Anijammin’
Please not this session is rated: Unrestricted M (Mature) – Restricted to persons aged 15 and over unless accompanied by an adult.
Guest Co-Curator: Marv Newland
Gotta love a great ANIJAM! A bunch of disparate animators come together and individually animate their own section of a film usually without knowing what any of the animators have done. Each animator passes on only the last frame of their shot – the next animator has to take that frame, craft their own sequence in their own style before passing on their last frame… and down the line it goes. Sometimes there’s a theme, sometimes not. All the pieces get stitched together and the results are encyclopaedic compendiums of style, energy and ideas from a who’s-who roll-call of international indie animating talent. This is animators coming out to play.
The leader of the Anijammin’ pack has got to be master Canadian animator, Marv Newland. Marv is one of our favourite human units and is the genius behind the ultra classic “Bambi Meets Godzilla” (1969) and an incredible catalogue of animated shorts spanning four decades. He’s even seen a bit of “Duckman” action and animated a series of Gary Larson cartoons. Buuuut back in 1984, he gathered together a constellation of nearly two dozen of the world’s most renowned indie animators and got each of them separately animating the adventures of a bizarre, trippy character named Foska. The resulting film “Anijam” (1984) cracked open the whole anijam genre whistles, bells, fireworks and all.
MIAF Creative Director, Malcolm Turner, sat down with Marv and spent a couple of months going through a pile of films that picked up that anijam baton and ran with it. Working with Marv is always a delight and the collection of anijam films he lead us through on our way to this final selection is a joy to behold; brilliant clusters of work from a bewilderingly diverse range of animators and the absolutely perfect, anarchically fun way to kick off MIAF’s International Animation Day line-up.
Anijam
Marv Newland
Canada, 10’14, 1984