Marlies van der Wel

Marlies is a Dutch animator and illustrator whose short films have been presented in national and international film festivals around the world.

‘I want to address big themes by putting them in small packages, using simple images and words to tell stories that are emotional, but not tearjerkers, with humour never far away.’

Marlies’s illustrations are the result of a painstaking collage process in which she weaves drawings, textures and random objects together. ‘To do a bear, I might take a tennis ball for the body and a shoe for the head, before drawing on top of them to, well, make it a bear.’

That’s just half the deal, as her creations are brought to life in a technique that Marlies calls ‘digital cut-out animation’ but most people would call magic. ‘I don’t know what my style is, but whatever I do, I want to create humour with beautiful, detailed images animated with minimal but natural movement.’