Pixar – the amazing makers!!!

 

GetOut

 

Best Animated Short Film 2009

Vladimir Kush

Kush was born in 1965 in Moscow and began to draw and show his artistic ability at the age of three or four. His father, Oleg encouraged his natural talent at an early age. He also did his best to provide his son with books of romantic travel by hard to get (and sometimes banned) authors such as Jules Verne, Jack London and Herman Melville. At the age of seven, Kush began attending art school in Russia. The first half of his day was in regular school, doing normal lessons, and the second half of the day spent in art classes until nine PM. Kush entered the Moscow Art Institute at seventeen, and a year later, began two years of compulsory military service. However he was soon commissioned to paint propagandistic posters, rather than perform the functions of regular infantry.

Kush states that his style has been influenced by these major artists: Monet, Botticelli, Bosch, Van Gogh, Durer, Schinkel, Vermeer and Dali. Becoming weary of the Cézanne painting style which he focused on at art school, Kush then went to surreal images as a teenager and painted his first surreal image at the age of fourteen. Kush experimented with various styles of impressionism after reading a book on works of Salvador Dalí one of the artists whom he found highly influential in earlier and in fact later life. Kush was also strongly influenced by his father, a mathematician who believed that his son’s realistic paintings showed the artist’s professional skill. His father believed they drew the audience in to accept the impossible images and explore the different levels of meaning since they were painted realistic enough to see the metaphors contained in them.

Salvador Dali and Walt Disney collaboration – Destino

IN 1937, Salvador Dalí wrote to his fellow Surrealist André Breton about his trip to California: ”I have come to Hollywood and am in contact with the three great American surrealists — the Marx Brothers, Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney.”

That might have been the end of it, if not for a party at the home of the producer Jack Warner, in 1945. There, Disney and Dalí ran into each other again, and, the next year, embarked on one of the 20th century’s least likely artistic collaborations: the creator of Mickey Mouse and the painter of melting clocks joined forces to create an animated short titled ”Destino” (”Destiny”).

Dalí told the press it would be ”a magical exposition of the problem of life in the labyrinth of time.” Nervously, Disney translated, calling it ”just a simple story of a girl in search of her real love.” For eight months, they worked on it, until Disney, citing postwar financial problems, abandoned the project.

In the 57 years since, the unfinished short has acquired the reputation of a lost masterpiece. ”Destino” is as legendary in animation circles as the phantom footage from ”The Magnificent Ambersons” is among movie buffs. But ”Destino” is lost no longer. Next month at the New York Film Festival, this six-and-a-half-minute legend will finally have its American premiere.

It has been reconstructed from Dalí’s paintings and drawings by a new generation of filmmakers who were guided by Disney’s nephew, Roy E. Disney, the vice chairman of the Walt Disney Company, and by Dalí’s assistant on the original project, John Hench, who is now 95. It’s a far cry from ”Snow White.” Dalí’s signature incongruities dominate the film; there are crawling ants, colossal statues, shadowy vistas, a baseball ballet and, of course, melting clocks. Still, Mr. Hench recalled in an interview, ”Walt approved the general terms, thinking rightly that whatever Dalí would produce would be an interesting set of images.”