| Hunger/La Faim | |
|---|---|
English opening title |
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| Directed by | Peter Foldes |
| Distributed by | National Film Board of Canada |
| Running time | 11 minutes and 12 seconds |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | none |
Hunger/La Faim is a 1974 animated short film produced by the National Film Board of Canada. It was directed by Peter Foldes and is one of the first computer animation films. The story, told without words, is a morality tale about greed and gluttony in the (then) modern society.
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Peter Foldes worked in collaboration with the National Research Council's Division of Radio and Electrical Engineering's Data Systems Group, who decided to develop a computer animation application in 1969. NRC scientist Nestor Burtnyk had heard an animator from Disney explain the traditional animation process, where a head animator draws the key cels and assistants draw the fill in pictures. The work of the artist's assistant seemed to Burtnyk to be the ideal demonstration vehicle for computer animation and within a year he programmed a "key frame animation" package to create animated sequences from key frames. The NFB in Montreal was contacted so that artists could experiment with computer animation. Foldes made a 1971 experimental film involving freehand drawings called Metadata.[1] This was followed by Hunger, which took him and his NRC partners a year and a half to make.[2]
Awards for Hunger included a Special Jury Prize at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, a BAFTA Award for Best Animation Film and a Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival.[3] The film was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film at the 47th Academy Awards.