U5 Animation History

The Quay Brothers or Brothers Quay are identical twins and they are influential stop-motion animators. Their work seems to be quite unique and unusual and I can not recall seeing anything similar to their work before.

After graduating in 1969 from the Philadelphia College of Art, where they studied illustration and graphics, they won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London.I think they started to make animations because they did well in their studies at the Philadelphia College of Art and their work there was recognised which got them a scholarship, so they decided to try and make a living out of what they did well and liked doing.

I would say that the majority of their animations are rather dark, moody and dull in both colours and overall atmosphere. They often feature puppets made of different objects and are often partially disassembled, which make their animations quite creepy and horror like. With very few exceptions, their films have no meaningful spoken dialogue—most have no spoken content at all. So they are very reliant on the music scores of the animations of which most are quite gloomy and kind of unsettling.

The Quays are renowned for their crafts manlike methods and their unusual sources of inspiration. Their animations are heavily on twentieth-century European visual and literary culture. A lot of their animations seem to have a sort of old photograph theme to them with lots of washed out colours and basically no bright colours at all. They mostly have a feel of death and decay surrounding them and are often bizarre and artificial like.

Overall I am not very keen on their work I find it too strange and disjointed like it has just been thrown together and tossed in a blender. I find there to be to many dull colours. But that is just my opinion as it is not my type of style and I am sure there are people out there who like and enjoy their work and in the end they have made a living out of it and have been successful at that. So good for them.

Here is an example of one of their animations:

Dada used several art techniques in their work these included:

Collage- a piece of art made by sticking various different materials such as photographs and pieces of paper or fabric on to a backing.
Photomontage- The Dadaists – the “monteurs” (mechanics) – used scissors and glue rather than paintbrushes and paints. It is a variation collage techniques, photomontage used actual or reproductions of real photographs printed in the press.
Assemblage- Three-dimensional variations of the collage – the assembly of everyday objects. Objects were nailed, screwed or fastened together in different fashions.
Readymades- A mass-produced article selected by an artist and displayed as a work of art.
Typography- The art or procedure of arranging type or processing data and printing from it.
Solarisation- is a phenomenon in photography in which the image recorded on a negative or on a photographic print is reversed or partially reversed in tone. Dark areas appear light or light areas appear dark.