Some time back Wabi Sabi mentioned The Diary of Tortov Roddle. I recently came across a torrent. It’s an odd little series, consisting of nine short episodes. Seven concern Tortov Roddle, an etiolated traveler with a stovepipe hat exploring the northern plains. These are brief, surrealistic stores told without dialogue. In the first episode, for instance, Roddle sees a town on a hill and hopes to find an inn there. However, it turns out that the town is on the back of a gigantic frog, which leaves the hill for a lake populated by other frogs with towns on their backs. The penultimate episode, “Fantasy,” is a collection of brief vignettes too slight to summarize. The last is “The Apple Incident,” in which giant apples fall from the sky.
Rather than try to explicate the imagery, I’ll just post some screen captures below the fold.
That’s really amazing. Some of it reminds me a bit of “Yellow Submarine”.
Mixed with Krazy Kat in spots.
I love it already.
On a per-minute basis, it looks like it had a really high budget. Very impressive looking.
Ah, very cool. The stills make me think of some of those Czech and Russian shorts that were big faves at the Ottawa animation festival shortly after Glastnost freed up the filmmakers to actually enter various competitions like that. Can’t wait to watch.
Yeah, I agree, It looks a lot like the animation that came from the Eastern Bloc in the 1980’s that I used to see back when I used to go to the annual Tournee’s of Animation. (Do they even make those any more?) Likely the animators of this series consciously imitated that style. It really looks gorgeous.
I have downloaded them all and watched three so far. By mistake, I began watching without the subtitles, but I am glad I did. The storylines have been quite clear without the subtitles, and when I watched with the titles on, they seemed to make the story drag; they didn’t add anything of value.
BTW, so far at least, the shorts are as charming and fantastical as Don’s screencaps suggest.
–Robin