How and why my animated film Piano Concerto was created. It all began a few years ago. At the time, I was listening to classical music while busy making illustrations for a number of Swedish publishers as well as working on my own children´s book to be published in Poland. One composition of Maurice Ravel, Concerto in G-major caught my attention, particularly a section of the concerto ten minutes long - Adagio Assai. In the piece resounded many different musical styles whose blend was wonderful. Unduobtedly, it was a reflection of composer´s enchantment with music of Mozart, Chopin, Satie, Debussy and Gershwin. It´s a difficult composition whose unusual beauty appeals only when you listen to it over and over again. It was in this way that the music eventually held sway over me. The melancholic melody line bewitched me, awakening pictures of my childhood. I felt it as a lamentation, and shared its feelings. Its grief became my own. But for what, this grief? For time past, for moments of happiness gleaming through the leaves of the trees when as a little boy I passed on a scooter through my childhood streets. Thus I discovered an old picture. Our neighbor to the left worked as a trumpeter in the Railroad Orchestra. His daughter used to practise piano. This picture awakes more memories from that time. An old woman pours a pail of soapy water on the curb and so flushes a cat from his hideout. The cat runs away, shaking soap bubbles from his whiskers. On the same day a gloomy moving van takes my girlfriend away, the best playmate of my childhood. I began to listen to the Adagio more closely. The music was asking for fulfillment in the screenplay. Never before had I created a movie from musical inspiration. In doing so, you can´t  change a melody line, and so my story adjusts to the natural ebb and flow of the music. I merely create the music´s picture. Its contents overlap. Melancholy and powerlessness long for the unreachable, clearing away in their wake. And it visually overlaps as well, a reflection of the music´s many layers. It blends architectonical styles from far different eras and far different parts of world. And beyond all of this it seems as wonderful rainbows in bubbles, fragile like a dream or antique glassware on a shelf. And as I checked on the internet and in some books on the composer´s biography, I discovered a reflection of my inspiration. In a picture of the composer´s atelier in his house in Parisian suburbs, he is seen surrounded himself with various objects from as many places and times. And also in the portrait, over the piano, his mother´s stern gaze supervises his work. How many deeply hidden dreams must surface to exorcise such a gaze? So with its melancholy and grief, Adagio Assai also brings a sense of unfulfillment.M.Ravel wrote Piano Concerto G-major with thoughts of concert tours around the world, but also a dream which illness following a car accident left incomplete. When the piano concerto comes to the end, the sound of the closing piano resembles the sound of the closing coffin. Unfulfillment accompanies three stages of our life. It steals away in our childhood mind, painfully touches us in adolescence, and afflicts us in our old age. The artist tries to tame it by transforming it into beauty, into a fragile bubble that only lasts ten minutes.   Richard Antonius    The illustrations and texts are Copyrighted © 2000 by Richard Antonius and Antonius Animation.All rights reserved.