Scarred - Clyde Henry Productions
Madame Tutli-Putli, crafted by Clyde Henry Productions in association with the NFB, is a short animated film I’ve been anticipating for quite some time. It’s the first instance I’ve come across of someone deliberately using the “uncanny valley” of realistic animation for the purposes of establishing an unsettling mood. What sold me was this statement, made by co-director Maciek Szczerbowski in one of the numerous interviews available on the site.
“When the train starts going very fast, you’re quite happy because you’re going to get there on time if not earlier. There’s nothing scary about a train going fast. What’s paradoxically very scary is the train actually being stopped in the middle of the night. Nowhere. And you look out the window and you just see 100 km of nothing until the horizon, and the other way as well. And that’s the kind of thing we discovered was actually the real fear of being on the night train.”
What other macabre images inspire Clyde Henry Productions?
Attached is a photo that we came across recently while doing research on an upcoming project, The White Circus, a fantastical war story we are in the process of writing. The picture shows a World War I battlefield, with earth, wire, clothing, and a German corpse blending into a macabre, yet oddly beautiful pallete of grays; a singular landscape broken only by bare white teeth.