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After several years in gestation, Philippe Leclerc’s animated film “La Reine Soleil” (The Sun Queen) is to be released in France on the 4th April.

The pre-production work was done by Neil Ross, whose blog link (gibbon) appears on the sidebar on the left.

Here are three of Neil’s early pre-production paintings:

The process of actually making an animated film often means that some compromises of the original vision will occur along the way.

Leclerc and his production team have tried to stay as close as they could to Neil’s original guides while stripping out quite a lot of the 2 dimensional decorative elements that graced the originals.

They have conserved the strong tonal contrasts that convey the blinding light of Egypt.

Looking at the video clips on the new Reine Soleil website, you will notice that the characters in the animation have no, or at least very few ink outlines, as there would normally be with traditional animation.
The Hungarian co-production partner company, GreyKid, used some animation software that used to be known as Moho, but is now known as e-Frontier’s Anime Studio.

Anime Studio works more like 3D animation software than any other 2D animation package.
To quote from their site:

# Rigging Your Characters Using Bones. Anime Studio’s unique bone rigging allows you to create a skeleton that can be manipulated to animate characters, simple drawings, or objects that will be parts of your animation, so the animation is easier than ever before. Even beginners new to animation will find this powerful feature to be a breakthrough.

* Bones rigging helps to build animations by creating joints or flex points in your artwork. Add bones simply by point-and-click to your character, drawing or object. Then move the bones like puppet to manipulate your image into new positions without having to redraw!
* Add keyframes to your timeline and adjust your bone movements, then move down the timeline and repeat the process. Creating animation is that easy.
* Bones are interdependent just like a skeleton. When you adjust one bone, all other bones connected will be moved in response to this movement.
* Anime Studio’s bone rigging also uses spring-like simulation to calculate dynamic bone movement, making a wide range of movements seem real, such as jumping, waving flabby body parts, and bouncing hair.

Now a cynical animator might think that these built in motion presets would lead to a lot of similar, slightly over bouncy moves, but the team at GreyKid have wrung as much flexibility out of the software as they can.
Personally I get the feeling that while the software makes, or forces, all the characters to stay exactly on model, their facial expressions are lacking something and they end up being a little too inflexible, as if they had all had botox injections.

Anyway here are some links to keep you busy!
First Catsuka Anime and BD News (In French)
Neil Ross’s website and blogs (1) gibbon and (2) Limbolo.
The Reine Soleil website.
Greykid’s Reine Soleil website.
e-Frontier’s website and the Anime Studio Pro website.
Finally, there’s a trailer here:- Large version, and Small version.