I’ve been fiddling around with paper Valentine ideas…both for this blog, and for Jackson’s Darwin’s shop displays. It was serendipity that led me to this romantic animation featuring paper. Lots of paper.
Merging computer-generated and hand-drawn animation techniques,”Paperman” was created by a small, innovative team working at Walt Disney Animation Studios. I love that they’ve put it up on YouTube for everyone to enjoy.
An animation made with pages from sketchbooks by Reeo Zerko. Wish my sketchbook drawings were this cute!
Vintage first-edition book cover designs of classic reads, rendered in felt and embroidery, and animated into a tragicomic love story between literary characters…holy shit, what’s not to love about Spike Jonze and Olympia Le-Tan‘s new stop-motion animation, filmed upon the fabled shelves of romantic, nostalgic Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris?
This turns me on in so many ways, as a bookbinder, a reader, an embroiderer, an artist…I feel so full of inspiration right now that I think I might explode. First Jillian Tamaki’s book covers, now this…this has really got me wanting to embroider and stitch fabulous bookcovers…
Note: I have no idea whether the movie embedded properly…it might be blocked for sharing this way, I don’t know, maybe it’s a WordPress thing…but do make sure you hop over to Nowness and watch the short animation, which is mostly funny, in a bawdy and irreverent way, but with a brief moment of sweet sadness. Links to Nowness are at the bottom of this post.
In Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side), director Spike Jonze’s stop-motion animation has given a wonderful life and story to the fibre artistry of Olympia Le-Tan.
On a shelf in the iconic Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company, the star-crossed love story of Macbeth’s skeleton and his Bride of Dracula amour plays out amidst Le-Tan’s fabric and felt illustrations of vintage first-edition book cover designs.
The project started when Jonze asked for a Catcher in the Rye embroidery to put on his wall and Le-Tan asked for a film in return. With French filmmaker Simon Cahn co-directing, the team wrote the script between Los Angeles and Paris over a six month period, before working night and day animating the 3,000 pieces of felt Le-Tan had cut by hand. “I love getting performances from, telling stories about and humanizing things that aren’t human,” said Jonze of working with Le-Tan’s characters.
Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.
