This is what I posted a month ago. I knew as soon as I learned about it the film would be very special. I underestimated it. Not because of the film by itself, but because of the addition of what it took to make the film and how it was made.
The movie is Loving Vincent, a 2017 biographical drama about the last letter Vincent van Gogh wrote being found a year after he died. Joseph Roulin, the postman who delivered the letters sent to and from Vincent and his brother Theo, asks his son Armand to deliver it to Theo. Joseph feels its only right that this last letter find its way there and doesn’t abide the difference between Vincent’s statements that he was feeling quite well and committing suicide just six weeks later.
Armand agrees, but when he tries to deliver the letter, he learns that Theo died six months after Vincent. His efforts to find the next most appropriate person to receive the letter puts Armand on a journey of learning about Vincent’s last days. Each person he talks to gives him a different point of view, some contradictory: Vincent was trouble the moment he appeared, Vincent was misunderstood. When he finally gets to talk with Dr. Gachet, the physician who treated Vincent in his last weeks, was an amateur painter himself and was present when Vincent died, Armand still doesn’t have a final answer, but decides Theo’s widow should receive the letter. Gachet delivers it and brings back a copy of one of Vincent’s earliest letters to Theo, signed, as typical, “Your loving Vincent.”
There are several films about Vincent van Gogh. Most were made in 1990 or later, including a TV movie called Van Gogh: Painted With Words, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. The earliest one seems to be Lust for Life with Kirk Douglas back in 1956. Vincent & Theo explores the relationship between the two brothers and how Theo struggled to show the world how talented his brother was. There’s also the very emotional episode of Doctor Who called “Vincent and the Doctor”, where The Doctor gives Vincent a chance to see the success that came only after his death.
I haven’t seen any of the dozen or so movies about van Gogh. I really liked “Vincent and the Doctor”. I don’t know if there’s been any other animated movies about him, but I do know that Loving Vincent is a unique animated movie that may never be duplicated ever again.
Why?
Because it was animated using hand-painted oil paintings.
66,960 oil paintings, for a filming rate of 12 frames a second, with each painting filmed twice to become the standard 24 frames a second movies are shown at.
When heard that’s how the movie was made, I thought, “They can’t use a traditional animation method of having a background painting and then overlaying a clear animation cell with the characters or whatnot.” I thought they had to paint each frame of the movie on a separate canvas and they ended up with 66,960 separate canvases when they got done. Their method was actually closer to traditional animation. Once a painting was filmed, the animators scraped away the paint at the points where it needed to change for the next frame and worked on those spots.
Traditional animation involves drawing outlines and filling the interior with color. Oil paintings usually aren’t done that way. How in the world did they learn out how to animate with an oil painting?
One part involved using computers to take the over 90 paintings selected from van Gogh’s works and figure out how to create camera movements and color changes. For example, a painting created in winter needing to be changed to summer, or from day to night.
Another part involved teaching painters to duplicate van Gogh’s style, both for his oil paintings like the famous “The Starry Night” and for black and white sketches, which were used for flashback sequences but were done as paintings, too.
Another part went back to another standard animation process of painting the keyframes, which are the frames in the movie that define a beginning and ending point of a sequence and the animators do all the adjustments in between.
Another part included building physical sets and making props that matched the selected paintings so actors could be filmed in front of a green screen, playing the parts that would later be animated on canvas.
All of that did come together in specially-constructed animation workstations that gave the painters a monitor to watch the live-action footage on as they translated that into oil paintings, then activating the camera that photographed their work before scraping away the paint and making updates. It’s a type of rotoscoping that works.
Five years of work, using the world’s slowest method of animation.
Worth it.
They got there by first creating a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds to train the animators. They also got funding from the Polish Film Institute. They go to a company to work with them on producing the film and are told, “We’re not an animation company”, but after seeing the concept trailer, it became “We’re now an animation company. We’re in.” And they got official help with selecting the paintings and with accuracy from the Van Gogh Museum.
When you buy this film, you want the 2-Disc Collector’s Edition. It is the special features on the Blu-ray disc and the documentary on the second disc called “The Impossible Dream” that build on a movie that’s special in its own right. The DVD version just doesn’t have enough to help you appreciate what it took to create Loving Vincent and for some reason it doesn’t have closed captioning. The Blu-ray does.
Until I watched the special features and the documentary, the little I remembered about Vincent van Gogh came mostly from the Doctor Who episode and the Don McLean song “Vincent”. I didn’t know that Vincent and Theo exchanged hundreds of letters, nor that Theo kept all of the ones he got from Vincent while Vincent kept very few. I didn’t know, like many of the artists who worked on this project, that Theo supported his brother both emotionally and financially, paying for everything so Vincent could just concentrate on painting, going in eight short years from a nobody to the person people now respect.
To paraphrase the song,
We are listening
We have learned how
The world is listening now.
“Loving Vincent” - official trailer
Official website
The making of Loving Vincent
BBC segment about the movie
