Sylvain Chomet is a French comic writer, animator and film director.
The history of French animation is one of the longest in the world, as France has created some of the earliest animated films dating back to the late 19th century, and invented many of the foundational technologies of early animation.
Kirikou and the Sorceress is a 1998 French-language animated adventure fantasy film written and directed by Michel Ocelot. Drawn from elements of West African folk tales, it depicts how a newborn boy, Kirikou, saves his village from the evil witch Karaba. The film was originally released on 9 December 1998. It is a co-production between companies in France, Belgium and Luxembourg and animated at Rija Films' studio in Latvia and Studio Exist in Hungary.
Silhouette animation is animation in which the characters are only visible as black silhouettes. This is usually accomplished by backlighting articulated cardboard cut-outs, though other methods exist. It is partially inspired by, but for a number of reasons technically distinct from, shadow play.
Michel Ocelot is a French writer, designer, storyboard artist and director of animated films and television programs and a former president of the International Animated Film Association. Though best known for his 1998 debut feature Kirikou and the Sorceress, his earlier films and television work had already won Césars and British Academy Film Awards among others and he was made a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur on 23 October 2009, presented to him by Agnès Varda who had been promoted to commandeur earlier the same year. In 2015 he got the Lifetime Achievement Award at the World Festival of Animated Film - Animafest Zagreb.
Christopher Panzner is an American artist/writer/producer living and working in France. He has worked for a number of pioneers in the television and film industry, notably as Technical Director for the inventor of interactive television shopping, the Home Shopping Network and as Operations Director, France, for the inventor of the colorization process for black-and-white films, Color Systems Technology. He has developed animation software (Pixibox), designed theme channels and was managing director of the Luxembourg-based studio, Luxanima, which shared an International Emmy in 1994 for French CGI series Insektors, the first computer-generated TV series ever made. He went on to set up an animation/FX studio, Image Effects, where he supervised the creation of 2D animated series The Tidings for Entertainment Rights before creating his own studio in the east of France the following year, Talkie Walkie, specializing in pre-production and computer production (ink-and-paint/compositing) and whose clients included a Who's Who of international television animation producers such as SIP, RTV Family Entertainment, Alphanim and Cinar He joined Paris-based production company TEVA in 2001 and was instrumental in the financing and/or the making of five animated features there in 2002–2004: double-Oscar nominated The Triplets of Belleville, Venice Film Festival selection The Dog, the General and the Birds written by Tonino Guerra, Jester Till produced by Oscar-winning Eberhard Junkersdorf, Blackmor’s Treasure and T'choupi (co-producer). In 2002, TEVA and Mistral Films won the grand prize at IMAGINA for an experimental short film, The Tale of the Floating World directed by Alain Escalle, beating such prestigious competition as Shrek, Amélie and The Lord of the Rings, and was entirely responsible for the fabrication of Storimages’ Pulcinella-winning and International Emmy-nominated special, Marcelin Caillou, based on the book by famous French illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempé. In 2006, The Triplets of Belleville, The Dog, the General and the Pigeons and Blackmor’s Treasure were part of an eight-film retrospective of contemporary French animation at the Museum of Modern Art in New York called "Grand Illusions: The Best of Recent French Animation."
Mac Guff is a French visual effects company based in Los Angeles, United States, Brussels, Belgium and Paris, France, where it is headquartered. Mac Guff specializes in the creation of computer graphics for commercials, music videos and feature films. 270 graphic designers, VFX supervisors and producers, computer engineers, and administrators are usually working on over 100 million files. In mid-2011, the company was split in two, and the animation department was acquired by Illumination Entertainment. The new company was named Illumination Mac Guff and has capital worth 3.2 million euro.
"Earth Intruders" is a song written and recorded by Icelandic singer Björk. The song was released as the first single from her 2007 full-length studio album, Volta.
Azur & Asmar: The Princes' Quest is a 2006 French-Spanish-Belgian-Italian computer-animated fairytale fantasy film written and directed by Michel Ocelot and animated at the Paris animation and visual effects studio Mac Guff Ligne. It was released in theaters in North America as just Azur & Asmar.
Ciné si is a 1989 French silhouette animation television series conceived, written and directed by Michel Ocelot and realised at La Fabrique, consisting of short fairy tale and retrofuture stories performed by the same animated "actors". A critical success but commercial failure at the time, no further episodes were commissioned beyond the initial eight but following the success of Ocelot's Kirikou and the Sorceress six were edited into the 2000 compilation movie Princes et Princesses, in which form they finally saw wide exposure and acclaim both in France and internationally; a further episode was included in a home release of short works in 2008 but one remains unavailable for public consumption.
Kirikou and the Wild Beasts is a 2005 French animated feature film. It premiered at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival on 13 May and, unlike its predecessor, received only festival screenings in all English-speaking territories. It was released on English-subtitled DVD-Video in the United States by KimStim on 29 July 2008 as Kirikou and the Wild Beast.
Jean-François Laguionie is a French animator, film director and producer of animation.
Tales of the Night is a 1992 French silhouette animation television special written and directed by Michel Ocelot. It aired on Canal+ in France, ZDF in Germany and Channel 4 in the United Kingdom. It is a trilogy of three further fairy tales in much the same format as Ciné si.
Dragons et Princesses is a 2010 French computer animation television program written, storyboarded and directed by Michel Ocelot and produced at Studio O for Canal+. It is a fairy tale anthology series of ten further 13-minute episodes in the format established in Ciné si, though made in computer animation rendered in a silhouette instead of traditional silhouette animation made with backlit cut-outs. Five of the episodes are edited, with a feature-exclusive sixth, into the 2011 stereoscopic compilation movie Tales of the Night.
Princes et Princesses is a 2000 compilation film by French animator Michel Ocelot.
The Old Lady and the Pigeons is a 1997 animated short film written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. It tells the slightly surreal story of a starving policeman who dresses up as a pigeon and tricks an old lady into feeding him. The film was produced through the French company Les Armateurs with support from companies in Canada, Belgium and the United Kingdom. It was Chomet's debut film and won several awards including the Grand Prix at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.
Kirikou and the Men and Women is a 2012 French animated children's film written and directed by Michel Ocelot. The second sequel to Ocelot's 1998 film Kirikou and the Sorceress, following Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005), the film is an anthology, telling five tales woven together by a loose framing device.
Les Armateurs is a French film production company focused on animation. It was founded by Didier Brunner in 1994 and is based in Paris. It produces feature films, short films and television series. Brunner served as the president of the company until 2014, when he was succeeded by Reginald de Guillebon. He retains a role as consultant
Awa Sène Sarr is a Senegalese actress and comedian.
Arthouse animation is a combination of art film and animated film.
