Michel Gondry

Michel Gondry is an interesting director who incorporates animation into his work in various ways. Even though most would consider Gondry a live-action director, he deals a lot with animation. This animation extends beyond his music videos ("Fell in Love With a Girl", "Hardest Button to Button", along with other songs by the White Stripes and Björk). In his feature film “Science of Sleep”, he uses animation to create Stephane’s dream world. The animation style employed by Gondry in “Science of Sleep” is more abstract and iconic, with simplistic geometry and abstract motion. When Stephane is floating through his dream world, Gondry uses a sort of reverse masking effect, where Stephane is photo-realistic but his background is iconic and animated (using carboard and stop-animation). It seems that Gondry does this in order to maintain the reality of the character, but also create a world which is identifiable to all viewers, because every one of us dreams in some way.

Gondry is a very experimental director and it seems that animation enables him to unleash his creativity.