France Part 4 | Paul Grimault

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Paul, sorry..wait, Paul Grimault is a french animator, I came across him from this web site CLICK , it talks about a 'retrospective on French animation' up to the 1940's (which include Emile Reynaud who i've talked about) it seems that this Paul Grimault character is from the 1940's because it says it ends up looking at him and seems as though this 'retrospect' its from late 18oo's to 1940's, so i came to that conclusion. Although wikipedia is saying he began his career in 1948???? who do we trust?

There seems to be a lot of his animations on you tube, and I'll put some of them up, although everything is in french, so im having to use google translate to...well, translate.

Before that, Paul Grimault an animator whos animated since 1931 (from what his website says) doing experimental animation, 5 years later he co-founded a company called Les Gémeaux where he was making animations for adverts.
His first major project was called 'go chez les oiseaux' released in 1943, once his company had got back together, after they had been split up because of the out break of war. It was the first big project to come out of France since Emile cohl had stopped in 1917.

I can't find this animation, but there are quite a few of his stuff on the tube, and here's two that i liked.

This one (above) is really good. I hated it at the beginning for some reason, went a bit slow and didn't really like the style, but once it kicked in it was a fun animation to watch, and i also got used to the style. In fact it wasn't the style i didn't like, it was the dullness of the setting, although i did end up liking it.

The spinny top (think it was like a police car, because it had police sirens) looked almost 3D which is pretty amazing as it was made in the 1940's. I kinda seemed out of place come to think of it because it was soooooo different.

The antagonist was fantastic, looked like a typical evil person; sleazy, smart (well), looks like a magician. Well animated, everything he did was smooth, he was like a classic Disney villain (even though they came later! later meaning classic disney villains, not "disney came later")
His entrance is really cool, after the stupid spinny top goes away then there's a long pause (which is nice) then he pops up out of the box. The pop out of the box bit (3.40) is good because once he jumps out of it he bounces a bit which gives him weight, in terms of Principals its sort of squash and stretch and slow in slow out. His hand movements are lovely as well.

The balancing at the beginning from the protagonist....no he's the damsel in distress which is odd? so yer the bit at the beginning where hes doing acrobatics to show off it the doll is some fine animation. Loads of frames drawn to get that balance right, because the slower you want it to look, the more frames you will need. This is also giving the illusion of weight.





I'll talk about this later....