Loving Vincent : An animated film based on the life of Van Gogh. 65,000 hand-painted frames in the style of Van Gough are used to create this animated film. Nearly 125 artists from different nations have come together to work out this project; and it has taken seven years to complete this beautiful movie, which explores the causes of the suicide of the artist through his letters and paintings.

                           The life of world famous artist Van Gogh has been a great source of inspiration to filmmakers and novelists.  As an artist I have read and reread the book based on his life Lust for Life many times. The more one reads this book, the more one becomes sentimental and emotional and gets attached to the character. His passion, dedication, love for nature, romance with colours and canvass ­— all interest and engross readers immensely with no end. From generations to generations, his life lived frenziedly has inspired many producers and directors to make films with multiple viewpoints. During his life time, he neither earned enough money to support himself and to lead a lavish life style, nor was he recognised for his outstanding brilliant works, which speak volumes till toady. A sudden tragic end to his life, at the age of 36, left his experimentation into the art field half-way and incomplete, it seems.

Loving Vincent, biographical film of the artist, was a nominee for 90^th Academy Awards. Loving Vincent tries to unveil the truth of the artist’s suicide centred on the last available letters written to his brother Theo.  

 The director has a very interesting approach to the film making here. Instead of going for the present-day advantages of the technology, the director has painstakingly opted for hand -painting method for her animated movie making. Before the introduction of technology, a series of hand- painted frames were to be used while making animated movies, and, no doubt, it was indeed a laborious work and time consuming also. With the advancement of the technology, the making of animated films has become pretty easy and the numbers of films also have increased remarkably. But, here for this feature film - 65,000 paintings have been hand painted in the style of Van Gogh — for the very style he was mocked and criticized during his life time — both by his friends and critics. With this huge body of paintings, the film has been made with all the dedication and hard work, which took almost seven years to complete. The 93-minute-long film showcases 65,000 hand-painted frames sequentially, and each second shoot requiring an average of12 canvases.

 For this project, nearly 125 artists from different countries came together and produced a huge body of works based on the life of world famous artist Vincent, especially in oils. This body of works details about his life, friends, his home, his belongings so as to give details of his life. These paintings are painted with oil colours which was the prevalent medium then. We all artists know how Van Gogh used paint his canvasses — he literally used to squeeze the tubes of  oil colours directly onto the canvases — the thick pigmentation applied frenziedly evoked criticism  — because smooth application was the trend then But he never compromised though his friends tried to dissuade him to follow the trend and to be on the bandwagon.

As a result of combining her passion for cinema and painting, the film director Dorota Kobiela has woven this film with 65,000 frames, each one hand painted. One has to appreciate the efforts in bringing out the film based on hand-painted frames as everyone is turning to technology even for small works. Though the film could not get the award, it deserves to be watched for its innovative approach.