Manchester Animation Festival DAY TWO (Ethel And Ernest) (OUAN402)

Day two of the fest brought a whole slew of great new stuff to absorb. Here are some of the most relevant things I want to talk about.

Ethel and Ernest and the making of Ethel and Ernest: Dir Roger Mainwood

Learning about the making of Ethel and Ernest before watching the film itself helped me appreciate the movie a lot more, especially the lengths that the team went to and the creativity that it took to emulate Raymond Briggs' style. One of the details that stuck out for me was hearing about how, to properly get the colours right to be similar to the graphic novel, the team made large sheets of watercolour washes.

Like this

Then they cut them into six, scanned each segment as a colour swatch, then every two or three frames would swap out one swatch for another very similar swatch to create the look that it was all hand painted, which would otherwise have taken years and years. I admire the genius behind an idea like that. It's rather revolutionary. I really hope that this film gets the commercial acclaim it deserves but I feel like it won't based on the fact that it is not made with C.G. I remember feeling the same way when Kubo And The Two Strings, a great stop motion film, got beaten out at the Box Office by Sausage Party, an okay C.G film, which grossed nearly twice as much for absolutely no good reason. We need more films like Ethel and Ernest to bring 2D animation back into the limelight where it belongs. It shouldn't become a medium just for the niche audience.

The film itself was a real corker! I could've watched just the animation alone. So much effort went into it and I always enjoy stuff more when I know people suffered to make it, which is why I shop at Primark so much. What I can take away from this film the most is the tremendous character development and design, which is relevant since we are currently studying good character design and it's useful to see how characters age. The way that Ethel and Ernest age is subtle and pulls at the heartstrings, as we watch the two protagonists go from being young and exuberant to more subdued and grounded, although they're still tremendously relatable and likeable except for how Ethel is a STINKIN TORY. And it pulled at my heartstrings because their characterisation was so detailed that whenever something changed in the story, like they got older, I felt like it was the end of an era and a moving on of sorts, which in a ninety minute film is a difficult thing to convey but it flowed flawlessly.