Ethel and Ernest – First Trailer
From Skwigly Online Animation Magazine.
The first trailer for Ethel and Ernest, the hand drawn, feature length adaptation of the graphic novel by Raymond Briggs (The Snowman, Fungus the Bogeyman) has arrived. The film will be released in cinemas 28th October 2016.
The film has been faithfully adapted by Lupus Films who previously created the sequel to The Snowman, the TVC classic perhaps best associated with Briggs. Directed by Roger Mainwood the film spans the relationship of the titular Ethel and Ernest Briggs, parents of the acclaimed author/illustrator as they live out the 20th century and all of it’s social and political developments. The idea to translate this film was originally the late John Coates who passed the baton to Mainwood and Lupus Films. Mainwood has been documenting the progress of the film on a well maintained blog which charts the progress of the film (which you can see here).
Synopsis:
Forty years, one love, countless cups of tea…
Heart-warming, humorous and bittersweet, the film follows the lives of lady’s maid Ethel and milkman Ernest from their first chance meeting in 1928, through the birth of their son Raymond in 1934, to their deaths, within months of each other, in 1971.
From the socially stratified 1920s to the moon landing of 1969, the film depicts, through Ethel and Ernest’s eyes, the most defining moments of the 20th Century: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build up to World War II, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from post war austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s.
Echoing the lives and concerns of the London working classes through momentous social and political change, Ethel & Ernest is a heartfelt and affectionate tribute to an ordinary couple and an extraordinary generation.
From the production blog:
Ethel and Ernest was animated using a software called TVPaint. When the film was first being developed, way back in 2007 (!), we were going to animate it on paper. That was how all the other Raymond Briggs films had been done (The Snowman, When the Wind Blows, Father Christmas, The Bear, and The Snowman and Snowdog). However, technology has moved on and in the intervening years TVPaint has become more and more the industry standard for hand drawn animated films. Using a Wacom cintiq to draw on, the animators can reproduce a line quality that is virtually indistinguishable from a line drawn with a graphite pencil on paper.
Many of our crew were new to TVPaint, but tutorials were given by Lupus Films’ animation supervisor Isobel Stenhouse, and also Elodie Moog from TVPaint was always on hand to answer any questions.
