The 2017 film Loving Vincent by DK and Hugh Welchman was the first ever hand-painted feature film. Animated in 12 frames per second, each frame being its own individual painting, the film paid homage to the one of a kind art style and artistic techniques of Vincent Van Gogh.
A poster for Loving Vincent, via Breakthru Films.
This is what we’ve all heard about this movie: it required a stunning 400 artists, 65000 paintings, 7 years of work.
But was all that hard work necessary?
Soon the film will no longer be alone in the “hand-painted” category. In the Fall of 2023, the Welchmans are returning with an adaptation of the Nobel-Price winning Polish classic, The Peasants by W??adys??aw Reymont.
The book was written in a very significant time for Poland: period of partitions. From the late 1700’s to 1918 the country didn’t exist on the maps. However, Polish people still lived in the areas of their old lands. This event was word-shattering only for magnets. For simple peasants, life did not change much. Those people were never included in the political life of Poland. The Eastern-European farm and serf economy relied only on their farming; they couldn’t vote, didn’t have access to any education or healthcare. What’s most important, they were never the owners of the lands they worked on. That changed in the mid 1800’s, when because of the peasants’ rebellion, they were enfranchised. From then on, the most important thing for all of them was who owned, how many and what lands.