Gobelins: “Un tour de Manege (Merry Go Round)”

Watching Un tour de Manège (Merry Go Round) is like flipping through the pastel drawings of a child—but coming away with clean fingers. Directed by Nicolas Anthanè, Brice Chevillard, Alexis Liddell, Francoise Losito, and Mai Nguyen, this latest Gobelins short is an impressionistic tale of being lost and found, as experienced through a child’s eyes.

Saying so much by doing so little, Un tour de Manège gets it right. It’s tactile: full of tonal and shading effects, chalky, and sprinkled in baby-powder. It’s innocent: tapping into the existential dramas of childhood, and like many works from the Gobelins school, crystallizing emotions like fear and loneliness in graphical simplicity. These moments are brief, but define a coming of age for the character, and help to humanize the inherent flaw by providing an escape from reality. Liberation by imagination.

The narrative is simple, buttressed by the fundamentals of good storytelling, and follows the same three-act structure documented at the turn of the 19th century. Much is left unexplained. The audience is left to fill in the blanks, without papering over the poetic nuance.

yU+co: “Cirque du Freak” Main Title

Fresh off the passing of Halloween comes the title sequence for Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant — yU+co’s latest main title opus.

While many cinematic title sequences suffer from a sense of auto-pilot, the main title for Cirque du Freak keeps you guessing. Taking on the thrust of a children’s nightmare, the resulting aesthetic is innocent but deftly tuned with motifs of fear—a surefire way to take the edge off the sweetness.

Borrowed from themes developed by the film’s director, Paul Weitz, the typography serves a dual purpose in providing information, while also being extensions of the puppets themselves. By redrawing original woodcut lettering, the typeface takes inspiration from lithographic circus banners, and as a narrative device, leads the children along an ominous journey. Cracked from the vault of graphic design, inspiration for the letterforms where drawn from the stylistic sentiments of Dada, shadow puppetry and German Expressionism.

The result is decorative but highly engaging, with an undercurrent of darkness and grit à la Tim Burton. Even so, similar themes are vested in the main-on-end titles for Lemony Snickets A Series of Unfortunate Events,  and in this piece, a renewed bond between Hollywood horror and the big, fat orchestral score. Through a string of slick transitions, the entire sequence strides forward with a sense of athletic perseverance resolving in moments of compositional clarity.

Read on for an in-depth Q&A with Motionographer’s Brandon Lori and yU+co’s Garson Yu…