Flatpack Festival Animation Preview
The Skwigly crew are always on the lookout for film festivals which showcase animation. They give us an opportunity to see a diverse selection of animated films on the big screen, hear the stories of some of the people behind them and experience things that you just wouldn’t find anywhere else.
The Flatpack Festival festival has been running since 2006 and covers a wide mixture of films with recurring themes that include animation, music, artists’ film, archive discoveries, offbeat shorts for kids and live cinema. It takes place in venues across Birmingham from the 21st to the 31st of March which makes it easily accessible from most of the UK. Some of the animation highlights are listed below, while full listings can be found on their website.
Re-animating a Dead Python: Animation Forum Talk / 23rd March
Ben Timlett and George Sander-Jackson, part of the directing team behind the recently-released feature film, A Liar’s Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman, will be leading a discussion on collaboration and implementing multiple animation techniques from different studios. Fourteen separate animation companies worked on the film and we have previously interviewed some of them on the Skwigly podcast. This is an excellent event to find out more about how this collaborative project was put together.
The Adventures Of Prince Achmed / 24th March
Created by Lotte Reiniger and a small team using scissors and card over the course of three years, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is the oldest surviving animated feature film and still captivates all ages today. Freely adapted from the Tales of 1001 Nights, the quest for a magic lamp takes us across oceans and down into volcanoes, battling with dragons, demons and witches along the way. This very special event at the University of Birmingham’s new Bramall Music Building will include a live score performed by composer Geoff Smith who will be using a range of rare and wonderful instruments.
Babeldom / 24th March
Best known for a string of award-winning shorts, artist-animator Paul Bush has spent five years accumulating the material for Babeldom from cities across the world, weaving his footage together with visual data gathered from research labs and the internet in order to construct a future city that isn’t so far removed from the ones we live in today. Paul Bush and one of the film’s leads, Youla Boudali, will be there to talk about the film, along with a bonus screening of Paul’s short film Lay Bare.
Shynola: Collected Works / 28th March
Emerging from college in Kent in the late 90s, Shynola were the original home-brewed animation collective. Having created seminal music videos for Radiohead, Queens of the Stone Age and Blur, then title sequences for The IT Crowd and Scott Pilgrim vs The World, they have become renowned for their originality. This screening is a chance to take stock of Shynola’s terrific back-catalogue, peek inside their sketchbooks, and get a live director’s commentary on fifteen years of music videos, movies and unreasonable deadlines.
Soviet Animation in 3D / 30th March
During the Cold War, Soviet inventors developed pioneering technology for stereoscopic projection, which was used to make several animated films. This is a rare chance to see these digitally remastered films, which have been gathering dust in an archive since the Soviet Union’s collapse. An amazing cinematic experience, we strongly urge you to attend this unique event.
The festival will include an awards ceremony on its final day that, like several of the other events, is free entry. You can also follow Flatpack on Twitter for real-time festival updates or, alternatively, their Facebook page.