Saturday, February 6, 2010

Books, iPAD and Piet Kroon's DaDa



In DaDA, everybody walks around carrying books on their heads. The more books stacked on your cranium, the smarter you are perceived to be. The story takes off when a little boy is born with a perfectly round head. To the horror of his parents no books will stay put, no matter what they try. Ultimately, they take their son to a hospital, where a learned scholar saws off the top of the kid's skull to study his brain. The doctor discovers the kid is really a genius. He realizes that it is not the books you carry around that matter, it is how you "process" them and create something new out of them. The final twist of the film, that somehow seems to be especially shocking to American audiences (maybe because they are suckered out of a happy ending), is that the father feeds the brilliant brain to the cat. Because with the top sawed off, he can pile an infinite amount of books on his son's head. He'd rather have a kid that looks intelligent, than an intelligent child.
Piet Kroon was storyboard artist for "The Iron Giant, the acclaimed animated feature based on a story by Ted Hughes. His previous feature film credits include that of storyboard artist on the animated feature Quest for Camelot and animator on the Universal Pictures' release An American Tail II: Fievel Goes West.
Kroon's animated short film, T.R.A.N.S.I.T., was short-listed for the 1997 Academy Awards and was nominated for both a British Academy Award and the Cartoon D'or. T.R.A.N.S.I.T was also named Best Animated Short Film of 1998 by the Los Angeles Times Film Critics Association. Another of his animated short films, Dada, was screened at the 1996 Brussels International Film Festival where it won the Best European Short Film Award.
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