Animated Short Walks Tight Rope

Wednesday, September 03, 2008
By: Ryan Ball

Magnolia Pictures’ documentary Man on Wire will be accompanied in select theaters by Michael Sporn’s 2005 animated short film The Man Who Walked Between the Towers, reports Daily Variety. Based on the Caldecott Award-winning children's book by Mordicai Gerstein and narrated by actor Jake Gyllenhaal, the short is intended to attract more family audiences to the doc. Sporn’s film won the Best Short Animation Made for Children award at the 2006 Ottawa International Animation Festival.

The animated film, like the feature, deals with French thrill seeker Philippe Petit’s death-defying 1974 high-wire walk between the World Trade Center’s twin towers. After dreaming about the towers for more than six year, Petit and his accomplices somehow managed to smuggle heavy cables and other gear into the world trade center and illegally secure the wire between the two skyscrapers. Petit spent nearly an hour on the tight rope high above New York City before he was arrested and taken in for psychological evaluation.

Director James Marsh’s documentary brings the extraordinary feat to the screen through the testimony of Petit and some of his team members. The pic has earned more than $1.5 million at the box office. Starting Friday, moviegoers can see Sporn’s ten-minute, hand-drawn short after the feature at the Landmark Theater in Los Angeles and Landmark's Sunshine Cinema in New York City.

Reader Comments

There are no reader comments for this article.