Pig Out

Bacon. Pork. Ham. Lots of people love all three, but particularly bacon if you believe certain websites… However, have you ever thought about the animal behind the bacon? Animator Deborah Tudtud (that is the best last name in the world, incidentally) has and this is her offering to the world – one pig that really does not mind being eaten… indeed is absolutely convinced that you should.  Right now.

This particular porcine performer is a little reminiscent of the Ameglian Major Cow from Douglas Adam’s The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, so keen is it to be eaten!

Tudtud created Pig Out as part of the Classical Animation program at Vancouver Film School.  Not only did she direct and animate this very funny short, but she also composed and performed the song as well.

DRINKme-EATme-READme

This is a very clever piece of stop motion animation.  Don't give up on it as I almost did - its cleverness increases as it progresses (much like many books in fact).  And that's what it is all about - books - but also about emotion, about imagination and about the worlds which books allow us to enter and the ways in which we interract with those worlds in the twenty first century.

The stop motion action begins with a reader making her choice from a bookshelf - all very traditional you might think.  Yet this is also an animation very much of our time - you should not naturally assumed that the book itself is made of paper - or indeed that paper books have to behave in a manner which we might expect.  For that matter it pulls together the ways in which we read in this day and age in to a great composite so that in some ways you may not know (or mind) where the paper ends and where the electronic book begins.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable piece by animator Irina Neustroeva which manages to be paper light at the same time as offering up some really quite meaty food for thought.  Superbly done.