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Carlos Saldanha, a native of Brazil, touched on the inspiration for Rio and the importance of drawing on one’s own culture and background. “Why not talk a little bit about my culture. Why not talk a little bit about things that are close to my heart, things that belong to my imagination and to my life. That’s when I had the idea to make a movie about my hometown. That movie was Rio.” For Saldanha, the film became a way “to try and reflect a little bit of the beauty and diversity” of Brazil, as well as a platform to share music and culture.
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Carlos Saldanha, director of Rio, makes a speech at the summit in Beijing, April 22. [Photo by Michael Thai/China Daily] |
Rob Minkoff took the stage striking a very philosophical tone, explaining that animation and “stories define who we are.” Using the analogy of cavemen painting on walls to record their lives, Minkoff noted that the human desire to tell stories distinguishes us from animals. “With banks of computers at our disposal and billions of bits and bytes, we are no different than those early cave dwellers, because no matter how advanced the technology or our ability to manipulate it becomes, our needs have not changed: to share experience, to teach and entertain, to bring color and light to the darkness that surrounds us, and ultimately to discover the meaning of our very existence.”
In contrast to modern CG animated films, Peter Lord emphasized the beauty of a simpler kind of animation – stop-motion puppet animation. Carrying a puppet onto the stage, Lord shared his passion for the more traditional method, which he views as intimate, handmade and personal. For Lord, stop-motion animators are very much like live performers. In contrast to modern animation, which allows editors or animators to enter a film at any moment to change a shot or frame, stop-motion must move forward. Animators must work to create a performance from their puppets in a linear fashion.
"They’re very afraid because they don’t want to make a mistake. Especially towards the end of a shot that may have taken them a whole week to shoot. The last thing they want is to get to the end and mess it up, to make some mistake. So in fact, the adrenaline is rushing in their bodies, as it is with an actor, or any other live performer. So the adrenaline in the veins, and the fact that you can’t go back, that you can only go forwards, I think are the defining things about puppet animation.”
The forum ended in the afternoon with a series of guest seminars framed around content creation for Chinese and foreign animated films, technical innovation, industry integration, and talent cultivation and demand.
