There is very little genre coming out this week, with the animated Disney fantasies The Good Dinosaur and The Lion Guard being pretty much the only Western exceptions. Anime does a bit better, with Tokyo ESP: Complete Series taking place in a world where flying fish bestow paranormal powers, and only the penguin can overcome them. Meanwhile, police without powers are rounding up all the gifted they can get their hands on, and are either killing them outright or forcing them into concentration camps where they are worked to death. This is not a good time for Rinka to gain powers, but she does the best she can with them to protect her family and friends. In Ga-Rei-Zero: Complete S.A.V.E. two sisters are teenage exorcists fighting demons using sacred swords each night, until one of them becomes possessed. Now the other sister has to decide whether to kill her, or let her run around slaughtering innocents.
Alice Through the Looking Glass will be on the big screen on May 27th, but while you are waiting, here are a few things to watch…
I absolutely can’t wait for Zootopia to arrive, it looks amazing. This particular Sloth-centric sequence is made all the more intense by the fact that the police officer looking for results is a bunny. There is something of a difference in the way each of these mammals binds time to their world view, after all. This animation makes extensive use of facial puppeteering to create the various characters personalities, which makes me believe it is a discipline I should be learning.
Another excellent CG animation, Exode won a dozen awards on the festival circuit, including one from SIGGRAPH last year. The animation was done by Kathleen Cartier, Sandrine Gimenez, Nicolas Mrikhi, Baptiste Roy, and Thomas Saez, with Yuichiro Maeda creating the music. This was another graduation film project from Supinfocom Arles in France.
EXODE from Exode movie on Vimeo.
This is a movie I want to see, from a game I should be playing; it is amazing. Blur Studios, the folks who put this together are heavy into both worlds, with movie special effects credits including Thor: The Dark World and the upcoming Deadpool. In this case, League of Legends happens to be a game, but after watching this video I am ready to plunk my money down on the counter to see the finished production on the big screen. Mind, I was gasping for sympathetic breath 30 seconds into the trailer; I suspect that same 30 seconds might end up being my best time staying alive were I to actually attempt to play.
This short CG film Ascension has won multiple awards and certainly made me smile when I watched it. As so many of these are, this is a graduation movie, meaning it was built to prove they deserved the degree or certification offered by their school, the same way you do it to get a degree for film school. The school in this case was the Supinfocom Arles in France (if you don’t speak French they have an English version of the site), and the students who created this are Thomas Bourdis, Martin de Coudenhove, Caroline Domergue, Colin Laubry and Florian Vecchione doing the animation, with Seth Stewart composing the music.