Invention of Love was made by Andrey Shushkov in 2010. It’s here because some of our viewers like animated movies and because we can see the clear influence of the animation technique by Lotte Reiniger. While wanting to link to our article on The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1922), we noticed the Avenue had never published such an article. Truly a shame, which is why we’ll first post a clip of said movie:
Do check out the rest on dvd, it’s well worth your money. And now back to the 21st century, with Invention of Love:
film brings you 75 minutes of madness. Plasticine madness. Cowboy, Indian and Horse live together in a house. It’s Horse’s birthday but Cowboy and Indian have forgotten this. They lure Horse away and start working on a wonderful birthday present, a barbecue made of bricks. Sadly instead of 50 bricks they buy a lot more. These may come in handy when their house is destroyed, but every night someone comes to steal the newly-built house. Can Horse and his friends catch the thieves? Will the gorgeous piano teacher fall in love with Horse? See the movie if you want to find out.
of madness. They clearly didn’t care too much about a convincing plot, which is why (by the middle of the film) you don’t have trouble accepting the plot line of some wacky scientists who’ve invented a giant penguin with the sole use of throwing gigantic snowballs at animals in snowfree regions.
name. Especially the ones with a name that sounds very much like a regular name but is still different. (Between you and me, that was the basis for the novel I’m working on at the moment.)
housemates, a former circus artist who worked with mice…) or annoying (Wybie, a boy roughly Coraline’s age, whose grandmother warned him never to enter Coraline’s house).
womb (that hasn’t been a plot element since No(r)way of Life) and there are a couple of castration jokes the youngest ones in the audience won’t get either.
Coraline is the first stop-motion animated feature to be shot entirely in 3-D and it looks good (even in 2D, by the way). It constantly moves from nightmarishly awful to hauntingly beautiful, even though adults like us probably won’t be scared by the film anymore. (Instead, they’ll love the gothic atmosphere – well, if they’re so inclined…)
older sister Bislane at a seedy nightclub. Karas tries to find out whether her recent work – she was working on a cure for progeria – had anything to do with her abduction while sparks begin to appear between him and Bislane.
animation was achieved. It all started way back in 1996, when Volckman directed the short movie Maaz (which can also be found on the English dvd). Like Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings (Gollum, if you suck at sticking actors to their characters), computers noticed the 3D movement of actors and used that to create an animated look. Maaz was still in colour, but Renaissance went one step further. The makers had heard of black and white animation that deleted all the grey scales in between those two spectres and loved the idea for their upcoming movie. The result is what can be described as truly a black and white movie. Occasionally that – especially combined with the unclear dialogue – hurts the realism of the movie, but overall it helps to make Renaissance look different from other movies.
Renaissance has a good plot, but there’s not much to drag it over to an exceptional level. It’s good, but rarely does it get beyond that point. Which makes you focus even more on the film’s gimmick of using only black and white. I loved the look of the film and I also loved how the makers managed to include influences from their favourites into their own movie, without becoming too much of a copycat.
Wallace and Gromit have opened a new bakery, Top Bun, and business is booming, not least because a deadly Cereal Killer has murdered all the other bakers in town. Gromit is worried that they may be the next victims, but Wallace does not care, as he has fallen head over heels in love with Piella Bakewell, former star of the Bake-O-Lite bread commercials. So Gromit is left to run things on his own, when he would much rather be getting better acquainted with Piella’s lovely pet poodle, Fluffles.
Just like any baker wants to know how many raisins you can stick in one loaf of bread, the brand new Wallace and Gromit tries to include as many puns and references as possible into this “who-doughnut” (that’s +1 for Park and c°). From the name of their bakery (Top Bun) to a dough-based Ghost pastiche (surely “pastry-che”?), the Aardman studios managed to stay just underneath the overkill bar of puns. The result is half an hour full of flavour I managed to stomach more than Wallace & Gromit’s movie (which, by the way, I liked).
Persepolis is an animated feature based on Marjane Satrapi‘s comic (which she based on her own life). Marji grew up in Iran and witnessed the many changes the country had to endure. Her parents wanted to shield her as much as they could, which is why Marjane spent several years in Europe.
Avenue Kurtodrome 
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