ANIMATIONWorld — December 30, 2016
Repurposing Matisse: Georges Schwizgebel’s ‘Erlkönig’ a Kaleidoscopic Dance with Death

One of the most visually striking animated short films to be seen this year, Swiss filmmaker Georges Schwizgebel’s Erlkönigrepurposes the visual style of French painter Henri Matisse to bring German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1782 epic poem to the screen.

In the film, a father rides with his son through the forest. The sick child thinks he sees the Erlkönig, or the king of the fairies, and is both charmed and frightened. Spoiler alert: the kid doesn’t make it. Based on Goethe’s poem “Erlkönig” and the music of the same name by Liszt and Schubert, the five-minute, 40-second Erlkönig exists at the intersection of cinema and painting, using Schwizgebel’s signature paint-on-cel technique to create a swirling journey through space and time.

Schwizgebel is one of the biggest names in contemporary animation, and two of his films — 78 R.P.M. (1985) and The Ride to the Abyss (1992) — rank among the hundred most influential animated films on a list published by the Festival d’Annecy in 2006. The Man without a Shadow(2004), his first collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada, garnered nine international awards. Though he first employed rotoscoping in films such as Perspectives (1975) and Offside (1977), Schwizgebel later developed a freer approach marked by a gestural application of color and the frequent use of geometric shapes seen in such works as Fugue (1998) and The Young Girl and the Clouds (2000).

A visual homage to Matisse’s iconic painting “La Danse,” the dialog-free Erlkönig is produced by Geneva-based Studio GDS, the production company Schwizgebel founded in 1971 under which he has produced all 19 or so of his films, many of which have gone on to win multiple awards at Cannes, Annecy, Zagreb, Hiroshima Stuttgart, Ottawa and Espinho. The short has screened at more than 15 international festivals, including DOK Leipzig, Encounters, Ottawa, Locarno, Zagreb, and Fantoche, where it won the award for best visual. (Read full story…)