After two years touring dozens of international festivals, garnering several nominations and the Grand Prize for Best Animation at the 2012 Rhode Island International Film Festival, the animated short The Last Belle arrives today on YouTube.

The film is a labor-of-love, created and funded over a fifteen year period in the downtime between commercial jobs. Led by director Neil Boyle (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Space Jam, The Snowman and the Snowdog) a team of veteran and younger animation artists were assembled to create the ‘retro’ cartoon feel, using entirely traditional methods: thirty-five thousand drawings, xeroxed and traced onto cel, hand-painted, and shot onto 35mm film using a rostrum camera.

The film is voiced by Sienna Guillory (Love Actually, Resident Evil), Colin McFarlane (The Dark Knight, Torchwood) and Amanda Donohoe (Castaway, LA Law), and the twice-nominated score is by award-winning composer Stuart Hancock.

Neil is currently developing a feature-length film of Michael Morpurgo’s award-winning book ‘Kensuke’s Kingdom’ with co-director Kirk Hendry, screenwriter Frank Cottrell Boyce, and producer Sarah Radclyffe. More on his work and the production of The Last Belle can be found in our 2011 interview.

For more information and to watch The Last Belle you can visit thelastbelle.com and thelastbelleblog.blogspot.co.uk/