The Monterrey International Film Festival celebrated the last activity of its International Animation International Conference with the European panel. It was moderated by filmmaker Marec Fritzinger and headed by Swedish animator Erik Rosenlund, who has been selected twice for the Cannes Film Festival. Rosenlund has written, directed, produced and animated six short feature films with great success.
Erik Rosenlund, director of the short films Looking Glass and Butler, expressed that he has been inspired by American films from the sixties and Japanese films from the fifties. What he most enjoys from this art is that he can do everything himself: “There are two elements to become an animator, style and storytelling, someone that creates films. A great advantage of working with animation is that you can be someone else, the photographer, art director, actor and you don’t need a whole team, which is a great advantage”.
He also shared with the public his most recent black and white film, Out of Erasers, placed in the fifties within the broken post-war society. The story presents a girl trying to escape from the paper men to avoid becoming an animated drawing.
On the subject of European animation, he said there are certain similarities in the way this work is done, in large part defined by the most important European schools, especially France and Denmark that share their animation style and character design. This is because animators are nomads. A Swedish artist can work with in projects in Finland or in Denmark, and learn different styles.
Marec Fritzinger asked Erick to give some tips to the young talent in Mexico so help them find the correct road: “When I began I made very ordinary cartoons, so I wanted to make something different, find a different style and different movement, because I was bored with what I was doing, so I looked for other influences in the visual arts and they were of great help”.
The reason why he decided to make films and not another art, as literature, is because he considers films allow you to know how the characters look, which can only be found in cinema. “In my animation my characters are ugly, as I think you don’t have to do beautiful characters, and this is a mystery, because in animation even then characters end up being adorable”.
