A blog exploring the work of Jean Giraud, aka Gir, aka Moebius. Basically, there didn't seem to be any places online that gave a comprehensive collection of his work, so I made one.
[The official site of Moebius] - While there are very few of his works available to an English-only audience, the last thing I want to do is take away from potential sales by hosting his work here. If you speak French and can enjoy his books the way they were originally meant to be enjoyed, please click over and show him some love.
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Posts tagged film
Career Timeline: 1987 - The Abyss
James Cameron hires Moebius to design the non-terrestrial intelligence creatures for The Abyss(released 1989)
Career Timeline: 1986 - Willow
Moebius is hired by George Lucas to do some extensive design work for Willow(released in 1988). He does quite a bit of character/set design work that never gets used. In some cases, like the piece with the sea monster, Moebius just made the whole scene up from scratch in hopes that they might give it a shot.
Career Timeline: 1986 - Masters of the Universe
Moebius, along with artist and sometime-collaborator William Stout, do some concept work for Gary Goddard’s He-Man film, Masters of the Universe(released in 1987). Moebius was hired specifically to design He-Man’s cotume, played in the film by Dolph Lundgren.
Fun fact: Masters of the Universe was loosely based(maybe inspired by is a better way to say it, to dispel an old rumor that it was an actual reworked adaptation) on Jack Kirby’s Fourth World and Fantastic Four comics.
Career Timeline: 1985 - Little Nemo in Slumberland
Moebius is approached by Tokyo Movie Shinsha to do concept design work and script revisions for their animated feature film based on Winsor McCay’s comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland.
P.S. Hayao Miyazaki was heavily involved in production early on, even making a test film. He left the project, citing unspecified difficulties, years before Moebius came on board.
Career Timeline: 1985 - Internal Transfer
A sample of the many storyboards made for Internal Transfer
Career Timeline: 1985 - Internal Transfer
In 1980, Moebius met and became enamored with French philosopher and spiritualist Jean-Paul Appel-Guéry. They formed a somewhat tight student/teacher relationship, something that Appel-Guéry did often, gaining him a following of people that believed in his new age teachings(some have said his group operated under suspiciously cult-like behaviors, and at one point Appel-Guéry told all of his followers that they had to move to Tahiti in order to achieve spiritual harmony, which Moebius did for a year). He had also convinced Moebius to re-examine his primary artistic subject matter:
“Appel-Guéry encouraged Moebius to tap into the more positive zones of his subconscious. ‘Most of the people that were studying spirituality with Appel-Guéry did not know much about comics, but they immediately picked on the morbid, and overall negative feelings that permeated my work,’ said Moebius. ‘So I began to feel ashamed, and I decided to do something really different, just to show them that I could do it.’”
—Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier, from Moebius Comics #1, Caliber Comics, 1996
So in the early 80s, along with Appel-Guéry, writer Paula Salomon, and animator Arnie Wong, Moebius began conceiving of an animated film called Internal Transfer. This was to be a full-length feature, meant to embody Appel-Guéry’s philosphical message. Most of the conceptual artwork was done in 1984 and 1985, including lengthy storyboards and an unfinished comic. Moebius and Wong even hand-animated a short ‘pilot’, which you can see here(at the 3:45 mark).
The film lost all of its financing, and was abandoned in 1986. Appel-Guery’s influence on Moebius lived on though, as his Aedena Cycle is partially rooted in these concepts.
Career Timeline: 1981 - TRON
Moebius is hired by Disney Studios to begin concept design work for TRON(released in 1982). He would also serve as a backup storyboard artist.
The Airtight Garage: An animated feature film that never happened, produced by Akira Kurosawa and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo
This just breaks my heart you guys. While searching through ebay, I found this book of storyboards for a failed Russian production of an Airtight Garage animated film from 1990-91. I had never heard of this before, so I looked around and found THIS:
“This might be the start of another sad “Moebius can’t make a movie” story if it weren’t for Kurosawa Enterprises USA, which has hooked up with Rivier and Starwatcher Graphics (Giraud’s US corporation) to produce The Airtight Garage. Kurosawa is working on securing a worldwide distribution deal, and is supporting the animation production in Japan.
Japanese film master Akira Kurosawa and French comic master Moebius make a complementary team. Giraud started out making Western comics and then moved into science fiction. Kurosawa directed Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, which became the basis for two world-famous westerns: The Magnificent Seven and A Fistful of Dollars. His film The Hidden Fortress foreshadowed the plot of Star Wars.
Rivier says that one reason he was so excited to have animation buff Kurosawa involved with the movie project was that the director has access to Japanese animators. The Starwatcher movie never got past a six-minute demo because nobody involved in the project realized how expensive it was to make a full-length movie using only high quality 3-D computer graphics. This time around The Airtight Garage will use a combination of traditional cel animation and computer animation. The cel animation will be done in Japan under the direction of Katsuhiro Otomo, whose animated feature Akira was a huge hit in Japan and a cult classic in the United States. Like Giraud in his cinematic approach to comics, “Otomo uses traditional cinematography techniques for animation,” says Rivier. “His angles and camera movement look like real life movies.” The computer animation will be done in the United States.”
Completely dumb-founded. And completely heart-broken.
Moebius: king of everything, including being the cream of the almost-happened-story crop.
Career Timeline: 1978 - Les Maîtres du temps
Moebius begins production of Les Maîtres du temps(The Time Masters), an animated feature film where he will design, storyboard, and co-write the script. He partners with animation director René Laloux, already well-known for directing the surreal La Planète Sauvage(Fantastic Planet). Les Maîtres du temps was released in theaters in 1982.
Image 1: Movie poster, drawn by Moebius
Image 2: Concept art by Mobeius
Images 3-10: Stills from the film(taken from here)
Career Timeline: 1978 - Alien
After Dune falls apart, Dan O’Bannon writes the script to Alien. When the film is greenlit and begins pre-production, O’Bannon invites many of the people who worked on Dune to get involved, including Moebius. He worked on costume design, specializing on the space suits.
Oh yeah. Forgot that Moebius designed Dolph Lundgren’s He-Man costume for Masters of the Universe.
The cover to issue 35 of Mediascene, from January/February 1979, with a colored version of Moebius’ concept piece for Alien.
I put this video up on Youtube over five years ago, and I haven’t learned much more about it since. What I do know is that there was an attempt to produce an animated feature film of The Incal, and that this attempt failed. What I think you see here is a reel put together to bait more financiers into the project. Curiously at the end, there is an animated Arzach sequence and what looks like a Starwatcher sequence. This thing is baffling. And gorgeous. As far as I’ve heard, both Moebius and Alejandro Jodorowsky were involved in the production, but I haven’t heard either of them mention it directly.
(Source: theairtightgarage)
114 notes (via theairtightgarage)
