Animated Self-Portraits

Jan Švankmajer (born 4 September 1934 in Prague) is a Czech surrealist artist. His work spans several media. He is known for his surreal animations and features, which have greatly influenced other artists such as Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Quay and many others. Švankmajer has gained a reputation over several decades for his distinctive use of stop-motion technique, and his ability to make surreal, nightmarish and yet somehow funny pictures. He is still making films in Prague. Švankmajer’s trademarks include very exaggerated sounds, often creating a very strange effect in all eating scenes. He often uses very sped-up sequences when people walk and interact. His movies often involve inanimate objects coming alive and being brought to life through stop-motion. Food is a favorite subject and medium. Stop-motion features in most of his work, though his feature films also include live action to varying degrees.

A lot of his movies, like the short film Down to the Cellar, are made from a child’s perspective, while at the same time often having a truly disturbing and even aggressive nature. In 1972 the communist authorities banned him from making films, and many of his later films were banned. He was almost unknown in the West until the early 1980s. Today he is one of the most celebrated animators in the world. His best known works are probably the feature films Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators of Pleasure (1996), Little Otik (2000) and Lunacy (2005), a surreal comic horror based on the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade. Also famous (and much imitated) is the short Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), which shows Arcimboldo-like heads gradually reducing each other to bland copies (“exhaustive discussion”); a clay man and woman who dissolve into one another sexually, then quarrel and reduce themselves to a frenzied, boiling pulp (“passionate discourse”); and two elderly clay heads who extrude various objects on their tongues (toothbrush and toothpaste; shoe and shoelaces, etc.) and use them in every possible combination, sane or otherwise (“factual conversation”). His films have been called “as emotionally haunting as Kafka’s stories.” He was married to Eva Švankmajerová, an internationally known surrealist painter, ceramicist and writer until her death in October of 2005. She collaborated on several of his movies including Faust, Otesánek and Alice. They had two children, Veronika and Václav.

(From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Svankmajer)

Osamu Tezuka was born in Osaka at a time when Japan was facing its greatest changes and challenges as a nation. Western culture and art, once rare, were now readily available in Japanese society. Young Tezuka was greatly influenced by the early animated films of Walt Disney, and was especially fascinated by the artistry of Disney’s animated masterpieces, Snow White and Bambi.

While in college, Tezuka began cartooning and created New Treasure Island (Shintakarajima), which sold over 400,000 copies — a staggering figure for a comic book at the time. His artwork for New Treasure Island is admired for its cinematic quality — events and emotions unfold as if the reader were watching a film. Throughout his creative career, Tezuka pioneered the East-meets-West storytelling style that greatly influenced the development of modern manga. Later, Tezuka formed his own animation studio and his innovations in this industry influenced the evolution of a homegrown anime/animation industry that flourishes today.

Tezuka mentored and influenced many contemporary manga artists. His decision to draw characters with large eyes to enhance their expressive, emotional qualities has been passed down to many generations of artists who have followed in his footsteps. Today, the Asahi Shimbun, a major Japanese newspaper, honors excellence in contemporary manga with the Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize.

Dr. Tezuka was not only innovative, he was extremely prolific. In his 40+ years as a cartoonist and animator, Tezuka created 700 stories and 17,000 pages of comic book art, and numerous popular and award-winning animated TV series and award-winning short films and feature-length movies.

Another remarkable aspect of Tezuka’s career is his consistent ability to draw compelling, sensitive stories in a variety of genres, for almost all ages of readers. For example, Astro Boy and Kimba the White Lion were meant for young boys. Princess Knight was created for Nakayoshi, a magazine for girls. With their complex, nuanced storylines and dynamic compositions, works such as Phoenix and Buddha were clearly meant for older audiences. And yet all of these works, no matter how different in tone, style and intended audience, still retain Tezuka’s style of drawing.

Dr. Tezuka died at the age of 60 in 1989, drawing and writing until the end. His lifework was honored by the opening of the Osamu Tezuka Museum of Cartoon Art in Takarazuka, Japan. Today, more and more of Tezuka’s manga is being translated into English, French, German and is readily available to comics connoisseurs worldwide. —Deb Aoki

An Oscar-nominated animator and cartoonist, Bill Plympton has been amusing and provoking audiences with his surrealist, off-kilter take on everyday life for years. Born in Portland, Oregon, on April 30, 1946, Plympton developed a fascination with animation as a child. Frequently trapped indoors due to Oregon’s rainy climate, he spent hours nurturing both his drawing skills and animation. At the age of 14, he sent some of his cartoons to Disney, only to be told that he was too young to work as an animator, but that his drawings showed promise. After college and a stint in the National Guard to avoid the Vietnam War, Plympton moved to New York City, where he began serving a long tenure as an illustrator, cartoonist, and magazine designer. His illustrations graced the pages of such diverse publications as The New York Times, Vogue, House Beautiful, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, and Glamour. In 1975 he began the cartoon strip Plympton in the Soho Weekly News. By 1981, the strip was syndicated in over 20 newspapers throughout the country.

In 1983, Plympton was approached to animate his first film, a short for Android Sister Valeria Wasilewski’s production of Jules Feiffer’s song Boomtown. The finished product gave Plympton the motivation to make his own animated film, entitled Drawing Lesson #2 (1987). That same year, in collaboration with songwriter Maureen McElheron, Plympton made Your Face, a beautifully disturbing animated short that earned an Academy Award nomination. The success of the film increased his popularity, and Plympton’s work began appearing with increasing frequency on MTV and at various animation festivals, and following a string of prize-winning shorts (“One of Those Days,” “How to Kiss,” “25 Ways to Quit Smoking,” and “Plymptoons”), he decided to make his first feature-length film. The result was The Tune (1992), an animated musical comedy about a harried songwriter’s desperate search for inspiration. Sections of the film were released as shorts to finance the production, and one of them, “Push Comes to Shove,” won the Prix du Jury at the 1991 Cannes Festival. Meanwhile, Plympton was asked to make a few TV commercials and duly produced highly original work for such products as Trivial Pursuit and NutraSweet.

Deciding he wanted to try his hand at live action, Plympton first made J. Lyle and then, in 1996, Guns on the Clackamas. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of a fictional disastrous Western, it was a satirical poke at egomaniacal directors and was inspired by the 1937 movie Saratoga, in which star Jean Harlow died during the filming and a stand-in was used to finish the production.

Subsequently returning to animation, Plympton once again ventured into the realm of the bizarre with So I Married a Strange Person in 1997. The story of a newlywed couple’s less than typical adventures on their wedding night, it was a politically incorrect, adults-only affair that invited such descriptions as “Akira with humor” and “an animated Pulp Fiction.” It provided a nice predecessor for his Sex and Violence (1998), another delightfully warped addition to Plympton’s famously bizarre resume. —allmovie guide

Dušan Vukotić (1927 – 1998) was an award-winning cartoonist, author and director of animated films from Yugoslavia. He is the best known member of the Zagreb school of animated films.

Vukotić was born in Bileća, Bosnia and Herzegovina (at the time Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes).

In 1953 he was one of the founding members of Zagreb Film and had worked there for over four decades.

He won an Oscar for best animated short in 1961 for Surogat (“Ersatz”), being the first foreigner to do so. Another of his films, Igra (“The Game”), was nominated for an Academy Award in 1964.

After 1960s, he rarely made short animated films, making three full-length movies – fantasy tale for children Sedmi kontinent (“The Seventh Continent”, 1966), action movie Akcija Stadion (“Operation Stadium”) about the resistance of the Zagreb students to the Ustaša regime in 1941, and science fiction/horror parody Gosti iz galaksije (“Visitors from the Galaxy of Arkana”, 1981).

He also was teaching film directing at Zagreb Academy for Dramatic Art since the founding of its Film department in 1967 up to his retirement in early 1990s.

After 1973, he was a member of Montenegrin Academy of Sciences and Arts.

In time of death Vukotic was preparing the production of his new science fiction movie, co-written by the Croatian science fiction writer Aleksandar Ziljak.

Vukotić died in Krapinske Toplice near Zagreb at the age of 71. —Wikipedia