MirrorWorld

The new MouseMasters' short animation movie was screened on the 10th of June in the auditorium of the French Cultural Center, Delhi, India.

For their third movie, the MouseMasters' team had 13 members working hard during nine month to achieve a nine minutes movie taking place in four different environnements.

The teenagers from 11 to 14 years old designed everything by themselves, characters, castle, orrery, landscapes and an impressive steam train to tell the story of three magical dice with a power revealed only in the last shot of the movie.

See pictures and read comments about the movie on the École Française de Delhi's website.

The team also worked on the marketing, designing a poster, creating a blog, and directing a Making Of with interviews of the creative team. This attempt to make CG animation movie with teenagers is probably not the only attempt in the world but it was impossible to find an equivalent anywhere so far.

A DVD containing the three short movies (Le Verre de Vin, La Boucle and 3Dés) will be release at the end of 2005 so if you want to get it, just contact us.

3Dés, produced by EFD Studio and MirrorWorld Studio. ©2005 MouseMasters Production.

Here it is the sixth volume of the incredibly popular serie Harry Potter. As millions of people, I got the book as soon as possible and the next day, I finished reading it. Not that it’s my favorite book ever, but I really enjoyed book 1 to 4. Yes, you read me, 1 to 4.

I’m not gonna come back on the fifth installment now, it’s two years old, let’s just say that I felt that Rowling didn’t manage to turn Harry in a teenager, I’m working with teenagers and I know them well, Harry was still just a kid even if he’s used to fight ultra devil wizards and play Quidditch extremely well, the teenager mentality was just not there at all. Anyway, the fifth book was long, quite boring, mostly because of the extremely good climax at the end of Goblet, the confrontation with Voldemort was the best part of the whole serie so far, so I guess I expected more from the following book. And I’m not even speaking of the way Sirius Black is dying, so disappointing.

Let’s go back to Half-Blood… So now Harry is 16 years old, he’s as tall as an adult, he probably started to shave except if he knows a spell for that… “Gilletto” probably. And if he’s not shaving, he’s got this little moustache so typical of teenagers that don’t realize they are growing up. Once more, the whole Dursley, Hogwart express, beginning of the schoolyear, Quidditch, Hogsmead things are there. Are we getting bored here? Doesn’t matter, the war is near, Voldemort ready to strike and for sure, surprises are on the way. Are they?

We are turning the pages, one chapter after the other, the book is already half read and, yes the pensieve sequences are nice. The little Malfoy’s plot intriguing but where is the excitement? Hagrid? Little part only and nothing new from him. Hermione? Just the same, we don’t even have a clue of how good looking woman she’s probably becoming (luckily the movies are here.) Snape which is one of the character I enjoy the most (feeling deepened by the performance of Alan Rickman, he’s just superb) is now the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, GOOD, we were waiting for that for so long. But nothing is happening here. Does Rowling still love her characters?

OK, now the book is almost finished, we are heading for the climax, good, let’s see what Voldemort is up to now. Dumbledore and Harry are going together to retrieve a part of Voldemort’s soul, big expectations, but how dumb, nothing thrilling, they just go there, Dumbledore got weak and they are coming back (and for god sake, why are they not apparating directly in the cave?) Then here it is at last, the last scene.

Just disillusions, just weak and poor, lack of imagination (where is the time travel excellent plot of Azkaban? Where is the surprising bad turn good plot of Sirius Black? Where is the nicely developed relationship between Lupin, Black and Pettigrew?) All gone with the wind. Harry is petrified, Dumbledore is lying at the mercy of Malfoy, and it’s just getting worst, Snape arrive and just kill him like that. After all this time where we were expecting him to have a more complex personality, everything but not being a stupid servant of You-Know-Who. In one sentence, she killed both Dumbledore and Snape. OK Dumbledore is the all good guy, so he’s playing is part perfectly, but Snape, come on, Snape was such an ambivalent character so far, I was excepting more complexity than that (or she’s leaving that for the last book, but she’s leaving so much for the last book…) Poor Snape, he was just acting like Lucius Malfoy should have act. Of course, he never liked Harry but that was so enjoyable the way he was treating him and he’s the head of Slytherin after all. The climax of Half-Blood is just an anti-climax, lack of style, as if she was in a hurry to conclude the book or as if she doesn’t know how to deal with her own myth anymore.

So Mme Rowling, please, for the last book, surprise me, let me change my point of view, let me discover how cleverly you made me think like I think right now to twist everything upside down like you did in Azkaban, let me hope that the last book will be your masterpiece, that you lead me to false feelings and false conclusions. I hope a big surprise, not this dumb plot that is not fulfilling any expectation. And tell me, how do you think they’ll manage to do a movie with such a script? I wonder…