Saw Them Twice

The article on Wikipedia for this film is less than 300 words long. The article for Madagascar 3 is over 1000 words.



I watched Frederic Bach’s films Tout Rien and The Man Who Planted Trees for the second time in our last class. I first saw both films over two years ago in the exact same classroom when I visited Huntington for the first time, and I remember walking away from the visit with those two films heavy on my mind. When I first set foot in Professor Leeper’s class, I remembered the room and I remembered those films. I remembered the awe I had felt when I saw those films two years before, and I walked away from class last week with that same feeling of amazement in my mind.

The number of things these films do that stun me also stun me. The almost watercolor style with the lack of solid shapes is distinct and beautiful to look at, contrasting greatly from the more solid style most animations use (Disney animated films, for example). The individual shots done one by one, without any cells being carried over from shot to shot, is a form of dedication that few modern or past animators can claim to have. There’s also the matter that both of these films were done by one man (though some outside talent is credited in both films), and then taking into account that The Man Who Planted Trees is over half an hour long.

I grew up on animation done by teams of dozens of artists produced by massive film companies and Hollywood. I loved all of those films, and I still love them today (mostly). But when I watch those films now, I just walk away with a warm, glowy feeling and forget about them in a few minutes. When I saw Frederic Bach’s work for the second time, I was in a state of sheer awe for well over an hour, and the lessons those two films taught me are still vivid in my mind as I’m writing this four days later.

When mankind leaves Earth in the distant future and we can only bring 100 animated films with us into space, Bach better have spots reserved for those two films. When one man can make you vividly remember a half-hour film days after you’ve seen it and teams of hundreds can’t make you remember their blockbuster hit an hour after you’ve watched it in a theatre, you know you are witnessing the art of a true master.