Oscar and BAFTA-winning Canadian stop-motion animator and filmmaker Co Hoedeman died yesterday in Montreal, Canada. He was 84. No cause of death was given.
Among the dozens of awards he won for his much-beloved short The Sand Castle (1977), the film received the grand prix at Annecy and the Academy Award for best animated short.
Born in Amsterdam on August 1, 1940, Jacobus-Willem Hoedeman started his career as an assistant animator at Multifilm in Haarlem, and studied at the School of Fine Arts in Amsterdam and the School of Photography in The Hague. By the time he emigrated to Canada in 1965, he was designing, directing, and editing commercials. He moved to Canada with the…