The Corsican Brothers Trailer

An animated production of The Corsican Brothers draws lots of inspiration from Victorian-era toy theatre.

I just watched the trailer for The Corsican Brothers. It looks great and has obviously been a labour of love for filmmaker Nigel Peever. I'm pretty sure that it's actually being done as computer animation, but it has a wonderful handcrafted look to it that makes look just like toy theatre. Go have a look and see it for yourself.

Via Penny Plain, Twopence Coloured.

Monday Morning Inspiration: Jamie Caliri

Stop motion animator Jamie Caliri creates distinctive, beautifully crafted stop motion animation for film and television.

In my current "day job" I design opening credits and title sequences. When I'm searching for inspiration I often watch the work of one of my favourite animators, Jamie Caliri. His amazing credits include the title sequences of Lemony Snicket’s A Series Of Unfortunate Events, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (see previous post) and The United States of Tara. He's also helped pioneer the development of Dragon Stop Motion, a stop motion animation software package I'm dying to try (a free 10 trial version of Dragon is available to download).

Lines on Palms

Toy Theatre inspires Lines on Palms, the latest Josh Pyke music video.

Lines on Palms is the video for a recent single from Australian singer Josh Pyke. It's filled with lots of simple, but very effective puppetry. The whole video looks like it takes place in a wonderfully whimsical giant toy theatre.

Thanks to Mike Marinos for the great link!

CG Animated Puppets Mambo Italiano

Puppet-like CG animated characters dance with French actor Gérard Darmon in Mambo Italiano.

There's lots of great puppetry and puppet-inspired work going on in France. Last week I mentioned Jerome Murat's amazing Statue Act and I just watched a great video of Mambo Italiano with French actor Gérard Darmon. To see it click here, then select "productions" and then "Mambo Italiano".

Although the characters in the video look like puppets, they actually aren't. Much like the pseudo-Kermits in Over Time (another great French short) they are puppet-like CG animated characters.

Thanks to Jérôme at Moving Puppet for writing in with this fantastic link!

Over Time

Over Time (link via Tough Pigs) is a beautiful 3D animated film by French animators Oury Atlan, Thibaut Berland and Damien Ferrie about a troupe of small Kermit-like puppets who find their creator lying on his bench and have to eventually come to understand his death. It's a brilliant film that includes several subtle, yet very clever homages to famous scenes in Muppet films and TV shows. It's also screening in competition this weekend at Animex 2005 in the UK.

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06/12/06 Update - The original link for this is no longer working so I have updated it to point to a copy of the film on YouTube.