Mike Raymond - Urðr

Drawing inspiration from legendary anime director Satoshi Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers, artist Mike Raymond proceeds to join the dots between the old Norse Edda, Chris Cunningham’s video for ‘Only You’ by Portishead and The Lord Of The Rings with Urðr, a nightmarish sequence of stunning, hand-painted CGI and foreboding sound design. Centering around a solitary old man, illuminated by a Victorian street light on a bench in the snow, the film follows his encounter with the tituar Urðr, one of the three Norns of Norse mythology, who draw from a scared well to tend to the world tree, Yggdrasil, while deciding upon the fates of human beings. “In the last few years I have been thinking a lot about certain rules I like to aim for,” explains the artist. “With CG being so endless, sometimes it can just be too extreme. One of the big turning points was through a phase of watching a lot of stop motion. I was having issues with characters and scenes feeling too sterile and I knew I wanted to make emotionally real films, films