Experimental Animation Shines in Annecy Contrechamp Title ‘Journey of Shadows’: ‘I Perceive Animation as a Mannequin to Replicate Ourselves’

The minimal and subliminal converge in Swiss artist Yves Netzhammer‘s Annecy Contrechamp title “Journey of Shadows” (“Reise der Schatten”).

Netzhammer, who made his function debut with “Journey,” is well-known for his work in sculpture, animation, mixed-media and video, all of which knowledgeable his animated venture and summary rendering of the human situation.

“I’ve developed many animation works for installations over the previous few years. Within the course of, a form of visible vocabulary with human figures, animals and objects has emerged,” Netzhammer advised Selection. 

“My function focuses on the narrative construction, which, on the one hand, follows cinematic guidelines, however alternatively, capabilities in a round method as a consequence of my associative visible language and permits us to think about many issues, each private and collective. My characters are given an identification by this function movie,” he added. 

Produced by Stella Händler at Freihändler Filmproduktion GMBH and Jolanda Gsponer a Liechti Filmproduktion, who additionally deal with world gross sales rights, alongside Gabriela Bloch Steinmann and SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen, the movie units up three principal figures on display screen, two mannequin-styled varieties managing a tumultuous romantic relationship by bouts of self-reflection, and a simian companion. The aesthetic is each fashionable and futuristic in its rendering. A delicate choreography ensues, because the figures make fast work of affection’s emotional labor and the inevitable toils related.

Contemplative and intelligent, whereas additionally mind-bending, taboo and uncooked, the nude-hued silhouettes carry all the trimmings of recent flesh and bone as they meander round a veritable fugue state. 

“What impresses me most is the deep humanity with which Yves’ figures deal with us, though they’ve neither a face nor different particular person attributes,” Händler relayed.

Netzhammer wrote, directed, and painstakingly animated the 3D function, which debuted on the Worldwide Movie Competition Rotterdam earlier this 12 months.

“The pc program Infini-D is the manager organ for modeling and animation. The figures and surroundings I created are first produced in a uniform type as 3D fashions. Then I create a tough animation sequence earlier than adjusting the finer actions intimately work,” Netzhammer defined.

“This animation work, in addition to the technical preparation for a feature-length movie, is enormously time-consuming and complicated. With this method, I imagine I can provide the viewers a unprecedented cinematic expertise,” he added.

With no phrases to litter the movie’s colourful ambiance or muddy the feelings presenting themselves by fluid motion, the ahead and stalled trajectories are ever extra hanging. The photographs maintain viewers captive moderately than counting on a preconceived plotline stuffed with concrete that means. Primarily, the viewer is left to venture their needs onto the austere figures, because the movie calls into query our company whereas ruminating on the connections we make, bend, then break.

A visceral jaunt, oddly heat and alluring whereas uncanny and void of exact emotion, the varieties tackle the plotlines forged upon them by an viewers moderately than being front-loaded by the filmmaker. The figures careen into and away from each other like clockwork and future without delay, resulting in an meeting line of expertise for the anonymous varieties – at occasions brutal, illogical and dystopic.

“My diminished type permits for lots of openness. This implies you can empathize with the characters and go on this cinematic journey with them. In fact, this openness additionally raises the query of how, or in what method, we will nonetheless inform ourselves tales in a world so saturated with data and feelings,” Netzhammer defined.

“I really perceive animation as a mannequin to mirror ourselves on the planet and the way we take into consideration the boundaries of subjective and collective freedom,” he continued.

Accompanying the characters, a classy, astral rating with music by Anthony Pateras, curated by sound designer Oscar Parcival van Hoogevest, that works to appreciate the transcendent nature of the pictures. Fluid morsels of matter drift by the scenes alongside it, recalling humanity however standing firmly outdoors any bounds equated with the species.

An affinity for non-natural artforms is obvious, as Netzhammer proclaims, “Naturalistic aesthetics and narratives run the danger of illustrating prefabricated data.” By using strategies that take a look at the bounds of caprice, “Journey of Shadows” is on observe to supply one other immersive and progressive creative odyssey.