Influences part 8: Tim Burton

Tim Burton could have been included in yesterday's post, but his drawing style is, for me, the least influential component of his work.

I am not fond of The Nightmare Before Christmas as a film, but I really like the texture in the concept art and posters. Images like this particularly influenced the rough style in my graduation film. The DVD bonus features also introduced me to Burton's early works: Frankenweenie and Vincent.

Above is a Frankenweenie illustration in an interesting style similar to the other influential illustration work that I mentioned yesterday.


Vincent has a nice simple aesthetic, and I think the poem that narrates the short film is wonderful. I originally began writing the story for my graduation film as a poem (greatly influenced by Vincent), but my graduation film slowly developed away from the poem, and is now a completely different story.


Corpse Bride is one of my favourite 3D stopmotion films, and I greatly admire the perfectionism that the production strives for. I think it is a really beautiful piece of animation, and it is one of the few animations capable of contradicting my prejudices against CGI-style slickness in modern animation.
I greatly desired to produce my graduation film with 3D stopmotion because it is a technique that I am really interested in but have not had the chance to use. I would jump at the chance to work on a 3D stopmotion film: either to animate or to build the sets and props. Jess' graduation film, The Owl House, looked so-damn cool and I enjoyed watching her set coming together this time last year.
I wanted to try emulating Jess' achievements with my own film this year, but I was not going to use stopmotion if it was not best suited to the story of my film - as has now happened... So stopmotion will have to wait for another day.

I was really disappointed with Sweeney Todd, but I found a lot of really interesting stuff in the extensive DVD bonus features: most notably the etchings and vintage illustration-style animations used to visualize historical accounts of Sweeney Todd. The animation movements were lame AfterEffects kind of stuff, but the characters and backgrounds looked great, and would make a wonderful-looking film if they had better animation (it is reminiscent of Alison Cross' graduation film Tale Soup about book character illustrations coming to life - which I thought looked fantastic).

I've written this much without even mentioning Tim Burton's trademark Expressionist style... So I won't elaborate much more than to say that this gives all his films a stimulating and original visual environment - something that I would like to achieve with my own work.

Influences part 7: Rackham, Gorey, Cope

Although I would regard the drawing style of my graduation film as a natural development of my earlier artwork, the animation style of Piotr Dumala (previous post) has motivated me to keep this rough style through to the final animation rather than clean it up and make the finished film look cleaner or more 'commercially appealing'...
Despite the importance of Dumala to the aesthetics of my graduation film, here are some other artists with a similar drawing style whose work I find interesting.

Edward Gorey:
Gorey's black and white artwork best illustrates the drawing style for how I imagine my graduation film looking. This image also has an interesting hazy border (instead of being drawn up to the edge of the paper) that is similar to my concept sketches, and which I want to try incorportating into the final animation of my graduation film.

Arthur Rackham:
I prefer the style of Rackham to that of Gorey, and although I imagine my graduation film being in black and white, I will colour my animation with watercolours in a style similar to Rackham if I do eventually decide to use colour. I have used watercolours in my animation work in the past and I think it looks nicer than most animation colouring methods.

Jessica Cope:
Jess' drawing style is different to my graduation film but I have greatly admired her style since I met her at eca in 2006, and I would credit her with being the original influence for the direction that my artwork has since taken. Without meeting Jess I would probably never have gotten into the work of Tim Burton, expressionist art, and this general style of art...

Here is a sample demonstrating how their artwork (plus a lot more research sources) have developed my graduation film:

Influences part 6: Piotr Dumala

Erica told me about Polish animator Piotr Dumala in relation to the Paint on Glass animations that I was making last year, and although Dumala uses a different technique [he animates by scratching into blocks of painted plaster] his rough style intrigued me, and it seems to have a bigger influence on me as I became more familiar with his work...

The most influential part of Dumala's work for me is the scratchy aesthetic because it made me consciously aware of the fact that animation does not have to look smooth, detailed, or conventional just because that is how the commercial industry looks. This helped me to loosen the preliminary sketches and designs of my graduation film, and I think it will give me a much more interesting film aesthetic at the end of it all too!

Here are some links about Dumala:
Dumala's artwork in the AWM Famous Animator Gallery Series

AWM article, January 2001: Beyond Good and Evil: Piotr Dumala's Crime and Punishment

AWM article, December 1997: A Conversation With Piotr Dumala and Jerzy Kucia

Video: Crime & Punishment (2000)

Video: Franz Kafka (1991)

Video: Scainy (1987)

Video: Little Black Riding Hood (1983)

Influences part 5: Aki Kaurismäki

- He's a Finnish auteur filmmaker,
- He has an absurd/dead-pan sense of humour,
- And his films have New Wave elements...
How could I not like Aki Kaurismäki!?

I started watching films by Aki Kaurismäki in December 2008 because I wanted to make my graduation film in Finnish.
Why in Finnish you ask?
I dislike Scottish accents in the media, whereas I have grown up hearing lots of great Finnish racing drivers giving interviews on TV and I have always loved their accent, so that is my reason for using Finnish voices rather than French, German, English (or anything more "predictable").
I originally used Kaurismäki's films to check what Finnish dialgoue sounds like on film, but I found his work to be really interesting so I have continued to borrow his films from the college library on a near-weekly basis so that I can watch them all (I've currently seen about 8 of the available 12).

Below are some short reviews about some of the films I've seen so far:

Calamari Union (1985) follows a group of 15 strange men (14 of them are called Frank!) as they try to make their way to the mythical land of Eira. It is full of silly little things (perfectly suited to my sense of filmic humour) that, for me, make it such a delight to experience... It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I'd strongly recommend it just for the absurdity of it all!


Hamlet Goes Business (1987) is loosely based upon Shakespeare's Hamlet, but it also features a Swedish mafia trying to corner Finland's rubber duckie market! That story premise sounds fantastic, unfortunately it didn't live up to my high hopes.


Leningrad Cowboys Go America (1989) is a ridiculous road movie about a 9-piece polka band with trademark foot-long pompadour hairstyles and long pointy shoes, that decide to leave the tundra to try making the big-time as a rock n roll band in America. This is perhaps his most commercial film, and for this reason is perhaps the easiest for general audiences to get into, but other than the absurdity of the band, I do not think it does the director justice. I would describe this film as This Is Spinal Tap meets The Blues Brothers translated by Borat...


Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (1994) focuses on a roadtrip across Finland between a coffee addict and a vodka addict accompanied by two foreign women trying to reach Estonia. I would describe it as a minimalist New Wave film (having little in the way of dialogue or action), but it was really captivating! (I thought that one of the protagonsits was like a Finnish version of John Travolta in Pulp Fiction - which further enhanced the comedy element!)


The Man Without a Past (2002) opens with a man getting ruthlessly attacked as he sleeps on a park bench, he then goes through the film without any memories and making new friends with the poor whilst living in a cargo container and falling in love with a woman from the Salvation Army.
Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 98% rating, while Metacritic classifies it as deserving Universal Acclaim.



Related websites:
An in-depth biography at Virtual Finland

The Guardian interview, January 2003: 'I am a lousy film-maker'

Director info & DVD reviews at http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/film/dvd/The-Aki-Kaurismaki-Collection-Vol-1/?tag=5|80

Film stills for Shadows In Paradise (1986)

Film stills for Ariel (1988)

Film stills for The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Film stills for The Man Without A Past (2002)

Film stills for Lights In The Dusk (2006)