The Cat Piano - Eddie White & Ari Gibson (2009)

El Piano de Gatos

Inglés / English | Subs: Castellano (incrustados)

El hombre del faro ataca la ciudad para crear el instrumento musical más abominable que pueda llegar a existir... el Piano de Gatos. Un escritor hará todo lo posible por rescatar a su amada; The Cat Piano es un trabajo dirigido por Eddie White y Ari Gibson y narrado por Nick Cave. La película es una adaptación de un poema escrito por Eddie White, una mezcla entre la poesía romántica del poeta de la generación beat Jack Kerouac y los inquietantes poemas del brillante Edgar Allan Poe (...)

(Filmaffinity)

"In a shadowy animated city, all blues and blacks, everything revolves around a pulsing musical scene. Seedy nightclubs, sleazy jazz, a beautiful singer all glowing and white - it's Heaven to our narrator. Until cats begin to disappear.

The notion of the cat piano - every bit as crude a device as it sounds, yet told of from a cat's perspective, with other cats sounding beautiful - might owe something to Monty Python and a certain mouse organ, but this is a tale with a very different tone.

It's styled as film noir and the narration by Nick Cave lends it a creepiness that goes way beyond the scope of its central poem. There's an expectation of real violence, a sense of the desperation often underlying creative urban scenes. Our heroes are portrayed as peaceful by nature, but how far will they go to defend - or avenge - their own?

Applying such an intensely dramatic tone to what is in essence a ludicrous story gives this film a certain charm which will make it appeal to fans of the noir genre and many more besides. It never quite generates the energy that might make it stand out, and its characters are the usual noir archetypes with little to distinguish them, but it's still an intriguing curiosity, elegantly made."

(Eye for Film)

LINKS

https://rapidshare.com/files/3823367772/2009CatPiano.A.Gibson-E.White.www.nplus2.org.part1.rar

https://rapidshare.com/files/916209416/2009CatPiano.A.Gibson-E.White.www.nplus2.org.part2.rar

Cousin - Adam Elliot (1998)

El primo

Inglés/English | No subs

Adam nos cuenta una historia acerca de jugar con un primo mayor, quien padece de parálisis cerebral y huele a orozuz.

Hoy, en otro Lunes de Cine, Queso y Vino, les presentamos Cousin, la primera animación profesional de la trilogía que Adam Elliot, el animador, escritor y director australiano padre de la magistral Mary & Max. En esta trilogía utiliza la técnica de stop motion en plastilina y elije un formato minimalista de stop motion en escala de grises para narrar su relación de la infancia con su primo. Esta es una obra de un nivel de profundidad, belleza y ternura que continúa con la saga de Uncle y Brother y culmina en su aclamados Harvie Krumpet.

A esta grandiosa obra decidimos disfrutarla de a sorbos de un vino acorde por lo que elegimos el Casa Boher Malbec 2006 de Cavas de Rosell Boher de la zona alta del Valle de Uco, junto con un queso de oveja tipo español, no muy maduro, rústico pero con un sabor perfecto para esta combinación. Resultó interesante el contraste entre el blanco y negro del corto con los colores intensos y oscuros del vino rojo violáceo, y la consistencia del queso que se asemejaba a la de la plastilina con que estaban hechos los personajes. Una magnifica propuesta. Que lo disfruten.

Esteban Cynowiec (Caesusmundi)

Adam tells us the story of an older cousin, who had cerebral palsy. Adam would go over to play, and they'd dress as superheroes, jump off the shed, and run about the the street with an old shopping trolley. Adam explains his cousin's wayward left arm, his strong right one, his aunt's understanding of her son's rages ("bake a cake," she'd tell him), and the boy's love of swimming. On Adam's eighth birthday, the cousins are separated by tragedy; it's left to Adam to wonder about his cousin, and if he still smells of licorice.

(IMDB)

Link

https://rapidshare.com/files/2008375528/Cousin__Elliot_1998_-KG.avi

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

The amphibian - Anthony Lucas & Sina Azad (1991)

El anfibio
No dialogue/Sin diálogos

El bizarro viaje de un pez que repta por alcantarillas subterráneas, transmutando todo lo que deja a su paso. 

En esta ocasión este animador de origen australiano nos trae una inquietante pieza surreal que, en lo personal, por momentos hace recuerdo al estilo Svankmajeriano.

"In a dark subterranean landscape the Amphibian has lost its way."

LINK

http://www.4shared.com/video/C-gq7uJ-/1991TheAmphibian-ALucas.html