| Prologue | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Richard Williams |
| Produced by | Imogen Sutton |
Release date |
|
Running time | 6 minutes |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
Prologue is a 2015 British animated short film directed by Richard Williams and produced by Imogen Sutton. It was the final film directed by Richard Williams before his death in August 2019. [1]
It was to be the first part of a planned feature film based on the play Lysistrata by Aristophanes, in which Greek women withhold sexual privilege from their husbands and lovers in order to end a war. The short film depicts the gruesome combat between ancient Greek soldiers, resulting in the death of every combatant and the reveal that the entire skirmish was witnessed by a little girl, who runs off to the comfort of an older woman.
The film was a critical success and gained many awards and nominations, including an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. [2] [3]
The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature is given each year for the best animated film. An animated feature is defined by the academy as a film with a running time of more than 40 minutes in which characters' performances are created using a frame-by-frame technique, a significant number of the major characters are animated, and animation figures in no less than 75 percent of the running time. The Academy Award for Best Animated Feature was first awarded in 2002 for films released in 2001.
The Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film is an award given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) as part of the annual Academy Awards, or Oscars, since the 5th Academy Awards, covering the year 1931–32, to the present.
Richard Edmund Williams was a Canadian-British animator, voice actor, director, and writer. A three-time Academy Award winner, he is best known as animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), for which he won two Academy Awards, and for his unfinished feature film The Thief and the Cobbler (1993). His work on the short film A Christmas Carol (1971) earned him his first Academy Award. He was also a film title sequence designer and animator. Other works in this field include the title sequences for What's New Pussycat? (1965) and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and title and linking sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade and the intros of the eponymous cartoon feline for two of the later Pink Panther films. In 2002 he published The Animator's Survival Kit, an authoritative manual of animation methods and techniques, which has since been turned into a 16-DVD box set as well as an iOS app. From 2008 he worked as artist in residence at Aardman Animations in Bristol, and in 2015 he received both Oscar and BAFTA nominations in the best animated short category for his short film Prologue.
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Imogen Sutton is a Canadian–British producer and director and widow of animator Richard Williams. She is best known for producing the animated short film Prologue, that earned her a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with Williams.
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