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Meilink Sjaak
Award-winning Dutch filmmaker Sjaak Meilink has been working in animation for quite a while. In 1997 he joined the National Film Board to make Stiltwalkers, his first professional film. It is a Canada/Netherlands co-production about a fisherman who encounters a tribe of people on stilts.
Sjaak studied animation and photography at the Utrecht School of the Arts. He graduated in 1992, after making a stop-motion film called Labyrinth. He then went on to work for Paul and Menno de Nooijer to create The Laughing Cow and Music Non-Stop. From 1994 to 1997 he studied at the Netherlands Institute for Animation Film in Tilburg, where he laid the technical groundwork for Stiltwalkers and storyboarded the film. While there, he also began a stop-motion animation series called The Alchimist.
