The Spine (2009)

Director:

Chris Landreth

Writer:

Chris Landreth (written by)

Genre:

Animation | Short

Plot:

Uses a twisted, beautiful and highly original visual aesthetic to look at the ways individuals evolve, adapt and break.

Plot Keywords:

Leader | Therapy | Thyroid | Group Therapy | Childless Couple

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Gordon Pinsent	...	Dan Rutherford
Alberta Watson	...	Mary Rutherford
Patrice Goodman	...	Angela
Robert McCarrol	...	Francis

Directed by
Chris Landreth

Writing credits (in alphabetical order)
Chris Landreth		written by

Produced by
Steven Hoban	....	producer
Bob Munroe	....	executive producer
Marcy Page	....	producer
Mark Smith	....	co-producer
David Verrall	....	executive producer

Original Music by
Kirk Elliott

Film Editing by
Yonah Lewis
Jeremy Montgomery

Production Management
Alexandra Gunter	....	production manager

Sound Department
Pierre Yves Drapeau	....	sound designer (as Pierre-Yves Drapeau)

Visual Effects by
Paul Anderson	....	finaling artist
Paul Arion	....	layout artist
Paul Arion	....	lead shot finaling artist
Chris Bobinski	....	modeler / texture artist
Yiqun Chen	....	visual effects
Sean Dsouza	....	lighting and compositing
Paul Eberhard	....	modeler and texture artist
Biagio Figliuzzi	....	digital artist: lighting and compositing
Biagio Figliuzzi	....	model/texture artist
Mahsa Ghorbankarimi	....	visual effects artist
Tyson Groth	....	visual effects artist
Bo Mosley	....	environmental modeling and texturing supervisor
Mayur Patel	....	rendering technical director
Mahmoud Rahnama	....	character modeler/texturer
Mahmoud Rahnama	....	lead visual effects artist
Brian A. Smeets	....	lead technical director
Dylan Trotter	....	rendering technical director
Louis Vottero	....	lead character rigger
Adrian Williams	....	modeler / texture artist
Israel Yang	....	look development
Chris Zammit	....	lead surfacing artist

Animation Department
Dianna Basso	....	animator
Ken Collins	....	animator
Keith Cooper	....	modeler
Sean Craig	....	animation director
Morgan DeLange	....	animator
Biagio Figliuzzi	....	animator: additional animation
Andrew Gregoire	....	animator
Ryan Harvey	....	animator
Christina Kelbert	....	animator
Rundeep Khaira	....	animator
Angelo Libutti	....	animator: additional animation
Gabe Munn Magill	....	background artist
John Mariella	....	technical director
Augusto Quijano	....	animator
Derek Sunderland	....	animator
Lucas Wright	....	animator

Other crew
Heli Kennedy	....	production assistant
Calvin Thomas	....	intern (as Calvin Tamás)

Production Companies

• Copperheart Animation (in association with)
• C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures (in association with)
• National Film Board of Canada (NFB)

Distributors

• Image Entertainment (2010) (USA) (DVD) (Blu-ray)
• Mongrel Media (2009) (Canada) (DVD) (Blu-ray)
• National Film Board of Canada (NFB) (2009) (worldwide) (all media)

Also Known As:

Runtime:

Canada:11 min

Country:

Canada

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Company:

Copperheart Animation

on the edge

It takes breathing, it takes reflection, to assume and finally understand that a film as this is a part of you. You see, short films that are as effective and powerful as this one are necessarily hard punches in the stomach. And indeed this is a powerful film. So in this case, it took me 10 days, during which i watched very few movies, to see which parts of me were shaken by the film. And indeed, i had 10 uneasy challenging days.

I didn't know the filmmaker, this is my first experience with his work. I'll want to see what he did before. This film does something that i hadn't seen done this way before. Now that i saw it, it seems incomprehensible how it hadn't been tried before. This is a kind of Philip Dick meets Gondry meets Jonze, both of which share the fact of having worked with Kaufman. Animation, in the sensitive way Landreth works, seems an incredibly interesting medium to work with these themes, basically voyages between vessels of inconscience. A constant instability that won't allow us to know where we stand, which level of consciousness are we visiting. The whole film is a no man land, an uncharted territory to obscure parts of self.

Every emotion is perfectly controlled, the construction is tight and perfectly balanced, and played around poles of madness, depression, love, frustration. Life.

The visual accomplishment is huge. The camera is grounded on our real world, but the images, though springing from this same world, were visualized elsewhere, in the tiny space between being awaken, and deeply sleeping. I'll want to see this film again.

My opinion: 4/5

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