Shadowland - Anthony Lucas (1988)

Tierra Sombría

No Dialogue / Sin Diálogos

Insectos gigantes atacan y devoran a los humanos de un desolado y oscuro mundo, donde elementos estéticos góticos conjugan con referencias a grandes maestros de la literatura, como ser E.A. Poe,  Julio Verne o H.G. Wells. 

"The Shadowlands is… a technique but from that technique it’s grown and evolved so I tried to make a culture and it’s a parallel culture to our own and it always looks like Wuthering Heights or the moors or some dark Jane Eyre, Edgar Allan Poe nightmare.

I think with the Shadowlands it is a great way to create fantastical environments, it’s not only an easier way of visualizing these grand landscapes and places and cities, it would be very hard to do that scale of environment in a different way of model making, you’d have to have much more attention to detail but because it’s silhouetted you can skip over the detail and just go for a raw form, what is should look like… it’s silhouette. It’s a way of creating mystery too within those places."

Anthony Lucas

"The Gothic elements of death, decay and terror are evident in the monochromatic fantasy world of Shadowland... The world that Lucas creates is influenced by the animator’s love of ‘monsters and the mysterious’ and, in particular, the inspiration he derives from the Victorian fiction of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe.

The Shadowlands is a Gothic wasteland, what Lucas describes as ‘a silhouette world of spindly figures dwarfed by bleak, windswept landscapes, of Jules Verne machines and dark undiscovered continents that only yield their secrets at great peril’. The Shadowlands has three ages: agrarian, industrial and the radium age. In this film, the agrarian age gives way to the beginnings of the industrial age.
A steam-train engine appears toward the end, a precursor to the steam-powered engines and cog-driven machinery which populate the city of Gothia in Lucas’s later film, The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello (2005). In contrast, however, Shadowland contains no dialogue and the animation technique is understandably less detailed and sophisticated.
Shadowland gave the name to Lucas’s unique silhouette animation style, also seen in his films Holding Your Breath (2001) and Jasper Morello (2005). The technique combines 2D and 3D elements: silhouette paper cut-outs of hand-drawn characters are scanned, then digitally manipulated and combined with actual objects such as sticks and leaves to create a textured environment. Although the style has been compared with Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 film The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Lucas explains that he accidentally stumbled on the technique when a light on an animation table went out..."

Marian Quigley (http://aso.gov.au)

  LINK

https://rapidshare.com/files/3032146607/1988Shadowlands.Anthony.Lucas.www.nplus2.org.avi