Manchester Animation Festival: Edmond

Another stand-out animation was director Nina Gantz's stop motion film Edmond, which explores a man's desire to return to the womb after the guilt of eating his twin brother in the womb leads him to develop problems in later life. The animation is as strange as it sounds, but almost poetic in it's presentation. Presented in reverse chronological order and making use of negative space for surreal scene transitions, the film really has a directorial flair to it, with a reoccurring motif of 'travelling back' or hiding from one's problems. 

The animation is stop-motion using puppets and models made out of yarn, which lends them a level of innocence. Features are soft and threatening which really allows for us to empathise and feel sorry for the main character. More subtle facial details such as the character's eyelids and mouth are animated using traditional 2D animation, but the effect is so subtle I didn't notice on my first watch as I was so absorbed by the aesthetic. 

There is also some symbolism at play, as we open the animation with a scene of Edmond typing a rope round his neck with a rock attached to the end of it before throwing it into the water of a lake, the rope we come to learn being symbolic of an umbilical cord and the rock, his deceased brother. There is also a reoccurring motif of passage through portals, representative of Edmond's desire to return to the safety of his mother's womb.

Manchester Animation Festival: Man O Man

Out of all the animation I saw at this year's Manchester Animation Festival, the one that stood out to me the most due to it's sheer lunacy was Simon Cartwright's Man O Man, a mix of rod puppetry and stop motion animation that celebrates the sheer excess of the form.



Man O Man acts as a commentary on masculine insecurities, following a main character who after attending a primal therapy session lets his inner self loose to wreck havoc in an orgy of sex, drugs and destruction. This is all told through child-like puppetry like a sort of demented version of the muppets. It may be puerile, but it knows it is and revels in it, taking it all the way and making it part of the overall aesthetic. This is the sort of animation made for short film festivals. It's short, it doesn't outstay it's welcome and remains funny and entertaining throughout it's short runtime.

Manchester Animation Festival

Between the 17th and 20th of November, our class attended the Manchester Animation Festival. The three day event which took place in Manchester's Home venue, featuring guest speakers such as Tomm Moore, Will Becher and Brian Cosgrove, sharing their own individual insights into the industry. The festival also hosted a series of short film showreels, showcasing independent short films, graduate films and competition films.

Personally, the highlight for me was the talk with director Tomm Moore from Cartoon Saloon on his work for his last feature film 'Song of the Sea' which up until that point I had not seen. The talk and insight into Moore's creative process piqued my interest in watching the film and made me consider things I had not thought about up until this stage in my animation career such as more filmic and literary influences when creating animation and drawing upon one's own experiences, as Moore did of his childhood in Ireland when creating Song of The Sea.

We also attended several graduate film showcases, with highlights such as Simon Cartwright's 'Man O Man' and Nina Gantz's 'Edmond', both of which came from graduates form the National School of Film and Television. Exposure to these films has piqued my interest in different styles such as stop motion and puppetry, mediums I have not considered in the past which were put to great use in these two films.

We also attended a talk with industry legend Brian Cosgrove, creator of such childhood favourites as Danger Mouse and Count Duckula. Cosgrove's experience and diverse career in the industry was inspiring for someone with intention of entering the industry at some point after university. I also attended a talk from the new creators of the upcoming Danger Mouse cartoon and gained insight into their creative process and it was interesting to compare and contrast how the process of creating children's animation for television has changed over the course of forty years.

Overall I would certainly say MAF was well worth my time and I came back from it more inspired than ever to create animation and explore the medium to it's fullest. Gaining insight form industry insiders was a valuable experience and I certainly look forward and hope to attend it again next year.