Major Post 14: Tadahito Mochiaga

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

 

Today in class we discussed Japanese animation. However, between the discussion of the amazing 2d animation of Hayao Miyazaki and Tezuka Osamu Professor Zhang mentioned one man that I had never heard of before. That man was Tadahito Mochiaga. It found him very interesting since in my preliminary research for this post I found that he holds the unique pleasure of being one of the only artists to have worked in both the Chinese and Japanese animation industry.

Tadahito Mochiaga  pioneered Japanese stop motion animation and is best known for working with MOM Productions. This Japan based studio was regularly outsourced by American directors, like Arthur Rankin Jr., to do the animations for their various films and commercials. He was an animation supervision on one of my favorite holiday stop motion movies “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” as well as a very interesting film called Mad Monster Party?. I will link the trailer below. The animation in it seems much more seamless and life like compared to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”.

LeAnn Schmitt

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.