She is touching, the main character from the short animation film A Single Life, which you see grow older the further she moves the gramophone player’s needle onto the record. Life moves in a groove, scratches on the record are leaps in time. She looks vulnerable and touching, because of how her facial expression and movements are designed by her animators, Job, Joris & Marieke.
It was Walt Disney’s ongoing artistic concern, according to his biographer Neil Gabler, as he worked in his thirties on his first major animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937: Can a fictional animated figure move people enough? He passed with flying colors.
The three animators Job Roggeveen, Joris Oprins and Marieke Blauw who started the ‘creative studio Job, Joris & Marieke’ in Utrecht in 2007, can also do it: create moving animated figures, using the latest animation techniques down to the smallest details, such as vibrating body parts. . This can be seen in the Kunsthal in Rotterdam, where the exhibition A Triple Life highlights from their animated oeuvre – and a new, beautiful pioneering animated film. They mainly make animated films for adults.
Emmy Award
Their atmospheric short animation film ‘A Single Life‘ from 2014 was nominated for an Oscar (although Disney grabbed the film prize from their nose). They were again successful with their inventive animation for young people, Come on from 2016, now also adapted as a series for VPRO TV. This is a film about teenagers from different cultural backgrounds, who discover that they can switch heads in a discarded magical washing machine. This is how they get to know each other’s lives. The film won an International Emmy Animation Award. The Emmy is shining in the exhibition cube dedicated to this film.
Also read: Job, Joris & Marieke about their full-length animation film about time travel with hiccups
For each animated film shown, such a giant cube is always built on top of the exhibition, in which not only the film (or a fragment) can be seen, but also photos, doll models and design sketches. It is clear and accessible; different from video presentations at art exhibitions usually are.
Job, Joris & Marieke have an enormous talent for converting bizarre stories and twists of thoughts into atmospheric, appealing poetic animations, full of expressive details. Sometimes with, unlike Disney, a gruesome edge.
For example, there is mute, a short film about people who have no mouth. Due to an accident with a knife, one of them suddenly gets a mouth, and can express himself. After which everyone cuts their mouth in the head with sharp objects, including a baby who can suddenly self-indulgently suck on a pacifier. The bloody aspect is cleverly dosed and stylized.
The idea for the film arose when Joris injured his toe while swimming and thought the wound looked like a mouth. “We have (…) always remained weird,” Marieke once said in an interview, who called “the chemistry between the three of us” the source of their creativity. The animation clip that the trio made for the Dutch hip-hop hit ‘I take you with me’ by Gers Pardoel shows that they can also make cheerful, say child-friendly films.
‘Selfie yourself healthy’
Highlight of the exhibition is a new 3D animation film nobody, specially developed for this Kunsthal presentation. It is a current short film about a man who is completely absorbed in his social media stuff: ‘Selfie yourself healthy’ is his motto. He literally just becomes a shadow of himself. This is beautifully portrayed by new 3D animation techniques, projected full of ingenious details on three walls and the floor, so that as a spectator you really feel included in the film. Anyone who has been so immersed in the wonderful creative universe of Job, Joris & Marieke will leave the Kunsthal refreshed.
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