Pixar’s 20 Years of Animation exhibition is currently on display at the Tennispalatsi art museum in Helsinki. I went to see it and all I can say is, if you’re anywhere close to Helsinki, you can’t afford to miss it (and hurry up, because exhibition’s next stopover is in Seoul).

Although most of us might not have been as radically inspired by Pixar’s animated movies as those kids who flushed their fish down the toilets after seeing Fining Nemo (to save them, of course), characters and stories created at Pixar are quite impressive when it comes to suspending our disbelief. Sure, cars and fish usually don’t talk humanese, but great characters and their believable expressions make us forget we’re watching cars and fish.

Anyway, I can imagine that most see a movie, either like it or not, but don’t give much thought to how it was made. This exhibition, however, provides such introspective opportunity; you get to see how Pixar’s characters and stories are conceived, developed, re-developed many times before they are polished, even sculpted and only then modeled and rendered. I was stupefied when I found out that three quarters of production time is spent just developing the characters and story, and only a quarter turning those ideas into a movie.

From what Pixar shows us in the exhibition, it definitely must be a dream job to work on their projects. They travel all over the place, some even had to learn how to scuba dive to be able to envision more realistic imaginary worlds. It must be a dream job most can only aspire to.

Besides abundance of quick sketches, conceptual drawings, detailed character sculptures and even some high art-like framed paintings, exhibition offers two brilliant gems: a superb four-projector wide journey through two decades of Pixar’s work and a large mesmerizing zoetrope full of Toy Story characters. The zoetrope itself is an unbelievably dazzling display of magic of bringing static figures into motion. I’d never get tired of it even if I had one at home.

For those who can’t make it to the exhibition, get a glimpse of the spinning marvel here.

Mladen

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:57 pm and is filed under Art, Culture, Finland, Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Tags: animation, Helsinki, Pixar, Tennispalatsi, zoetrope