Major Blog Post 14- Czech animation

Posted on by Wendy Kong

Czech animation has been one of the most developed in history. It has started for about 100 years, Czech animators are known as the innovator in film animation. Czech animation started in the 1920s, they reached the peak and produced some of the best anime between 1950s and 1980s, the period is known as the “Golden Era”. Cutout animation, Puppet animation, and Clay animation are largely used by the Czechs. However, they seldom use 3D animation because of the financial and technical issues. 3D animations are more expensive than what they used in the past, because what they used to make anime, clay and puppets, are low cost. Also, they do not have a lot of trained 3D animators. That is the reason they become less successful and unpopular after the 1980s.

Other countries employed 3D animation because it is fancier and more realistic, which eliminated Cutout, Puppet, and Clay animation. Rumors are saying that Czech animation is coming back, the new generation of animators are currently students, and the universities in Czech support the creation of animated films. I think one of the reasons for the revival is the 3D animation technique getting more common, the price of animation programs varies more than the 1990s. I am looking forward to the new generation of Czech animators! I have a feeling that they are going to kill it!

Wendy Kong

Major Post 04 – Nick Park

Posted on by Thang Tsz Ching, Janelle

Nick Park is an English animator, director and a writer. His famous works are stop motion animation : Wallace and Gromit, Creature Comforts and Shaun the Sheep. He also won a lot of Academy Award with Creature Comforts, The Wrong Trousers, A Close Shave and Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. He also received five BAFTA Awards, including one award for Best Short Animation for A Matter of Loaf and Death.

I found Creature Comforts the most interesting one. It is one of the stop motion clay animation made by Nick Park in 1989. They are animated comedy shorts. Basically, the studio will go interview some non-actors questions. The answers they have will be put into animals and match to the lip syc so it gives a feeling that the creatures are taking an interview from us. They have a lot of new versions of this series. The original and the first one of Creature Comforts is an interview to the animals from a zoo, talking about their current home conditions. The non actors were interviewed to talk about their home conditions. They are the residents of both a housing estate and old people’s home. After recording the voices, Nick started to fit the voices into different animals so the short animation is created.

They have a youtube channel for the new series of Creature Comforts. It is sometimes pretty sad and cute. They are very stylized, very easy to recognize.