AWARDS/ HONORS
Los Angeles Animation Festival 2018, Best Animated Documentary
Oxford International Film Festival 2018 "Film of The Festival" and "Best Animation" awards.
Black Maria Film Festival Stellar Award
Palm Springs International Animation Festival
ASIFA EAST
Woodstock Film Festival Official Selection 2019
Animatou
Trickfilm Festival Stuttgart
Ottawa International Film Festival
New York Foundation Fellowship in Film
Anne Arbor Film Festival
New England Film Festival
DCIFF
Green Point Film Festival Winner
Coney Island Film Festival
CLIENT LIST /
Disney
HBO
Nickelodeon
Cartoon Network
Comedy Central
Scholastic
MTV
Children's Television Workshop
Microsoft
Planned Parenthood of Greater New York
Pepsico
Artist Statement
In my art, most specifically my newest animation "New York City Sketchbook," I explore the urban experience unfiltered, with all it's beauty and it's blemishes. Working from my sketchbooks, in a form of visual journalism, the film attempts to document the challenges that NewYorkers face with their hopes and desires as they negotiate the urban matrix of the city itself.
There are layers and layers of people and places in the film, some opaque, while others we see right through. Most of the characters in the film were sketched from life, often in public places, but sometimes they are friends or lovers observed privately during moments of intimacy. In this regard the film is personal and has as many layers of interpretation as there are layers of drawings within the film's structural compositions.
Structurally and thematically I am fascinated with the pulse of the urban beat. As I move the viewer through the city's vast spaces, I look for rhythmic patterns and shapes in the city's architecture, with it's majestic skyscrapers, bridges and endless avenues. I look for patterns of movement in the subway trains, ferries, taxis and pedestrians as they overlap and crisscross each other in an endless looping cacophony of shape and sound.
I regard my art as a hybrid of social realism and theatrical nonfiction, where I combine animation based on observation, found sound, and visual diary forms into one seamless work.
Influential artists and thinkers of mine in no particular order are : Yuri Norstein, George Grosz, John Hubley, Flannery O'Connor, David Lynch, Diane Arbus, Joseph Mitchell, Alfred Hitchcock, Saul Steinberg, Picasso, Herge, and David Hockney.
~Willy Hartland
“It’s quite literally a living sketchbook of everyday life in the big city...”