Petra Szemán <Petra.Szeman@newcastle.ac.uk>
Hello everyone,
This is your belated invitation to the first iteration of the ANIMATION FORUM this year, which will be a special SCREENING EVENT on Friday 11 October, 3-5pm in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre.
We have a very special double bill of the early works of Shinkai Makoto, the short film ‘Voices of a distant star’ (2002) & the short-ish film ‘5 Centimetres Per Second’ (2007). The combined length of the films in 1 hr 20 min, and the rest of the time afterwards will be taken up with an informal discussion. Poster attached.
No particular trigger warnings apply to any of the films. The first one is sci-fi, while the second one is more rooted in real life – both are solid cornerstones for the sekai-kei genre, and deal with themes of disconnect.
Those who dabble in Japanese animation may be familiar with Shinkai’s name through his massive success works in recent years such as Your Name and Suzume. This is a great opportunity to watch his early stuff on a relatively large projection!
The goal of the Animation Forum (in no particular order) is to enjoy animation, think about animation and artists’ moving image in a very expanded sense and critically, and to spread technical skills that let you incorporate animated/video elements into your artistic practice.
This screening session + discussion is a good opportunity to think about how pop culture and “high art” may feed into and interact with eachother, and where we can go from there as artists.
I hope to see many of you there !!
All the best,
Petra