Marlies van der Wel
ONE WEEK ABOUT Animation by Cinetoko
Marlies van der Wel is an animator and illustrator, working from her own studio in Amsterdam. She started in 2007 and after having worked on both commercial as well as personal projects, she is now fully dedicated to her own short animations, which have been presented at national and international film festivals around the world.
Marlies’ illustrations are the result of a painstaking collage process in which she weaves drawings, textures and random objects together. That’s just half the deal, as her creations are brought to life in a technique that Marlies calls ‘digital cut-out animation’ but most people simply call magic.
The talented Marlies van der Wel first caught our eye with a crowd-funding project for the production of her first short animation, ‘Zeezucht’. She was raising money to finish this beautiful animation about a little boy who wants to live in the sea. It eventually became an animated film of 12 minutes.
With her unique style she creates a dreamlike world of hand-drawn and digitally painted images. For ‘Zeezucht’ she went into the mudflats to collect and photograph washed-up objects to process them in the design.
The film had its international premiere at the Berlinale 2016 and has since won several awards, including at the prestigious TIFF Kids Festival, where she received the award for Best Animated Short.
Zeezucht – www.zeezucht.com
Cinetoko Artist Talk #30 – www.motoko.nl/cinetoko/fromform/