The Paper Cinema’s take on moving pictures dazzles and delights at Lakeside...
Sunday morning began with reading that animation genius Hayao Miyazaki’s work has been plundered by AI. Some online clown noted that spending weeks on just one short sequence was a waste of time. Missing the point that weeks weren’t spent – they were devoted. Sunday afternoon I got to experience Paper Cinema’s extraordinary work, which gets to the heart of why that matters.
In one form or another, what Paper Cinema do is a rude and right corrective to life 2025-style. Three people. One table. One projector. Two people pick up one after another after another fragments of paper with inked drawings of people, places, and people that are places. A third plays guitar, and twiddles with electronic kit to make sound. All of it, from first to last, is just as it should be.
As someone who loves comics and cinema, I was likely to fall under the spell of Paper Cinema. Their magic engages, immerses, nourishes. It feeds something intimate and strange that resonates with Bjork at her best, novelist Alan Garner, cartoonist Carla Speed McNeil. Creativity that hops and glistens, rudely unaware of demands to be focus-grouped, demographically-targeted, Insta-friendly.
A man. Rocky landscape. Hints of dinosaurs
You want that stuff, there’s a thread on LinkedIn with dozens of people convinced they’re convinced by AI, each posting the word ‘prompt’ in response to a vacuous Miyazaki-plundering poo stripe of animation. Edgier ones add an exclamation mark or otherwise customise their ‘prompt’. It’s the 2025 remix of people nodding ‘tune’ as a DJ plays a tune.
Throughout the fifty-minute show I’m 5,000 years away experiencing cave art in the dark. Images come into play and speak without words. A man. Rocky landscape. Hints of dinosaurs. Scenes, moods and characters haunt me, the story as old as sitting round a fire. Something raw and real of ink and light and sound and soul unfolds in front of me and I have no idea what but a sneaking idea suggests it knows me. And it’s heartbreaking in its beauty. Take your kids, take your cat, take a chance on The Paper Cinema – more shows are coming up, out of Nottingham.
Paper Cinema played at Lakeside Arts on Sunday March 30th 2025.
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