kartooner

I received my copy of the beau­ti­ful Rust­boy book in the mail today. Accord­ing to the pack­age it was shipped from Bel­gium, which for the moment is bring­ing forth an odd feel­ing of “rich and creamy choco­late” nos­tal­gia. Any­ways, back to the intended sub­ject; Rustboy.

For those few who don’t know, Rust­boy is a project (a CGI ani­mated one at that) cre­ated, pro­duced, ani­mated and devel­oped by one man, the tal­ented Brian Tay­lor. Tay­lor decided to start this project a cou­ple of years ago to see what kind of film-quality he could cre­ate using noth­ing more than his Mac, a shoe­string bud­get and a whop­ping amount of imag­i­na­tion. The result was the cap­ti­vat­ing story of Rust­boy, a slightly rusted robot boy who is ini­tially intrigued with the world around him and even­tu­ally becomes bored and depressed through no fault of his own.

To say the visu­als are excel­lent is not say­ing enough because this so-called “one man” project screams atten­tion because of the vision and imag­i­na­tion that Brian Tay­lor has put into his cre­ation. As it stands the qual­ity of the film looks noth­ing short of Pixar-esque but with one excep­tion. Accord­ing to Brian he wants the film to retain a stop-motion ani­mated look sim­i­lar to the style found in movies like Night­mare Before Christmas.

In fact, Tay­lor explains on his web­site and in the book that one of his great influ­ences is Tim Bur­ton (of Edward Scis­sorhands and Beetle­juice fame). He also men­tions inspi­ra­tion from early Dis­ney films (Pinoc­chio, Cin­derella, Snow White) to older hor­ror movie clas­sics like Franken­stein, The Wolf­man and Drac­ula. It’s also worth men­tion­ing that this film shares many ideas with these inspi­ra­tions and in that respect makes it even more geniune.

Do your­self a favor and sim­ply visit Rustboy.com for more infor­ma­tion about the 25-minute film cur­rently in pro­duc­tion and write Brian an email if you feel obliged, he’ll appre­ci­ate it.