Okay, so I'm back from a long hiatus, but I made it through the semester and now and taking advantage of all the free time that I have now(that is until I have to get a second job for the summer). I want to follow up on the stop motion that I have been digging on for a while. Ivo Caprino the next fellow on my list of fascinating creators. Born in Oslo, Norway to a very creative family. He was the son of furniture builder Mario Caprino, and artist Ingeborg Gude. His mother would design puppets for a puppet theater which Ivo would assist her in making. This ended up becoming a great influence on his work in the future. He and his mother would collaborate on making puppet films from around the late 40s' up until her death in the mid sixties. Caprino received much praise and accolades for his films. He originally used an animatronic mechanism to give the puppets movements in real-time as it is shown here in the film, Karius og Baktus.
This film is based off of a story by Thorbjørn Egner about two little trolls who the title is named after. They represent Caries and Bacterium, and live the mouth of a little boy named Jens hammering away at his teeth. They just look too damn happy tearing up that poor kids mouth.
He would then later on use traditional stop-motion techniques in his later films, like in this short about lute fish.
Mmm... piping hot lute fish. I also like the bit of live-action added into the film when the food is being presented. I almost feel it was some sort of advertisement or public announcement that Caprino did. The stop motion puppets remind a bit of those that were featured by Rankin-Bass, who produced The Year Without A Santa Claus and Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer Christmas specials(Which were animated in Japan, though they are an American production company).
The movie that first grabbed my fascination with Caprino was a preview for a film called: Flåklypa Grand Prix or Pinchcliffe Grand Prix, which was based of a series of books by Kjell Aukrust. The reason why the trailer is in Japanese is because I originally was looking at the puppet animations of Kihachiro Kawamoto, and there was a link sitting right next to it. Also this is the only trailer that I've been able to find of the movie.
When I was researching the story in the film, I was interested in the main character Reodor Felgen's hobby of making Rube Goldberg type inventions. Plus he has two anthropomorphic assistants, A peppy duck named Solan, and a pessimistic hedgehog named Ludvig. I haven't looked into it heavily yet, but I noticed these two things remind me of Wallace and Grommit. One wonders if this movie had any influence on Nick Park at all. I save that thought for another post.
-Seph
