Screen/Society--AMI Showcase--Animation Series--"The Man Who Planted Trees" & "Tale of Tales"

Two Short Films: "The Man Who Planted Trees"(Frédéric Back, 1987, 30 min, Canada, in English, Color, DVD)/ Academy Award-winning animator Frédéric Back adapts acclaimed author Jean Giono's inspirational tale of the difference a single determined person can make in the world when they put their mind and body to the task. "The Man Who Planted Trees" is about the unique achievement of Elzéard Bouffier, a Provençal shepherd who patiently reforests a barren piece of land. The narrator's fascination with the man and his mission leads him to return time and again to the mountains, where he sees the windswept, forsaken landscape gradually transformed: springs, cultivated fields and thriving villages are regenerated by the incredible forest that is the work of one stubborn and uncommonly selfless man./-- Winner of Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film!/"Tale of Tales"(Yuri Norstein, 1979, 29 min, Russia, in Russian w/ English Subtitles, Color, DVD)/ "Tale of Tales" is a personal, and often profound, statement of atavistic recollection. Norstein uses the animated form to recall primal and ancestral sources of human feeling and experience. Fusing folk-tale, memory and personal symbolism, Norstein achieves associative relations which move beyond the realms of standard representations of time and space, privileging the psychological and emotional as the focusing agents in relating images./-- Named "Best Animated Film of All Time" by the U.S. Olympic Arts Committee!