Te Wei's The Buffalo Boy and his Flute

"A young boy who likes to play the flute dreams that he has lost his water buffalo."

(IMDb)

Te Wei's Feelings of Mountains and Waters

"Shan shui qing ('Feelings of Mountains and Waters') finished production in 1988. This water/ink animation was Te Wei's [特伟] fourth and final major production, and is in many ways fittingly so. 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters' is a masterpiece. The film runs slightly under twenty minutes, moving the viewer through an emotional journey cleanly articulated by deep and vivid imagery, wrought with incredible artistic purity.

The film's subject is a young girl, whom ferrying an aging man across a river, generously nurses him to better health after witnessing him collapse on the shoreline. In 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' Te Wei uses earthy watercolors and craggy puffs of ink to maneuver hillsides, paths, valleys, and waterfalls. He uses the high-values where the ink ends and the paper begins not as an artifact of the landscape, but as the landscape itself. The watercolor paintings move and flourish, the water and ink are the animation; and the rosy-cheeked girl, through muted conversation with the humble old man, learns to play a plucked, string instrument under the quiet and almost sentient backdrop of the mountainous milieu.

Te Wei served as general director for 'Feelings of Mountains and Waters,' and retired after its completion, at the time well into his seventies. The film deservedly earned multiple awards, including high honors from international film festivals in Montreal and Shanghai. In 1995, the global professional animation community ASIFA honored Te Wei with a Lifetime Achievement Award."

(Aaron H. Bynum, 12th February 2010, p.3, Animation Insider)

Ink: Central China Television's dramatic TV ident

2

Upside Down, Left To Right: A Letterpress Film

"A short documentary film about letterpress and one of the few remaining movable-type printing workshops in the UK, situated at Plymouth University, featuring Paul Collier."

(Danny Cooke)

Fig.1 A film by Danny Cooke dannycooke.co.uk, soundtrack by Tony Higgins tonyhiggins.org.

Love in a Very Cold Climate: The Observer/Cape Graphic Short Story Prize 2011 winner

"For Isabel Greenberg, the winner of this year's Observer/ Jonathan Cape/Comica graphic short story prize, it is a case of third time lucky. 'I'd entered twice before,' she says. 'And once, I'd been a runner-up. But to win is such a nice thing. I'm so happy about it. Everyone tells you when you leave art school that it is going to be hard, but you never really know quite how hard until you're out there. It can be a bit depressing.' How will she spend her £1,000 prize money? 'I'm not sure. I should do something really sensible, like buy myself a copy of Photoshop.' She laughs. 'Or maybe 500 bottles of Winsor & Newton ink.'

Greenberg, who is 23, graduated from the University of Brighton, where she studied illustration, last year. She is now working as a freelance illustrator, and trying to finish her first graphic novel. Her winning entry, Love in a Very Cold Climate, tells the story of a marriage - only this couple, a south pole dweller and a north pole dweller, will never be able to touch one another, surrounded as they are by a magnetic force field. It's beautifully drawn, of course, from first to last frame, but it's also exquisitely written. In particular, the judges admired the way Greenberg handles time, somehow capturing a shared lifetime in just four pages."

(Rachel Cooke, 6 November 2011)

1

2

3

4