One-man movie

>> Montrealer Tyler Gibb on Minushi,
the 90-minute fantasy film he made
at home in about 7,000 hours

by MATTHEW WOODLEY

Four years, 7,000 hours, 2,000 sheets of paper, one gazillion frames, a script, a plot, a score. One man. Well, it’s pretty much safe to say that Tyler Gibb doesn’t get out much. “I’m also my own lawyer, agent, Webmaster, publicist and pedicurist,” he throws in for good measure.

So it’s appropriate that the 90-minute animation feature Gibb recently finished is called Minushi, which means “minute, precise details,” since he handled nearly all of them. The word’s Japanese-esque ring fits well too; Minushi has anime undertones and people fighting robots galore.

The plot follows two orphans, Khal and Trixi (voiced by Mirror listings editor Vidya Lutchman), who live in a city under martial law. Trixi becomes consumed with finding her long-lost brother and the two set out into the war zone to find him. It’s a harsh landscape riddled with bandits, giants, an evil army and a mysterious man named Mr. Tinker, who leads a battalion of robot thugs. Total high-octane for the whole family.

Gibb has been a fixture in the Web-based Flash cartoon world for years. After graduating from Concordia’s fine arts program, in the height of the dot-com boom, he and a buddy started a Web site to stave off the real-job life. “I discovered Flash and made a little interactive cartoon called the Stress Relief Aquarium,” he recounts. “It suddenly took off in a viral way, and within a couple years, I started a new Web site dedicated solely to short animations—Boneland.com. The site sustained itself, and me, through ridiculous amounts of advertising revenue until the bubble burst in 2001.”

Having gathered a following of thousands, Gibb shifted his focus from short funnies on Boneland (which is still online, by the way) to the fantasy-adventure feature format. As he went along, he released serialized chapters online. “I thought it would be a fun experiment,” he says. “That way, I could get real-time feedback from an already established fan-base.”

The online community was only a part of the target audience, Gibb explains: “I figure if I make something that entertains me, it’s bound to entertain someone else—and it usually does. Animation in itself sort of has a stigma attached to it already and attracts a certain demographic; or conversely repels a certain demographic. So I just painted Minushi with a broad brush and tried to make it as accessible to as many people as possible.

“I think my influences come mostly from live-action films,” he continues. “I love animation, don’t get me wrong, but when I set up a shot or think about the film’s diegesis before I put pen to paper, it’s very much rooted in reality and not so much in the cartoony.”

Though what’s really rooted in reality is the film’s sweeping eight-part Details series, something Gibb found a few hundred spare minutes for somewhere or other. “It was in order to stave off the real job again,” he says. “I produced it in order to answer all the questions I’d received over the years from fans of the online serialized version of the movie. There’s a huge community of amateur Flash-animators out there. And I’m pretty much self-taught so I thought the least I could do is pass along all my bad habits to as many of them as possible.”

Minushi screens as part of Fantasia at
the D.B. Clarke Theatre on Tuesday, July 10,
5 p.m. See www.Minushi.com for (many)
more details about the film

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