Video of the Day: ‘The Adventures of Indiana Jones’

Waiting for fun things is hard, no matter what age you are, but today’s Video of the Day was worth the wait. Aim your squinties at The Adventures of Indiana Jones, a short film by Artist Patrick Schoenmaker has spent the last five years creating an animated Indiana Jones movie. It’s finally been released.

“Movie” can mean a lot of things, and in this case it means a short subject. The Adventures of Indiana Jones is all of a minute and 40 seconds long. All produced by a single person, the little film demonstrates how much one man with a vision can produce all by himself, and for all its brevity, it’s a thing of beauty.

It all began around the time of the release of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull when Schoenmaker was commissioned by Lucasfilm and ACME Archives to create a print envisioning Indiana Jones as an animated cartoon. And while Lucasfilm had no interest in seeing a cartoon version of Indy, Patrick’s imagination had been irretrievably ignited. He just couldn’t stop thinking what a film like this would look like, and started doing character and scenic designs. You can see here from this sampling of the production art just how much work went into creating this exciting little movie:

The production art Schoenmaker did suggested that the film retold only one of the Indiana Jones stories, but as you’ll see, that wasn’t quite true. Instead, Schoenmaker captures the spirit of the mythic adventurer, using action and motion to carry the leading man across the boundaries of time and space from one scene to the next. Scene by scene, it’s full on Indiana, but rather than tell a story, it’s a series of perfect little vignettes, which our hero somehow manages to survive.

If Lucasfilm is reading this, please consider hiring Schoenmaker to produce and direct an Indiana Jones full length animated feature film. This proof of concept shows just how sweet it could really be.

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SCIFI Radio Staff

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