Moho Forum

This movie, famously produced using Anime Studio, hasn't been released for distribution in the US.

A friend "helped" me see it, however.

Guys, I'm so excited about this movie. If you live in this godforsaken country, find some "help" to see it for yourself.

In several ways, it puts Disney to shame. Now, the bad news is: the bitmapped special effects often look like last year's video game, and don't mesh with the vector imagery.

The good news is: almost everything else (visually speaking, you understand: since I don't speak French I missed the storyline, but it was about good versus evil magic in ancient Egypt... ho hum, big deal).

Layout, production design, set design, color, beautiful, beautiful color. Beautiful production design. The animation is generally excellent, plenty of action, perfectly fluent and accomplished. And did I mention the color?

But beyond all that, way beyond all that, the character design.

Guys, these are the most beautiful characters I have ever seen. I'm sure of it.

They have a unique take on character design, by the way, with a powerful use of flat colors that entirely skips the external ink lines. This seems to be an homage to the Egyptian theme. They use lovely, angular but sensitive and accurate inklines for the facial features. It's a brilliant blend of stylization and realism. The faces don't just stand up to closeups, they beg for closeups as much as any great movie star.

Did I mention how incredibly beautiful it is?

You renewed my interest, so I googled up some more clips. Wow, I hadn't seen much of this before. I took your advice, and I'm looking forward to watching it (at least until it is released here with subtitles or dubbing, so I can buy it ).

It's Greykid Studios, right?

They are well known for their excellent AS work.

Actually only a part of it was done by Greykid.

The best part obviously.

knunk wrote:Actually only a part of it was done by Greykid.

The best part obviously.

wasn't all the movie?

You'll have to ask the main man himself but. I'm pretty sure they only worked on a part of it. Some of the other stuff in the film isn't too good. As human says, art direction is good though.

They did tend to use GKs work in all the trailers and publicity material though.

Yes, I believe only some parts of the film used Anime Studio.

If you want to own an actual physical copy, you can buy it from the French version of Amazon.com (that's what I did):

http://www.amazon.fr/

I bought a used one, nice and cheap:

http://www.amazon.fr/reine-soleil-Phili ... 960&sr=8-1

Be aware that it's got region code, so you may need to be creative in how you get it to play back.

The amazon page says "Langue : Anglais" that's wrong, it's all in french.

And it's a shame that some pictures never will have the chance for a bigger audience, and that's not only "La Reine Soleil".

http://www.pixelcreation.fr/3d-video/an ... ne-soleil/

Here's an excerpt from the Bablefish translation:

"Pascal Ropars, director of animation: The style of animation is here a realistic style, which gives to the characters a rather theatrical and purified aspect 2D. We chose an effect of with-dish, very graphic, which adapted well to the environment of ancient Egypt. One chooses initially the graphics which corresponds best to the history. One develops a first approach, often enough innovating, and these first drawings are used to seek the financing of the project...

... The scenes with the chief hittite Zannanza and the horses posed a certain number of difficulties, because we wanted to give them a beautiful pace. These scenes were worked over again with a software 2D which is called Moho.

One can make thus certain animations more fluid. We also used Moho on the closes-up of the face of the Pharaon. It was a bias of Philippe Leclerc, rather risky at the beginning, but which went formidably well. This software has also the advantage of controlling the proportions of a character throughout a plan, while making it faithful to the model.

%% For the colouring of the features of contour of the characters, we used a technique which already has existed for a few years, and which is called “Coil traces”. The principle of the layout of color, it is to make disappear the traditional black feature, which produced a rather hard aspect.%% The coloured feature, it, disappear in the color from the characters from film. For example, if you observe Akhesa well, you will realize that this treatment emphasizes its silhouette. The original feature of the drawing that one scanne on the sheet of paper can be treated multiple ways. One can make it more or less thick, and use various nuances of colors to obtain various effects. In the ideal, one tries to work only with the shade and the light, and one as much as possible eliminates the feature from contour, thanks to this colour application."

Would anyone care to clarify the paragraph which I enclosed in %%? re: "coil traces" ? The original article in French is found at the URL above.

If I'm interupting the general idea of what it is saying correctly, instead of using black lines to draw the outline of the characters, they used a variant of the characters color to outline them.

For example, if the character is colored in a flesh tone color, then the outline would be in a color a bit darker than the flesh tone instead of black lines.

I'm not sure 'coil traces' is exact translation; because I did not find anything on google about 'coil traces'.

Colour tracing. See old Disney animation before "101 Dalamtians".

Thanks ernesttx and slowtiger.

You are obviously correct, given the context of their remarks.

I was confused by the exotic result of the mistranslation--I thought there was something new to learn.

I should mention that the color-coordination between flesh color and inking was SO close that the features often nearly dropped out in many scenes.

It might have looked fine on the silver screen, but as you know, video has a smaller color gamut, and of course, 720 pixels is not the same as 35mm film.

Just something practical to keep in mind for production designers. Color management must be an endless pain in these artistic assets.

One of the partners in the movie was Disney France, as shown by the logos at:

http://www.princessofthesun.com/

Let's hope Disney redubs in it various languages (and gives it a better filmscore, too) so everyone can see this.

Actually the plot is about a young princess (Akhesa) fighting to get her rightfull place as the queen of egypt after the high priest of the evil god Amon Ra plotted and killed her familly to cease the throne, which obviouslly failed. She was help by a young prince who later became her husban and changed his name to Tutankhamun.

The movie is after a novel from Christian Jacq.

Was well done, and I would like to know how much of AS was part of that project!

GC

Good News.
You should have a look at any DVD store.

In Germany it will be published at November 27th .
"Die Prinzessin am Nil" Euro 9,99

Amazon says, there will be also the english version on it.
(The french amazon did say it also, but it wasn't)
Possibly an automatic reflex by the guys at the keyboard: "...type 'english', sounds good!"
(Don't worry, I'll inform you IF there is an english dub on it.)

Maybe "The Princess from Nile", free translated from the german title, will also be published now in GB?
"Princess of the Sun" wasn't on the british amazon site.

I've got the rental version here, the release was earlier

As I said...

Farbklecks wrote: Amazon says, there will be also the english version on it.
(The french amazon did say it also, but it wasn't)
Possibly an automatic reflex by the guys at the keyboard: "...type 'english', sounds good!"

The second language is french!
Sorry folks, that's all.