Antony Elworthy's latest stop-motion animation work is the acclaimed Wes Anderson film Isle of Dogs. He’s setting up base in Christchurch again after travelling the world to work.
Antony Elworthy Photo: supplied
His feature film work includes Coraline, directed by Henry Selick, Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and a lead animator role on Frankenweenie.
He’s one of the lead animators on Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs which last month opened the Berlin Film Festival to critical acclaim.
Elworthy was flown to Berlin for the event. “I’ve never been to a premiere like that, and it was amazing and glamorous and exciting.”
Set in Japan – “the 1980s as imagined in the 1950s” – amid an outbreak of canine flu, dogs are banished to an island to be exterminated, and a boy journeys to the island to try to rescue his pet.
Elworthy says stop-motion animation is slow going.
“Each animator is expected to do something like five to eight seconds per week, which is why it takes about 18 months to shoot a film.
“You have about 25 to 30 animators all working behind their black curtains, just going a frame at a time.”
Creating natural-looking and fluid movements takes a lot of analysis, he says. “We’ll film each other performing an action and look at it very carefully.”
One of his favourite films to work on was My Life as a Courgette, the story of a boy sent to an orphanage. “It has real heart to it,” says Elworthy.
“The main character accidentally kills his mother even before the opening credits and you think ‘this is going to be a bit of a downer’. But it’s a really sweet film and it’s funny and emotionally true. Not all films nail it the way that one did.”
Elworthy first dabbled in stop-motion animation after seeing the Wallace and Gromit film The Wrong Trousers by Aardman Animations, and was then hired to work on TV series Life on Ben “Until that point it hadn’t even occurred to me that people got paid to do it.”
In 2000 he travelled to London where he worked on stop-motion children’s TV and the Tim Burton film Corpse Bride.
“Suddenly, a lot of us who’d been working in kids’ TV got thrust into this world where everything was on a bigger scale, and we had to be a lot more careful and work a lot slower and lift our game.
“It’s been a succession of stop-motion films since then,” he says.
“As long as you’re prepared to move around the world and put your hand up for them, there’s work.”
He’s now setting up a studio Christchurch, his home town, to work on pre-schoolers’ animation and to keep it going as long as he can.
He’d prefer not to have to travel round the world so much for work, he says. “I’ve got four kids, and it doesn’t get any easier every time we move.”
Elworthy has brought in four overseas animators for his latest project, Kiri and Lou - the brainchild of Harry Sinclair of Front Lawn fame - set in a fantastical, prehistoric New Zealand.
A Life Like This
A Life Like This: Critically acclaimed, Cambodian Filmmaker Isiah Tour's animation about his father surviving the Khmer Rouge, extraordinarily, will go back to Cambodia. Video, Audio, Gallery
Review: Kubo and the Two Strings
Kubo proves that the Laika animation studio should be considered up there with Pixar, says Dan Slevin. Video, Audio
