Guilherme Marcondes' animated short Tyger is available online. (Trattoria/Guilherme Marcondes)
I met filmmaker Guilherme Marcondes at the San Diego Latino Film Festival last night. He made the animated short Tyger , inspired by William Blake's poem. The film will not play again at the festival but if you missed it, you can still -- luckily -- find it online . The film serves up a breathtaking mix of old and new as a puppet tiger walks through the computer animated cityscape of Sao Paulo, turning the urban jungle into something wildly surreal. This is a visual treat with clever and gorgeous animation. On his website , Marcondes says he related to "Blake's dystopian vision of the modern world." He says that the poem "gives us a hint of wonder along with the fear of progress. The tiger is as much dangerous as it is marvelous and this ambiguity makes us avoid the pure romantic negative vision of society."
For his film, Marcondes employs a tiger puppet manipulated by a trio of onscreen puppeteers dressed all in black. The tiger moves through what Marcondes describes as Sao Paulo's "chaotic urban landscape." Marcondes says that he was still studying at architecture school when he began working part time as an animator. "I never went to any film schools," he tells me as we sit in the theater where his film was just shown, "I just worked at this production company so I had to learn everything myself. I was five years at that company and that was my animation school. At a real film school you're told to do things in certain ways with certain rules. So I never learned their way of doing things, I learned my own way. I think it was better but it might have been a longer path though."
In regards to his mix of visual styles, Marcondes says, "it made sense to mix puppetry and hi-end animation because I was doing all this work on computers and CGI at the production company. I had to mix all sorts of techniques and designs for the commercial spots I was doing. So I used the technical knowledge I gained from working on those spots and was already mixing because I felt that was the best way to represent my interpretation of Blake's poem. Basically, the puppet/puppeteers are the perfect metaphor for the way I felt about the poem. Plus it was fun to do a CG movie with this old ancient technique of puppetry."
The puppeteers were actually friends of Marcondes. He had seen their work two years before he made Tyger . He just kept in the back of his mind the desire to make a film with them. Marcondes says that when he conceived the film, he didn't realized that the style of puppets (with the puppeteers visible working the puppets) was part of Japan's ancient Bunraku Puppet Theater tradition but he likes the fact that it is an ancient technique that he's mixing with state of the art technology.
Tyger is Marcondes' fourth short. But it's the longest of his films. He says that working in commercials prompted him to make his first three films with running times under one minute. Based on his work in Tyger , he's an animator whose work I will definitely seek out. Check out his film, but realize it was better on a big screen.
