Animation Spotlight Series - The work of Mikey Please (stop motion)

Truly mind blowing multiple award winning stop motion film "The Eagleman Stag"

Dir: Michael Please / UK / 2010

Peter's life has been spent in both fascination and fear of his quickening perception of time with age. As he nears the end of his days, his interest turns to obsession and he undertakes progressively extreme measures to control and counter times increasing pace. Peter also discovers that if you repeat the word 'fly' for long enough it sounds like you're saying 'life'. This is of no real help to him. His answers lie in the brain of a beetle.

I am gathering together as many animated films as I can get my hands on to take with me to show the students in China as I know they don't have easy access to many of the sites we take for granted such as youtube or vimeo and I won't be able to get these sites up for them in class. Whilst collecting a quickly growing treasure trove of animated films I thought it might be good to dedicate a post a week to an animator who has inspired me.

Mikey Please is one of my favourite animators. The first time I saw his work he was up for an award at the Royal Television Society awards. I managed to snag the undergraduate award whilst Mikey won the Post Graduate Award. He then went on to win a Bafta as well as long running international success all over the world and watching these animated shorts it's not hard to see why. Above is his post graduate film "The Eagleman Stag". His unique style using only white characters and environments accentuated by clever use of light and shadow. His characters lovingly made with card, carved foam and alluminium wire display some of the most human performances seen in any animation.

Below is another of my favourites by Mikey Please created in 2015 called Marilyn Miller. This is a beautiful piece about a young artist crippled by self doubt that leads to destruction of her own work. Through that she finds enlightenment and humour in the pointlessness of it all. Beautiful, funny, relatable and very human.

If you are interested in seeing some of the techniques used in Mikey's work here is a link to a small making of documentary filmed by Sqwigly magazine who are a brilliant source of knowledge for all things animated.

If you enjoyed these look out for future posts I'll be highlighting a different animator every week.

Many thanks,

Charlotte :)