timespace coordinates: summer of 1981 > ChristmasEve 1991 Hutchinson, Kansas / New York City
Mysterious Skin is a 2004 Dutch-American drama film directed by American filmmaker Gregg Araki, who also wrote the screenplay based on Scott Heim‘s 1995 novel of the same name.
Mysterious Skin tells the story of two pre-adolescent boys who are sexually abused by their baseball coach, and how it affects their lives in different ways into their young adulthood. One boy becomes a reckless, sexually adventurous male prostitute, while the other retreats into a reclusive fantasy of alien abduction. (wiki)
During pre-production, Tom Tykwer, Director of Photography Frank Griebe, Production Designer Uli Hanisch, and Costume Designer Pierre-Yves Gayraud studied the complete works of Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Joseph Wright, in order to ensure the film’s aesthetic correctly captured eighteenth century France.
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)
Hogwarts exteriors, like some interiors, were shot in the historic Lacock Abbey, dating from 1229. This abbey, located in Wiltshire, England, had already been used for the same purpose for the first films of the Harry Potter saga .
As with the first film, animal making required months of graphic, pattern, and animation testing to determine the appearance, behavior, movements, attitude, and personality of each creature. J.K. Rowling was inspired, for many of them, by legendary creatures from different cultures, such as the Chinese Zouwu, the Scottish Kelpie and the French Matagot.
An “homage” to the original rather than a straightforward remake, the movie explores themes of generational guilt in Germany during the Cold War. The film also focuses on themes of motherhood, evil, and the dynamics of matriarchies.
Unlike the original film, which used exaggerated colors, Guadagnino conceived Suspiria as visually “winterish” and bleak, absent of primary colors. The film incorporates stylized dance sequences choreographed by Damien Jalet, which form part of its representation of witchcraft. The musical score was composed by Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, who took inspiration from krautrock. (wiki)
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