Waltz With Bashir and The Congress director Ari Folman talks about his stop-motion Anne Frank film with the DP of Fantastic Mr Fox...
Director Ari Folman is no stranger to making animation with challenging subject matters, as his personal war story Waltz With Bashir and trippy sci-fi TheCongress prove.
And while talking about The Congress in a recent interview - the film has its home release in December - Ari Folman told us not only about his desire to make an animated adaptation of Jodorowsky's Dune, but also provided an update on his latest project: a film based on the story of Anne Frank.
It was announced last year that Folman's film would again be animated, but further details were somewhat difficult to find. But Folman revealed to us that his film will be stop-motion animated, and is being worked on by Passion Films in London - a studio well-known for its animated films and commercials.
Folman also revealed that his film was originally conceived as a mixture of stop-motion and traditional 2D animation - "stop-motion backgrounds and 2D characters cut into the backgrounds", he said - but "now we're going back to London to change it to full stop-motion."
The director's
also working with some of the artists behind Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr Fox, including that film's director of photography, Tristan Oliver (Oliver's previous work also includes ParaNorman, The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit and Chicken Run).
Stop-motion is new territory for Folman, though its usage could be perfect for bringing an unbearably sad true story to a young audience. As the director rightly put it last year, "There is a real need for new artistic material to keep the memory alive for younger generations."
The Congress is out on DVD and Blu-ray on the 8th December. We'll be bringing you our full Ari Folman interview nearer the time of release.
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