Gijón Film Festival

Studio Film Bilder

German animation studio Film Bilder was founded in Stuttgart in 1989, on the eve of the German unification. Film Bilder somehow updates and refreshes the rich East German animation tradition with irreverence and skill. A main characteristic of Film Bilder from its origin is its heterogeneity and creative flexibility a freedom that surely has a lot to do with bringing the studio closer to production, combining in balance contract with personal projects. Amongst its contract projects are numerous advertisements, video clips for artists like Lou Bega, Die Toten Hosen or Gigi D'Agostino, credits, successful children series and animated sequences for films such as Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer, 1998). Those are a series of work that also allows Film Bilder to maintain complete creative independence and produce a good amount of very successful titles that have won a great number of awards.

A group of multi-generational talents who have mastered various techniques and operate within very distinct creative universes has confluenced under the protection of the wide and well-rooted tree of Film Bilder, united by the originality, freshness and non-conformity that keep them in the creative avant-garde. The sample at hand today gives us a general vision of the studio’s evolution and its multiple aspects. There are works from the 90s, such as The Creation and Rubicon. Veteran Thomas Meyer-Herrman, founder of the studio, signs the short film The Creation with absolute control over drawings and the most traditional 2D-animation but patently applied with a biting and disturbing sense of iconoclastic humour. The most purely humoristic aspect of Film Bilder is represented in the work of Gil Alkabetz, who uses simple and expressive drawing at the service of the increasingly delirious story of Rubicon.

In the 21st century, English animator Phil Mulloy –whose first retrospective in Spain took place during the 41st edition of Gijon International Film Festival- produced (with Film Bilder) The final solution, a short science fiction movie full of rebelliousness and non-conformity. A terrible but amusing dystopia moulded through graphic work inspired by painting (a career that Mulloy studied), especially primitive African and South American paintings and the German expressionism by painters like Karel Appel. The works of Andreas Hykade, represented here by Ring of Fire, done in 2000, The Runt and Love & Theft, deserve special mention. A whole personal universe drawn with dense strokes that exhaust the unlimited possibilities of animation to create unusual, surrealist and lyrically allegorical beings and worlds. A work that increasingly focuses on colour and on clean forms, as seen in the fascinating Love & Theft (2010) a surreal and hallucinogenic piece with a successful career. Finally the latest works of Film Bilder: 3D animation pieces developed by Daniel Nocke, the person in charge of No room for Gerold and 12 years, a work on the small miseries in personal relationships and with the stylistic forms of independent films, with an element of uncertainty that obtains shocking results, when human beings are substituted with anthropomorphic animal shapes.

Film Bilder's proposal is extensive, with an assortment of somewhat peculiar and dissimilar tastes that portray the life boiling inside it that keeps its constant effervescence.