Seth: Seth's Dominion

An extravagantly designed portrait--in comics, photos, and a DVD documentary--of the world-building artist. When you live in an ornamented world where your home is a museum of 1940s design, you don’t leave the house without a hat and tie, and your wife owns a barber shop—which you designed—it’s hard to imagine letting a documentary about you go to press without constructing an exquisite package for it. In Seth’s Dominion, the National Film Board documentary by filmmaker Luc Chamberland about the acclaimed Canadian cartoonist, Seth has done just that.

Presented here as an innovative double-spined hardcover that opens in two directions, one side opens with a photo essay narrating Seth’s life while the other offers a generous sampling of Seth’s art: comics and sketchbook pages, but also puppetry and New Yorker illustrations. Seth also speaks to the experience of making the documentary through a comics diary, constructed from rubber stamp images.

Between these two halves lies Seth’s Dominion, a masterly portrait that mixes insightful biography with vivid animation in an artful fusion of filmmaking techniques that perfectly captures Seth’s manifold creative universe. From his melancholy reflections on childhood to his descriptions of his creative habits, Seth narrates his own life story enchantingly. With special features including two short animations and a taping of Seth speaking at the Drawn & Quarterly bookstore, Seth’s Dominion is a triumph.

Luc Chamberland is a Montreal-based animator and director. After graduating from Concordia University, Luc embarked on a nomadic career that eventually landed him in London, where he created animation for several feature films, including Steven Spielberg’s We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story. He was also director of animation on the Dreamworks feature Joseph: King of Dreams. Seth’s Dominion is the first film that Luc has directed and animated for the NFB.