Vincent van Gogh | The life of Jagna | The film that looks like a museum painting was made in the middle of a war and is now seeking the Oscar | Poland | Hugh Welchman | Loving Vincent | LIGHTS

The animated industry continues to overflow at awards shows around the world. Although it was previously only cataloged in the Animation section, this audiovisual technique has gone from being a cinematographic category to a great resource for telling stories that are not limited by the budget, but by the creativity of those who make it.

Among the great films that offer a different proposal to the most popular Disney or Pixar animations – both in narratives and production – are “Waking Life” (2001) by Richard Linklater, “The Life of Zucchini” (2016) by Claude Barras, “Waltz Im Bashir” (2008) by Ari Folman and “Loving Vincent” (2017). The latter is a film made with oil paintings made by hand, using the same style as the artist Vincent Van Gogh, and featured 115 different painters, being nominated in 2018 for the Oscars in the category of “Best Animated Film.”

This time, the creators of the award-winning film, Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman, up the ante with more than 90 painters from different parts of Europe, who managed to make their new film, “The Life of Jagna” – also called “In the Name of the earth” -, through the use of the rotoscoping technique, which consists of drawing on frames of images filmed live, frame by frame, to create an animation with realistic movements. In this case, the paintings were made by Polish artists and movements by actors Kamila Urzędowska, Robert Gulaczyk, Sonia Mietielica, among others.

“At first we wanted it to be similar to ‘Loving Vincent’, but we feel that this story is more explosive, there is passion, fights, laughter, it is more volatile. This is something more dynamic where you can fully immerse yourself in the scenes”director Hugh Welchman tells us, in an interview with El Comercio, who emphasizes that this type of narratives are necessary in the European film industry. “We don’t have films about peasants in the 19th century, but what we do have are many pictorial references to the life of peasants, not only in Poland but throughout Europe. The lifestyle they had was an incredible visual resource for us, and we thought that actually, when people think of 19th century peasants, they probably think of a Millet painting or a French realist painting. All references on canvas”he adds.

Art in Motion

Based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Wladyslaw Reymont, “The Peasants” is Poland’s entry for this year’s Oscars. The film is set in a rural village, where a young woman decides to forge her destiny despite being forced to marry a man she does not love, experiencing a series of events that will mark her.

“The novelist was a young painter, he was even part of a movement of painters. When he won the Nobel, he was told that he was chosen because his beautiful prose resembled that of his oil paintings. Something that stayed with him. So we combined both things in this film, which fits perfectly with an artistic desire that is projected today in different parts of the world,” says Welchman.

Despite having the experience, the approval of the director and an innovative technique, the film suffered several unforeseen events during the 10 years it took to make it. Among the most important is an unexpected war. “Everything got complicated when we had to evacuate all the artists from our studio in Ukraine and take things with us so that they wouldn’t be left behind the lines,” Welchman tells us. Despite sending requests, we were unable to do so. They all stayed, they needed men. Even so, we managed to reopen the studio and they continued making paintings in the middle of the war.”

Upcoming films that will feature this particular animation technique are currently in production. One of them will bring Leonardo Da Vinci to life through paintings, following the same style as ‘Loving Vincent’. Meanwhile, the other project of this couple of filmmakers will be an animated version of William Shakespeare’s classic, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” They are all unmissable options on the big screen.