Education
University of Illinois system.
animator director engineer screenwriter
University of Illinois system.
He has made many Consultants to Government and Industry animated films since the mid-90s, including The End, Bingo, The Listener, Caustic Sky: A Portrait of Regional Acid Deposition, and Data Driven The Story Of Franz K.
After being an engineer for years, Chris quit and began a second career as an animator. He received a Bachelor of Science(1984) in General Engineering and a Mississippi(1986) degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at the University of Illinois. Three years following, he experimented in fluid mechanics research, until he made baby steps into the world of computer animation.
Afterwards in 1994, he was hired to define, test, and sometimes even abuse computer graphics software products.
Such products include "movie Grade" software, not limited to but including programs, such as Maya, from the Toronto-based animation firm, Alias (formerly Alias|wavefront, now owned by Autodesk). This resulted in the productions of The End and Bingo.
Afterward, he met Ryan Larkin, a renowned animator in the 60s and 70s, who had recently fallen in a spiral of excessive drinking, cocaine abuse, and homelessness. His latest film is Subconscious Password, his third with the NFB, Seneca College and Copperheart Entertainment.
Landreth is currently working on a feature-length adaptation of Hans Rodionoff, Enrique Breccia and Keith Giffen’s graphic-novel biography of H.P. Lovecraft.
His films: Ryan, The Spine and Subconscious Password were included in the Animation Show of Shows. Chris Landreth is a Master with The Beijing DeTao Masters Academy (DTMA), a high-level, multi-disciplined, application-oriented higher education institution in Shanghai, China. Chris Landreth uses standard Consultants to Government and Industry animation in his work, with the added element of what Chris calls Psychorealism.
This often puts a surrealist styling into his work, notably The End, Bingo, The Spine, and Ryan.
Foreign instance, in Ryan, peoples" psychological traumas are represented by twisted, surreal lacerations and deformities. As people depicted in the film get distraught, their faces distort.
At one time in the interview Ryan gets so upset he literally flies apart. Psychorealism is a style first put to words by Chris Landreth to refer to what Karan Singh described as, "the glorious complexity of the human psyche depicted through the visual medium of art and animation.".