PES, Jan Svankmajer and various other stop motion animations...

To get inspiration we sometimes have to look at the works of others before us...

An interesting style is that of Jan Svankmajer, a Czech surrealist artist and animator whose animations are infamous in the animators world and have heavily inspired many other animator such as Tim Burton, The brothers Quay, Shane Acker and many many more.

By first looking at Jan Svankmajer, we can see how he works his very unique and bizarre style with a series of shorts, often making out objects to be other objects such as clothing or even body parts as food.



The use of the plasticine moulded faces which expand as the characters scoffs something down is so bizarre yet we as an audience just keep wanting to see it happen again and again... I also like the way he has made everything seem edible even though we know that its not. Other works by Jan Svankmajer include Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) and Meat Love (1988). The works of Svankmajer have inspired other animators to adapt this surrealist stop motion approach, the most famous and mainstream being Tim Burton.



Tim Burton, once a Disney concept artist created the short Vincent (1992) as a tribute to his idol Vincent Price in which Vincent Price actually narrates the story of a small boy who fantasizes that he is Vincent Price. The very quirky and surreal style is very common in the works of Burton and it can be seen running right throughout his entire career.

Another quite interesting animator I found who also uses the use of objects in very quirky and bizarre ways is Adam Pesapane (more known as PES) who is said to be inspired also by Jan Svankmajers surrealist style. His hit animation came with 'Roof Sex' (2002) which features two sofas havin sex on a New York rooftop. Other works include KaBoom (2004) Game Over (2006) Western Spaghetti (2008) and various others including many adverts.



I love the way this animation flows and how you can automatically see the real objects in the objects that PES has used such as you can see the garlic clove in the Rubix cube that is used.