The Village (animated short film)

The Village, a Vila or a Village is an Oscar-nominated short film by Mark Baker released in 1993      in the United Kingdom. The short film was animated with traditional hand drawn animation. The film was directed and written by Baker, produced by Pam Dennis and other actors and crew members, the animation tells the story of an isolated circular village located in the middle of a large forest in Northern Britain. The Church rules over the village as a figure of authority. The people in the village are devout Christians following the church and obeying the village priest, the villagers who are presented as hypocritical "Sinners" most of the time spy on each other by looking out their windows and peeping into one another's houses. The village is filled with distrust which causes many conflicts and tension between everyone. The protagonist of the film is a large bald man wearing glasses, a light grey long sleeved shirt and dark grey pants who is a gardener, in one of the first scenes the man is seen digging soil planting apple trees just outside the village. The rest of the village is seen after with the main focus being about the villagers staring at each other.

The Village was initially made for the British television channel Channel 4, Pizazz Pictures which was the studio where the crew worked in managed the production with Baker serving as director, Pizazz Pictures also distributed the animation. The Village aired on Channel 4 TV station as a "Pizazz Pictures production".

Today The Village is available on YouTube and Baker's website.

Plot
The Village starts with a scene of little ants carrying small food crumbs and objects into an ant colony hole, one ant picks up a large rock, carries it in the line of ants and fails to get it into the hole. Other Ants grab the rock and help put it somewhere else. The gardener is soon introduced, he is seen digging with a shovel in a designated area for planting apple trees, the rest of the Village is then introduced. The villagers are seen with their heads popping out of the small square windows of their townhouses while staring at each other and turning their heads. A large lady comes out of a house and steals apples from a tree beside the church while everyone watches, the village priest comes out of a house and drinks a bottle sacramental wine inside the church, it is heavily suggested that he is an alcoholic, after that he goes to a building where a prisoner is held in the basement behind a small window with bars, the priest spits on him and then leaves. The prisoner then gets up and reveals that he was lying down on top of a hole which he was digging with a spoon to escape. A greedy old man listens as the prisoner is digging and then goes back into his bedroom where he slides a large chest from under his bed that is filled with gold coins, he throws the coins up and down while smiling. Meanwhile, a large man wearing a tank top listens while waiting for his wife to bring food at a table. The man spits out the food that his wife brought, his wife grabs a basket and heads out to get some other food, she heads out of the village near the garden where the gardener is planting trees. They see each other and intimately smile at each other, an old lady is watching which makes the wife afraid and prompts her to run back to her house, the old lady laughs sadistically while the gardener sticks his tongue out at the lady, the lady then gets mad and takes a trash can and dumps all the garbage out of her window, the ants come and pick up the food scraps for themselves.

After a while the gardener resumes planting trees, he sings while doing it but is interrupted by the rest of the villagers who are congregational singing along with the priest and the organ. As the priest is singing he pours some wine into a goblet then ducks down to drink the rest of the bottle. The villagers finish praying and all come out of the church and head back in their houses. The greedy old man is seen again playing with his gold coins while the large man in the tank top watches, his wife again heads out to collect some food while the old lady spies on her again. She tricks the old lady by heading to the exit of the village then returning, the old lady follows but she runs out to the gardener. They start kissing and run into the surrounding forrest to have sexual intercourse. The priest is seen again who goes to the village graveyard to mourn but hides behind a headstone and drinks a bottle of wine again. Inside the village, the lady comes out and steals more apples from the tree, the large man keeps starring at the window of the greedy old man who is playing with his gold again. The large man goes to the back window of the house, climbs out, with a ladder, walks around the village and climbs up into the greedy old mans house confronting him about his secret stash of gold coins. The large man drags him out and throws the old man out from the window which kills him. The gardener and wife hear the old man falling, the gardener comes out of the forrest naked quickly dressing himself as he sees the old man lying on the ground. The large man laughs maniacally while the gardener confronts him about the murder. As he is climbing into the old mans house the old lady sees the corpse and accuses the gardener of the murder while screaming. The whole village sees this and they start trying to catch and chase the gardener. The gardener is caught and wrongfully put in the jail cell with the other prisoner.

The villagers gather in the graveyard to hold a funeral for the murdered old man. The villagers start chopping down the trees that the gardener had planted to build a gallows to execute the gardener. While building the gallows the wife of the large man sneaks a shovel to the gardener in the jail cell which he uses to dig a hole and escape. The prisoner screams and tells the villagers about the escape which makes everyone grab pitchforks and torches to search for the gardener. The gardener climbs up on the village house roofs using vines, he hides on the roof until the night. While walking on the roof the large man hears the gardeners footsteps and climbs out to fight him. The wife climbs out after to help the gardener, after a fist fight the gardener kills the large man who is holding the gardeners glasses. The gardener and the wife escape the village. In the morning the villagers resume the search for the gardener and find that the large man had his flesh eaten by the ants leaving nothing but the gardeners glasses and his skeleton. The villagers confuse the large man for the gardener since the skeleton looked like the gardener and had the glasses with it, they end up thinking that the gardener had died. The villagers resume their apathetic and miserable lives, the lady stealing apples, the old lady and the others spying on each other and the priest drinking wine.

The gardener and the wife watch the village from a hill in the forrest while leaving.

Cast
The crew consisted of three voice actors: Annie Griffin who played the role of all the female villagers including the old lady and the wife and Dave Western and James Baker who both played the roles of the male villager characters like the gardener, greedy old man and the large man in the tank top.

Production in 1993
The production of the short animation film took about 3 months as stated by Baker, the film was produced by a team of 32 animators including Baker, 5 sound engineers, one Cameraman and electrical engineer, one editor, one producer and one more person for additional crew. Baker, who directed and wrote the screenplay, explained how the animation was created stating "Since leaving the National Film & Television School in 1988, I had worked for a time at TVC, London before joining Pizazz Pictures. At Pizazz I designed and directed adverts and title sequences, but right from the start I was also working on The Village. Pam Dennis and Mario Cavalli, were keen to help me get my next film in production and together we approached Clare Kitson at Channel Four".

"I liked the idea of the village having a definite inside and outside, with most of the characters staying in their houses and occasionally scuttling across the courtyard from one building to another. I worked out a basic plan for the layout of the houses and who was going to live in each one.

Since the characters walk about a lot, this layout was one of the few things that remained constant through all the drafts of the script and storyboarding."

"Once I had completed what I regarded as the final draft of the script, I translated it into a drawn storyboard by first printing out the typed script under blank storyboard squares. Filling in these blank squares with drawings was a very fast process, since I had been imagining the action, and writing about it for so long. I think the final storyboard took about two days to draw (compared with a year, off and on between commercial work at Pizazz, working on the script)".

"The Village started life as a sort of reaction to The Hill Farm. I wanted to show a darker side of rural or isolated life, and I wanted the whole story to come from elements within the location, rather than having other characters turning up to get the action going. I spent a lot of time just trying to invent elements that could fit into this kind of situation. During this period I couldn’t settle on a final plot line, so my first proposals to Channel Four, were more along the lines of describing the characters and possible ways the story might go".

"I had animated The Hill Farm on my own, but it had taken three years… The production time allowed for animating The Village was just over three months, and I was going to work with a team of animators. This was one of the reasons the character designs had to be translated into detailed model sheets. I also laid out the whole film on sheets of animation paper, before the animation started. A  large proportion of the budget was made of animators’ wages, so we had to keep the process as organized as possible.

The team of animators were, Neville Astley, Mark Baker, Sally Baxter, Roxanne Ducharme, Caroline Cruikshank, Alyson Hamilton, Vanessa Luther-Smith, Gaston Marzio, Tom Newman, Isabel Radage, Sharon Smith, Paul Stone, Pete Western & Julia Woolf.

Pam Dennis, the producer, and her assistant, Angela Cocker, would check with us on a weekly basis to find out if we were keeping up with the schedule. We were always behind, but somehow we got the animation done, only straying a couple of weeks over schedule", "Annie Kocur edited the rushes and Julian Nott composed his score to the final picture edit. Danny Hambrook started track-laying the sound effects. We had less time than on The Hill Farm, but we worked in more or less the same way, track-laying in the day and recording effects at night. The main difference was that we worked digitally and in Dolby stereo. Certain effects proved harder to get than others – in particular the scratchy noises made by the ants, which ended up being a mixture of several sounds. Extra voices and effects were recorded by Dominique Wolf and the final sound mix was by Adrian Rhodes".

4K scan and restoration by Modern Film Labs California (2016)
In October 2016 a 4K scan and restoration of the film was made to improve the quality. The restored version is available on YouTube and Mark Baker's website.

Mark Baker's personal description of The Village
"The film is set in a small, isolated village where everyone has something to hide. The villagers spend about half their time trying to find out their neighbours’ secrets and the other half trying to preserve their own. One villager seems to have no interest in this way of life, and is considered an outsider.  He comes under special scrutiny from the rest of the village, and his every move is noted..."

"The Village is a 14 minute long animation film that uses the traditional animation technique of cel and painted backgrounds. It has virtually no dialogue. It was funded by Channel Four Television and produced by Pam Dennis at Pizazz Pictures, London."

General reception
The Village first aired at evening in May 1993 on Channel 4. The reception of the short film was mainly very positive, many critics loved the film with some describing it as a "near perfect animated short movie".

Nominations
In 1994 The Village was nominated twice, an Oscar award for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film with Mark Baker attending and also for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards as a nominee for best animated short film.

Awards summary
The Village was given 8 awards, it was awarded the best "Animated Production Especially Produced for Television and Not Part of a Series" at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 1994, in the same year the Hiroshima International Animation Festival awarded The Village the "Hiroshima prize", Carrousel International du Film awarded it the best short film award, in the Annecy International Animation Film Festival the animation was awarded the prize of "Special Jury Award", Cartoon Forum, Europe awarded it the prize of "Cartoon d'Or", The Village was awarded the best animated film and FIPRESCI prize at the 1993 Kraków Film Festival. It was also awarded the best short film prize at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1993.