Loving Vincent first fully painted animated film

Loving Vincent is the upcoming first fully painted biographical animated film. It tells the story of painter Vincent van Gogh. “Loving Vincent” opens in the U.S. next month in New York and Los Angeles, and later in the year in various other cities.

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life in France, where he died.

125 painters, 62,450 paintings and the better part of a decade for writer-directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman to get it done, but “Loving Vincent” is the first feature-length animated film to be made entirely of oil paintings on canvas. More than 100 of Van Gogh’s paintings were re-visualize for “Loving Vincent,” which was the Audience Prize winner at June’s Annecy animation film festival.

The development was funded by the Polish Film Institute, and re-training of professional oil painters to become painting-animators on the film was partially funded through a Kickstarter campaign. Each of the film's 65,000 frames is an oil painting on canvas, using the same technique as Van Gogh, created by a team of 115 painters. “Loving Vincent” takes the phrase “every frame a painting” to very literal new levels. Most of the scenes are written and structured in order to accommodate as many of these reference points as possible — even Lars von Trier would chafe at such a ridiculous obstruction.

This Movie rely on the relationship between reality and illusion, but “Loving Vincent” antagonizes those forces against one another. The movie isn’t just presented in the style of van Gogh’s paintings; on the contrary, it fulfills Albinus’ dream by seamlessly stitching 94 of the paintings into the action.