The European Film Award for Best Animated Feature Film 2012 went to the Czech-German film Alois Nebel. Interestingly, the film was made using the rotoscoping technique. Rotoscope animation is the process of creating animated sequences by tracing over live-action footage frame by frame. Although it can be time-consuming, rotoscoping allows animators to create lifelike characters that move just like people in the real world.
But what is the plot of the film and how does it relate to railways?
Alois Nebel, an ordinary stationmaster in a remote place in the Jeseníky Mountains (Czech Republic), is a quiet man haunted by memories of his childhood, of the time when the Germans left the Sudetenland after the Second World War. As a child, he witnessed something that keeps coming back to him. The violence of an old villager against a young German woman, Dorothe. But we are in the period just after the Velvet Revolution (the fall of the communist regime in the Czech Republic in 1989), the locals are still dealing with Russian officers from the Soviet garrison, and "The Mute", a young man bent on revenge, roams the countryside. The atmosphere of the godforsaken region around the railway station, with its perpetual rain and fog, becomes increasingly tense...
Behind-the-scenes facts
- the film has a budget of 2.5 million euros
- rotoscoping the film was a great challenge - 29 specialists who worked with the footage spent 2 years on the animation, and it took about 15 hours to redraw a single turn of the head, for example
-
in addition to the Czech and Slovak Republics and many festivals around the world, Alois Nebel has also been distributed in Russia, Australia, New Zealand, France, etc.
- all in all, the film took 5 years to make
And there are some more pictures and two trailers with English subtitles and the other in German:
