timespace coordinates: winter of 1987, Minnesota / Fargo, North Dakota
Fargo is a 1996 black comedy-crime film written, produced, and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Frances McDormand stars as Marge Gunderson, a pregnant Minnesota police chief investigating roadside homicides that ensue after a desperate car salesman (William H. Macy) hires two criminals (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife in order to extort a hefty ransom from his wealthy father-in-law (Harve Presnell). the score to Fargo is by Carter Burwell
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter is a 2014 American drama film co-written and directed by David Zellner. The film stars Rinko Kikuchi, Nobuyuki Katsube, Shirley Venard, David Zellner, Nathan Zellner, and Kanako Higashi. The story is based on the urban legend surrounding Takako Konishi in search of the fictional ransom money seen buried in the snow from the 1996 film Fargo. (wiki)
Fargo is an American black comedy–crime drama anthology television series created and primarily written by Noah Hawley. The show is inspired by the eponymous 1996 film written and directed by the Coen brothers, who serve as executive producers on the series alongside Hawley. The series premiered on April 15, 2014, on FX, and follows an anthology format, with each season set in a different era, and with a different story and mostly new characters and cast, although there is minor overlap. Each season shares a common chronology with the original film. (wiki)
Lord and Miller wanted the film to feel like “you walked inside a comic book”, and were excited to tell the story in a way that the live-action films could not. Persichetti concurred, feeling that animation was the best medium with which to honor the style of the comics, allowing the production team to adapt 70-year-old techniques seen in comic artwork into the film’s visual language. Completing the animation for the film required up to 140 animators, the largest crew ever used by Sony Pictures Animation for a film to date.
The CGI animation for the film was combined with “line work and painting and dots and all sorts of comic book techniques” to make it look like it was created by hand, which was described as “a living painting”. This was achieved by artists taking rendered frames from the CGI animators and working on top of them in 2D, with the goal of making every frame of the film “look like a comic panel”. Lord described this style of animation as “totally revolutionary”, and explained that the design combines the in-house style of Sony Pictures Animation with the “flavor” of comic artists such as Sara Pichelli (who co-created Miles Morales) and Robbi Rodriguez. To make it feel more like a comic book, it was animated without motion blur, and rather than using animation principles like squash and stretch they came up with substitute versions of them; “so that in texture and feel it felt different, but it still achieved the same goal — to either feel weight or anticipation or impact or things like that”.
The film’s directors all felt that the film would be one of the few that audiences actually “need” to watch in 3D due to the immersive nature of the animated world created, and the way that the hand-drawn animation elements created specifically for the film create a unique experience; Persichetti described this experience as a combination of the effects of an old-fashioned hand-drawn multiplane camera and a modern virtual reality environment. (read more)
Shoplifters (Japanese: 万引き家族 Hepburn: Manbiki Kazoku, direct translation Shoplifting Family) is a 2018 Japanese drama film directed, written and edited by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Starring Lily Franky and Sakura Ando, it is about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with a life of poverty.
Kore-eda wrote the screenplay contemplating what makes a family, and inspired by reports on poverty and shoplifting in Japan. (wiki)
timespace coordinates: – – Southern California’s Salton Sea community
“An indie with one foot in the netting of social realism and another in the terrain of desolation fables, “Don’t Come Back From The Moon” offers up a tale of mass disappearance born of economic hardship: fathers in a depressed small town leaving their wives and children like something out of a Greek tragedy or a post-apocalyptic story. Or, as one could readily imagine, out of headlines from America’s rapidly dying, labor-driven towns.” (read review)
Don’t Come Back from the Moon is a 2017 American drama film featuring James Franco and Rashida Jones. It is based on Dean Bakopoulos‘ 2005 novel of the same name.
Mid90s (stylized as mid90s) is a 2018 American coming-of-age comedy-drama film written and directed by Jonah Hill, in his feature directorial debut. It stars Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges and Katherine Waterston, and follows a 13-year-old boy who begins spending time with a mostly older group of skateboarders while living in 1990s Los Angeles. Mid90s features an original score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.