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| Festival Year |
Festival Section |
| 2015 |
21ST CENTURY SILENTS |
| Film Title |
PROLOGUE |
| Alternative Title 1 |
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| Alternative Title 2 |
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| Alternative Title 3 |
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| Country |
GB |
| Release Date |
2015 |
| Production Co. |
Imogen Sutton |
| Director |
Richard Williams |
| Format |
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Speed (fps) |
| DCP |
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| Footage |
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Time |
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6' |
| Archive Source |
Imogen Sutton, Richard Williams, Bristol |
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| Print Notes |
col., sd. |
| Other Credits |
| anim: Richard Williams; f./ph. (live action): Nick Beeks-Sanders; mont./ed. (live action): Julie Wild; sd. des: Adrian Rhodes; compositor: Bram Tthweam; technical advisor: Tom Barnes; special thanks: Aardman Studios |
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| Program Notes |
“We have just witnessed animation history,” declared Peter Lord, co-founder of Aardman Studios, following the first screening of Prologue in Summer 2015. “Nobody else alive could have created hand-drawn animation of this intensity and quality…” Other commentators have hailed it as “one of the best hand-drawn films of all time”.
Its 6 minutes describe an incident in the Spartan-Athenian wars of 2400 years ago. A small girl is witness, as warriors battle to the death. It has no dialogue, but natural sounds. Richard Williams has worked on the film for many years, between other projects. Begun in Canada on a small island near Vancouver, the work continued in West Wales and was completed this year in Bristol, at Aardman Studios.
Drawing and animating the film alone, Richard Williams has taken hand-drawn animation to a new level of expertise and impact. Breaking animation conventions, the film has an innovative mastery of movement and space, at the same time achieving dramatic and emotional intensity. Williams and producer Imogen Sutton acknowledge the inspiration of Kurosawa but also of the language of silent films, many of them seen at Pordenone over many years. (Williams created and donated the Giornate’s logo trailer, with its morphing portraits of great silent stars.) It was in fact in Sacile that the structure of Prologue was decided.
Williams says, “I’ve gone back to 1900 and drawn each shot on a new sheet of paper. Then it’s polished with state-of-the-art technology. It has taken over 6,000 complex animated life drawings to create this film.” Each of them astonishes with Old Master precision. Richard Williams is a great draughtsman as well as a uniquely gifted, multi-Oscar-honoured animator. – David Robinson |
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