Wandaland

The scouts

Noble's basically making a fever dream about Disney's hubris, and the mixed-media chaos—2D tangling with mocap tangling with live action—should be a disaster, but instead it's weirdly honest about how theme parks are Frankenstein monsters anyway.

A Royal College of Art thesis film that understands its lineage in both animation history and the satirical tradition of corporate grotesquerie; the formal rigor lies not in restraint but in the calculated collision of four distinct media vocabularies held in architecture.

The decision to let the mocap footage bleed into hand-drawn animation—that moment where the tycoon's ambitions literally can't stay in one medium—is what makes the concept sing rather than feel like a technical showoff.

Reviews

Richard Noble's impressive Royal College of Art film Wandaland transports it viewers into the life of a fictional animation tycoon and his dreams of building a theme park to compete with Disneyland. Over the next six-minutes Noble will present such a rich and detailed history of the man and his eccentricities, you might actually start to believe he truly existed.

A combination of 2D animation, 3D animation, motion capture, live-action and photographic elements, while Wandaland impresses with its distinct narrative, it more than matches this storytelling flair with its erratic aesthetic. The ever-changing visuals add a certain psychedelic, dream-like feel to the short and its hard not to be left somewhat awestruck by all that Noble packs into such a short film.