NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL | GOING WEST | 2010
The Pages of a Book Really Do Rise Up / NEW ZEALAND BOOK COUNCIL "GOING WEST"
Just by cutting paper, a forest rises and a river starts to flow. No CGI, no compositing — a "book that truly moves," made entirely by hand over eight months.
The problem
The New Zealand Book Council is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting reading. This film was made to convey the sheer joy of reading itself, based on a passage from Maurice Gee's 1992 novel Going West.
The insight
Reading a book is an experience where, the moment you turn a page, a whole scene rises up inside your head. So why not take what's happening inside the mind and make it actually happen, physically, on the paper itself? Rather than explaining this in words, it comes across far better if the page itself moves like a living thing.
The idea
Andersen M Studio created a stop-motion paper-cutout animation in which trees, houses and rivers burst out in three dimensions from the printed pages of the novel. As a narrator reads the original text aloud, paper forests and railway tracks assemble themselves one after another. Using nothing but a scalpel and paper, every movement was done entirely by hand, with no reliance on CGI.
What happened
After being posted on YouTube, it racked up over 700,000 views, landing in the top 10 of global viral video charts and ranking 8th on Unruly's chart. It won Gold at Cannes Lions in 2010, took Gold in two categories at the AXIS Awards, and in later years even won the Grand Prix at a paper animation film festival held at the Museum of Art and Design in New York.
Afterthought
This is an ad to sell books, yet it barely shows any product or logo. It simply proves, using paper itself, that "this is the kind of world waiting for you when you open a book." Is there anyone who could watch this and not want to go to a bookstore?
Awards
- Cannes Lions Gold 2010
