An exploration into the work and the mind of unique Bruce Bickford, a Seattle based animator whose obsessive brilliance with clay-mation will leave you gobsmacked.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2005
Monster Road 2004
A Crumb-like exploration into a unique individual named Bruce Bickford, a Seattle-based animator whose obsessive brilliance with clay-mation will leave you gobsmacked. An in-house collaborator of Frank Zappa in the 70s, Bickford ended up a recluse, caring for his Alzheimer’s-plagued father. He escaped his troubled home-life into a clay world of morphing heads, enchanted forests, elves and cannibalistic giants – a world where the little guy always overcomes the big guy’s oppression. Bickford has the innate ability to pre-visualise the movement of hundreds of tiny clay figures (many the size of a fingernail) and then painstakingly (over years) move them frame-by-frame until an animated tale has been created. Director Ingram lets Bickford tell his own story, and what an incredibly emotional story it is. We are also proud to present a special rare screening of Bickford’s masterpiece, the mind-blowing short Prometheus’s Garden (28 mins), a work that any person with an interest in animation should be forced to see.