animation at the Barbican

Rob and I had been intending to get to the Watch Me Move animation exhibition at the Barbican, for some time and as the new Ghibli film Arrietty was also showing (in the original Japanese, subtitled, version), decided to do the both last night.
Mad dash from work to get across London just in time for the "evening" screening - grrr, why do cinemas always assume that just because its an animated film, only families with young kids would be attending!  As it happened, the audience was mostly adults!

Arrietty was a Ghibli film, therefore a must see, however after the slight disappointment of Ponyo and their decision to make such a well known story this time, I wasn't sure what to expect......... wowwww, Studio Ghibli back on form!
The film was stunningly beautiful, relocated in modern day Japan, with the usual fantastic colourful painted backgrounds.  I'm pretty certain they must have visited morbidfrog  's bedroom to get inspiration for the Borrower's house! :-)  A lovely, touching (although I usually hate the use of that word to describe films) storyline and well paced.
Highly recommended.

After this finished we dashed upstairs to the gallery for the late night opening of Watch Me Move, thinking 2 hours would be adequate time to explore the exhibition.  How wrong we were!
Again, didn't really know what to expect and the advertisement wrongly gives the impression that this is an exhibition of popular culture "children's" animation, when instead its an exploration of the history of animation and early film with a range of familiar and not so familiar animations showing all around the space, some very rare pieces included. A total headf*** of an experience - fantastically curated and set out.  Starting off by wandering through a labyrinthine array of small dark rooms with curtained entranceways with all manner of flickering screens showing the weird and wonderful of early animation.
Moving on to the more familiar areas of Character and Superheros in animation - Rob was quite mesmerised to see Futurama's Leela on a massive screen! :-)
Then onto the "Fable" section, the largest area featuring lots of rooms showing full length animated films, where you sat in padded chairs with built in speakers.
Finally there were two smaller areas upstairs covering the more "arty" elements on animation and the use of digital art.  Finale being the original Tron, shown in a big reflective room - quite impressive!

The amount to see was overwhelming, there was no way you could sit and watch everything there, you could spend the whole day and not even scratch the surface, so instead we had 2 hours of confusing snippets as we dashed from one area to another, hoping to cover the whole exhibition before it closed.

Definately recommended for anyone into the history and/or the creative side of animation.  Just make sure you allow lots of time for it!!

and I came home with a Totoro picturebook! :-)