry Wu, who is still making genetically-engineered dinosaurs, but the crew never goes to another lab in another park. Been there, done that.

Owen, Claire and Maisie, meanwhile, bust out the poaching / dinosaurfighting ring, and try to save Beta. They fail. The road also leads back to BioSyn, as they learn by sneaking in the poaching ring, since BioSyn needs Blue’s DNA to make Giga Indotosaur more compliant. But again, Owen, Claire and Maisie don’t go to BioSyn. Then they are disturbed by another dino attack. They escape and we see the big action scene in Malta. Which was the best part of Dominion.

Of course, it’s not common knowledge that Blue’s (and by extension, Beta’s) DNA was mixed up with T. Rex DNA during the events of Fallen Kingdom. So when Lewis Dodgson adds her DNA to Giga Indotosaur (and goes behind Dr. Wu’s back, because he refuses to work with Beta), it, ahem, fucks shit up.

The Giga Indotosaur escapes BioSyn and starts to wreak havoc on the dinosaurs in the wild. Many who had been captured by BioSyn, including Beta, are also released, and it’s pure chaos on the streets of New York City (or pick whatever big city that Hollywood loves). It’s up to Ellie, Alan, Ian, Owen, Claire and Maisie to deal with the Giga Indotosaur and save the day.

Of course, Giga Indotosaur is killed, thanks to Beta and the T. Rex who gets her revenge, and everything eventually goes back to this strange, new normal. By the end, Ellie, Alan and Ian are interviewed by the United States Congress about the events with BioSyn and the future of dinosaurs in our world and Owen, Claire and Maisie bring Beta back to her mother.

Sprinkle in old characters, like John Hammond’s grandchildren, Tim and Lex, Ian’s daughter Kelly, Claire’s old friends Zia and Franklin, and Owen’s old friend Barry, and add new characters like Kayla Watts and Ramsey Cole. And Dr. Wu probably gets his comeuppance. Probably.

And that’s it. You got a movie.

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canmom · 2 years

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Animation Night 129 - Thrice the brinded cat hath mewed...

thrice and once the hedge-pig whined, harpier cries; ‘tis time! ‘tis time!

It is once again halloween! Or as close as we can get to it on a Thursday this year. Which means it’s time to once again celebrate horror, in the field of animation...

In previous years, we’ve enjoyed the prog rock album cover spectacle of Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust, the devastating ruined-world masterpiece Birdboy: The Forgotten Children, the hilarious creepypasta jankiness of Yamishibai in one year...

...and the next, the exquisite Katsuya Terada design and impossibly slick animation of Blood: The Last Vampire, the tense Korean zombie film Seoul Station, the sublime ero-guro festival of Suehiro Maruo paraphilias in Shōjo Tsubaki, the viscerally upsetting abstract dive into a Chilean Nazi cult in The Wolf House... and of course plenty more Yamishibai.

Halloween animation nights are some of my absolute favourites, you guys.

This year, we’ve got our hands on the long-awaited Mad God, the thirty year(!) project of stop motion animator Phil Tippett to take all the techniques he learned doing movie special effects and put it towards a fully stop motion film...

Who’s that? Tippett started his career at the animation studio Cascade Pictures, inspired by the legendary stop motion of Ray Harryhausen. His break into in special effects cane in 1976, when he and Jon Berg were hired to create the miniature holographic chess sequence in the original Star Wars.

Working at Industrial Light and Magic, Tippett was on almost all the big 70s-80s special effects movies - e.g. Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Robocop - earning industry renown. One of his major achievements was a set of techniques termed “go motion” to simulate motion blur when photographing stop motion animations, by moving the camera or smearing a glass plate with petroleum jelly. He was also heavily involved in creating the creature props, so he and his team are behind all those inescapably replicated Star Wars aliens. It’s wild to think of how an idea created at a studio one time is now replicated so widely: how many people have spent time creating 3D models or illustrations of a ‘Rancor monster’?

Yet despite all that success in stop motion, Tippett also oversaw the transition to CG special effects, starting on Jurassic Park (where he’s credited as ‘dinosaur supervisor’) and then Starship Troopers (1977) - Verhoeven deemed him effectively a co-director of the elaborate battle scenes.

And that brings us to Mad God...

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The way Tippett described it, Mad God is a form of ‘therapy’ in contrast to his increasingly constrained day job. It’s widely described as an exceptionally bleak film, depicting a figure known as the ‘Assassin’ descending into an increasingly grotesque body horror world. Tippett started it while working on Robocop in 1987, but shelved it for decades on the feeling that nobody was interested in stop motion anymore; he came back to it in the early 2010s, running a kickstarter which raised $124k, three times its goal; with this money Tippett brought on other people to assist him in finishing the film.

In an interview with Variety, he describes what went into it:

I had to archive it because it was just too big for me, the scope was too big, I didn’t have enough people, so I kind of canned it, but never forgot about it. Over the next 20 years, I studied a number of things like art history and literature, there’s a lot of Dante and Milton in the film, and then I really got into Freud and particularly “The Red Book” by Carl Jung. He wrote it over a period of 16 years, and it drove him insane. A similar thing happened to me. I went down this psychological path that took me into this bizarre world that ended up in the psych ward. It was that kind of experience where I guess I became a method filmmaker, I got lost in this unconscious vision.

As he alludes, in the last year Tippett suffered a mental breakdown - I can only imagine what it must feel like to reach the end of a thirty year project and just kick that 80 minute film out the door. I can’t wait to see what monsters emerge from Tippett’s subconscious from his almost improvisational process of animation.

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Next on the docket is... do you remember ‘Ujicha’, the ingenious ‘gekimation’ animator whose The Burning Buddha Man we watched back on Animation Night 108?

Ujicha’s technique is termed ‘gekimation’, a portmanteau of animation with 劇画 gekiga, the darker, more adult comics movement which once contrasted itself to 漫画 manga. Gekiga, published in magazines like GARO, was eventually reabsorbed back into mainstream manga - its influence is a big part of the reason why manga doesn’t look like an early Osamu Tezuka or Go Nagai drawing anymore. However, Ujicha’s method draws even more on kamishibai street theatre; it’s a process of limited animation with complex painted cels, moved like puppets. To this he brings a fantastic eye for body horror imagery and some really fascinatingly strange stories.

So! Five years after The Burning Buddha Man (2013), which saw a girl investigating her parents’ deaths only to stumble into a bizarre conspiracy involving merging bodies with carved buddhas to gain superpowers, Ujicha came back with a film titled Violence Voyager. This one follows two young boys who stumble into a weird theme park where they participate in a ‘macabre game’. I can only imagine where it’s gonna go from that vague description.

Ujicha is something of a mystery to me - last time I could only find a scant couple of paragraphs, and searching today I only find similar information echoed on other sites. The Guardian article there mentions that he has the backing of production house Yoshimoto Kogyo, although I’m not sure when that began. Ujicha’s own words about his work are pretty brief, saying that they draw on his childhood:

It’s a mashup of all the things he enjoyed in his childhood, says the director, from trips to Universal Studios Japan to horror movies by Lucio Fulci, John Carpenter and Tobe Hooper, to the gory zombie violence of the Resident Evil video game. The amusement-park-gone-awry scenario is a perfect fit for the strange world of gekimation. “It’s like I’m making an attraction myself,” Ujicha says. “Using my own supplies, and my childhood experiences.”

To me it’s just extremely cool to have someone pulling off something so distinctly different from just about all contemporary animation as well as plain fun, almost entirely alone, and getting rewarded for it! I am really hype for this one, and whatever Ujicha does next.

Now, it wouldn’t be an Animation Night Halloween if we didn’t have an anime about vampires. We’ve done (one take on) Vampire Hunter D, and we’ve done Blood The Last Vampire... so this time let’s take a look at Hellsing, specifically the 2006-2008 OVA series Hellsing Ultimate, a joint production of Satelight (who animated the first half) and Madhouse (who animated the second). What’s it about? It’s about Alucard, a vampire in the service of a British aristocrat, who hunts Nazi vampires with a great deal of gleeful violence.

This one is memorable to me because I actually ended up with a DVD of it when I was a kid, and watched the dub, which is hilarious because it’s packed with British accents or absurd movie German in a really hammy way.

The full Hellsing Ultimate is very long, consisting of ten episodes that are each almost an hour, so there’s no way I can pack it into this format. (We still never got round to the second half of Alexander Senki!) Nevertheless, I think it would be really fun to give everyone a little sampling of it.

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Meanwhile, continuing the stop motion theme, I have this fascinating little oddity courtesy of @mogsk: The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) directed by a British guy, Dave Borthwick, at his studio bolexbrothers in Bristol - the city where I was born funnily enough, and basically the home of UK animation. It’s a surreal story of a tiny guy who escapes from a lab and into a weird swamp.

Dave Borthwick sadly died in 2013, and so a lot of the information about his life comes from his obituary. From there, we know that he was - like me! - born in Bristol, and graduated the West of English College of Art (now UWE) in 1969, spending many years working in experimental theatre, where he used traditional animation techniques in light shows, and then as a cameraman in the film industry. He founded bolexbrothers in the mid 80s, at first creating mostly short films, ads and music videos such as Feel Free (1984), I Can Hear the Grass Grow (1986), Vikings Go Pumping (1987) and Igors Horn (1988).

The studio was known for their experimental animation, using not just the familiar claymation of studios like Aardman but also pixilation (stop motion animation using living human actors). Their short films tend to involve a lot of industrial settings and favour mood (set particularly by music) over a lot of dialogue or plot.

Tom Thumb is an evolution of that to a longer format, and I’m really curious to see how it plays out. Honestly I had no idea anyone was doing anything cool like this in the UK! It would have been really cool to have met Borthman. Alas...

Besides these main features? We have our usual sampling of shorter stuff - Yamishibai in particular! If you have any cool bits of horror animation, please throw em my way!

To finish up, let me point at some exciting incoming stuff! Alberto Vasquez, the director of the incredible Birdboy: The Forgotten Children and Decorado, has put a release date on his latest film, Unicorn Wars. The film is notable for being animated entirely in Blender Grease Pencil, with much of the same team as J’ai Perdu mon Corps (Animation Night 32). Much as with Birdboy, it’s an expansion of one of Vasquez’s earlier short films into a full length movie. Here’s the trailer...

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We can look forward to that in December this year! So if I’m still running Animation Night in a year, maybe it will be our next halloween pick. If I can wait that long.

The other one I have my eye on with decidedly more mixed feelings is... Shintaro Kago, the legendary ero-guro mangaka and one of my favourite illustrators, is directing an anime film, putting his unique spin on Christian mythology. Fantastic, I should be over the moon right? Only, the thing is, to fund this anime film, Kago has been selling NFTs. Apparently very successful NFTs. From a purely mercenary perspective, it’s not a bad move to exploit the vast amount of money flowing through the NFT bubble - but proof-of-work cryptocurrency is massive gaping environmental wound, and it fucking sucks to see an artist I admire like Kago lending the weight of his reputation to this exhausting ponzi scheme.

Course, I’m still gonna watch a Shintaro Kago anime. No idea who’ll be hired to animate it or whether Kago’s style - one of incredibly precise finicky detail - will translate well to animation.

Which brings me to the adaptation of Junji Ito’s Uzumaki to anime by Drive, a young studio that also made Mamoru Oshii’s comedy series VladLove, for Adult Swim and Production I.G. USA (did you know they had a US branch? I didn’t!). The animation they’ve been able to accomplish is nothing short of extraordinary, using designs straight from the manga that are anything but animation-friendly, with subtle, slow motions and drawing counts that would be at home in an expensive film. You have to see this...

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The project’s release has been moved back several times, and is currently indefinitely delayed, in part due to the pandemic - something which is frankly a much better state of affairs than animators and production staff working themselves to death trying to get this done on a deadline. I’m sure, whenever it arrives, it will be worth the wait.

And that’s what’s going on - at least to my knowledge - in horror animation at the moment. Hopefully a worthy introduction to these four films. So, without further ado...

Round about the cauldron go, In the poisoned entrails throw...

Animation Night 129 will be starting in about half an hour at https://twitch.tv/canmom - that’s about 9pm UK time!

#animation night #horror #animation

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