Feature #1: This Magnificent Cake_2019
This Magnificent Cake
Marc James Roels, Emma De Swaef
Belgium, France, Netherlands, 45’00, 2018
Oh Willy
Marc James Roels, Emma De Swaef
Belgium, France, Netherlands, 17’00, 2012
This delightful new feature film from the multi-award animating duo Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef is little short of a masterpiece of the style they made all their own with the release of “Oh Willy”, winner of Best of Fest in MIAF 2013.
“This Magnificent Cake” doubles down on the fragile beauty inherent in the fibrous material in which their characters and environments are crafted in. Extraordinary cinematography burnishes this technique with richly captured depth of field shots seldom achieved in stopmotion animation. And the film itself has all the light-touch quirkiness that these filmmakers bring to every script they create.
Set in colonial Africa in the late 19th century, it tells the stories of five very different characters: a troubled king, a middle-aged Pygmy working in a luxury hotel, a failed businessman on an expedition, a lost porter and a young army deserter. All seem to have little in common, and yet……