“Great artists are not peaceful souls,” says a character in the trailer of Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman’s animated film Loving Vincent. The biopic on Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh, merges 120 of his paintings into live action animation sequences.
The makers of the film, starring Douglas Booth, Jerome Flynn, Saoirse Ronan and Chris O’Dowd, have released a few images that reveal the rivetting transformation.
Featuring over 64,500 frames, each of which are hand-painted oil on canvas, the film is being billed as the world’s first oil-painted feature film.
Loving Vincent explores the artist’s life and his much-debated suicide. “As you probably know there are a lot of conflicting views about how he was like as a person, what was wrong with him, why he committed suicide, was he ill, was he mad, and so we wanted to use that,” Hugh Welchman said in an interview with Huffington Post. “And also the thing is about Vincent is that he’s beautiful and poetic in his letters and very intelligent and inspiring. His paintings communicate to you very directly but he had a real problem with communicating with people in front of him.”