The BBC has an article and video interview up on Adam Foulkes and Alan Smith of Nexus, an animation company based in the East End of London, who are flying the flag for Blighty in this year’s Short Animation category at the Oscars. With Aardman’s latest Wallace and Gromit completed too late to qualify for nomination it left Nexus’ dark comedy This Way Up with a chance to shine as the British contender for Oscar glory. This Way Up follows a father and son team of undertakers attempting to bury an old lady, with the wordless tale taking them from their funeral parlour across the country and then into the Afterlife itself: “I think people like it the darker it gets. The bit where they all go underground becomes a bit of a death carnival,” commented Foulkes, who added it had a British sense of humour drawing on double acts like the Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise plus the influence of the Pythons. The film has done extremely well at a number of world film festivals, earning it the chance to compete for the Oscar statuette.
And the news for animation fans gets even better – one of the regular complaints lovers of animation have (I include myself in this) is that when we read about awards nominations for short works we would very much like to actually see the films, but more often than not we can’t because there isn’t a great public home for this kind of animation outside of the festival circuit and occassional (when we are lucky) brief runs late at night on the BBC or Channel 4. Sure we get short clips and trailers online, but unless we are lucky enough to be at a particular film festival at the right time we’re not going to see the whole thing. But in this case I’m delighted to say we can – the BBC part-funded This Way Up and the entire short (just under nine minutes) can be viewed on the BBC Film Network site (which is a site well worth a browse, there is more animation gold in there as well as other works worthy of more attention; you will need Windows Media Player or Real Player though). Its a lovely piece of animation, with that nice mix of funny with dark (the sort of mixture that makes Edward Gorey or Tim Burton so appealing to me), especially when they venture into the Afterlife and there’s a big set-piece – go and enjoy (and best of luck to them for the Oscars, although they are up against some stiff competition).
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