Brothers Quay

Stephen and Timothy Quay ( ; born June 17, 1947) are American identical twin brothers and stop-motion animators who are better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They were also the recipients of the 1998 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their work on the play ''The Chairs''.

Careers

The Quay Brothers reside and work in England, having moved there in 1969 to study at the Royal College of Art, London after studying illustration (Timothy) and film (Stephen) at the Philadelphia College of Art, now the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. In England they made their first short films, which no longer exist after the only prints were irreparably damaged. They spent some time in the Netherlands in the 1970s and then returned to England, where they teamed up with another Royal College student, Keith Griffiths, who produced all of their films. In 1980 the trio formed Koninck Studios, which is currently based in Southwark, south London.

Style

The Brothers' works from 1979 to the present show a wide range of often esoteric influences, starting with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica and continuing with the writers Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Robert Walser and Michel de Ghelderode, puppeteers Wladyslaw Starewicz and Czech Richard Teschner and Czech composers Leoš Janáček, Zdeněk Liška and Polish Leszek Jankowski, the last of whom has created many original scores for their work. Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, for whom they named one of their films (''The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer''), is also frequently cited as a major influence, but they actually discovered his work relatively late, in 1983, by which time their characteristic style and preoccupations had been fully formed. In a panel discussion with Daniel Bird and Andrzej Klimowski at the Aurora festival in Norwich, they emphasized that a more significant influence on their work was Walerian Borowczyk, who made both animation shorts and live-action features.

Most of their animation films feature puppets made of doll parts and other organic and inorganic materials, often partially disassembled, in a dark, moody atmosphere. Perhaps their best known work is '' Street of Crocodiles'' (1986), based on the short story of the same name by the Polish author and artist Bruno Schulz. This short film was selected by director and animator Terry Gilliam as one of the ten best animated films of all time, and critic Jonathan Romney included it on his list of the ten best films in any medium (for '' Sight and Sound''s critics' poll of 2002). They have made two full-length live action films: '' Institute Benjamenta (1996), or This Dream People Call Human Life'', produced by Keith Griffiths and Janine Marmot, and '' The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes (2005)'', produced by Keith Griffiths. They also directed an animated sequence in the film ''Frida'' (2002).

With very few exceptions, their films have no meaningful spoken dialogue (most have no spoken content at all, while some, such as
The Comb (From the Museums of Sleep)
' (1990) include multilingual background gibberish that is not intended to be coherently understood). Accordingly, their films are highly reliant on their music scores, of which many have been written especially for them by the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski. In 2000, they contributed a short film to the BBC
...