Of the handful of mini-projects I’ve launched for the Film Walrus, Poor Little Animated Shorts has been one of the most fun. I learned a lot in a fairly brief period, gotten to see a couple hundred interesting shorts (it helps when the average run-time is only 7 minutes) and discovered more than a dozen new directors to follow up on. I hope it has been good reading/viewing for all of you (chase down some of those links/DVDs if you haven’t already). I may continue to present more sets in the future, but for now I’m taking a break.
My apologies to any artist or movement that I’ve grossly overlooked (including most foreign countries). Sorry that for all my CS love, I didn't include any machinima. I'm personally pretty fond of speedruns, but I that might have been a little too nerdy.
Although I’m familiar with their work, for reasons of personal taste I intentionally omitted Tomasz Beginski (recent, technically impressive CG), Bill Melendez (Peanuts specials), David Fleischer (Popeye), Terrytoons (Mighty Mouse) and anything related to Christmas (think stop-motion Rudolphs, Chipmunks outwitting Pluto and so on).
Oscar Fischinger (pre-Fantasia musical visualization) was skipped over because I couldn’t find a spot for him. Norman McLaren definitely deserved a spot on the list (I did plug two of his shorts in the “Cat Came Back” review), but I couldn’t choose. Many great sources of animated shorts were relegated to a single entry when they deserved more, including Tex Avery, Disney, Pixar and the whole of Soviet/Russian output (I really wanted to include “The Old Man and the Sea”). Many shorts were left out because of my own ignorance or lack of time in a field that is almost impossible to keep up with.
Showing posts with label Poor Little Animated Shorts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Poor Little Animated Shorts. Show all posts
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Monday, April 21, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Platinum Edition
This set of shorts includes, respectively, the top rated films according the animation industry, international critics and popular vote.
Title: What’s Opera, Doc (1957)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 DVD or online here.
Review:
An abbreviated version of Richard Wagner’s opera “The Ring of the Nibelung,” this short is purportedly the industry’s most highly regarded cartoon, topping the animator poll “The 50 Greatest Cartoons.” Elmer Fudd plays a Viking on the hunt for a rabbit (Bugs Bunny) who disguises himself as the Valkyrie Brunnhilda atop an obese equestrian to woo and eventually break Elmer Fudd’s heart, with tragic consequences. Jones admits to lavishing the project with far more time than usual, evident in the operatic visual extremes and the emphasis on pictorial humor and timing over wordplay and slapstick gags.
Along with “The Rabbit of Seville,” also by Chuck Jones/Warner Brothers, this is one of the great send-ups of opera, managing to earn both low brow and high brow appeal through its fun exaggerations and clever grasp of staging and music conventions. It remains one of the best known and most beloved cartoons of the golden era.
Title: Tale of Tales (1979)
Director: Yuriy Norshteyn
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: Masters of Russian Animation: Volume 3
Review:
“Tale of Tales” is a multi-layered allegory which touches upon national history, personal introspection and universal fairy tale tropes. Norshteyn, considered one of the greatest Soviet animators, structures the film as a series of interconnected memories which merge, recede, nest and shift in a fluid series of symbolic and nostalgic passages. At least three main stories are distinguishable: the tale of a childlike grey wolf in post-war USSR, a young artist at the beach with his fictitious creations and a festival on the eve before the WWII draft goes into affect. The art is a dreamlike collage of painted photographs, exquisitely detailed drawings and decorative landscapes peppered with cutouts creatures. Norshteyn demonstrates a brilliant sense of lighting, making scenes shimmer, glow and sink into shadow with expertise and instinct. His music is a similar collage of classical, tango and poetry.
Soviet censors freaked out when Norshteyn first submitted his work, worrying frantically that the film contained all sorts of social and political hidden messages. They were largely barking up the wrong tree, failing to understand (or perhaps understanding all too well) that the power of “Tale of Tales” came from its spellbinding humanist honesty and emotionally reflective tone. It has since grown to be regarded as one of the landmarks of short cinema and has been voted the greatest animated film of all time by international juries in 1984 and again in 2002. Other masterpieces by Norshsteyn include “The Hedgehog in the Fog” and “The Battle of Kerzhenets.”
Title: The Man Who Planted Trees (1987)
Director: Frederic Back
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: On DVD or online here.
Review:
Based on the popular story by Jean Giono, “The Man Who Planted Trees” is narrated by a traveler who happens upon a silent shepherd in desolate foothills of the Alps. When, as young man, he first meets the quiet, recluse, he is impressed by his stoic determination to carry out a self-proscribed task: to plant 100 acorns in the treeless valleys every day. The narrator revisits the site every few years, with absences during the first and second world wars to which the shepherd remains oblivious. After decades have passed, the entire region has become a lush “natural” forest which is declared a national park and celebrated by the local officials, tourists and immigrants who never know about the man who steadfastly planted trees. The art style has a water-colored warmth to it that flows like wind and water and fits well with the environmental themes and good-natured optimism. Originally made in French, Christopher Plummer provides the English narration.
“The Man Who Planted Trees” has long reigned atop the IMDB shorts list and quite deservingly so. The green, humanist themes occasionally border on melodramatic, but the sweeping allegorical charm is quite genuine and moving while the deft skill at story-telling is so realistic that for years many believed it to be a true story. A beautiful film, it should be required viewing (or reading) for all ages.
Title: What’s Opera, Doc (1957)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 2 DVD or online here.
Review:
An abbreviated version of Richard Wagner’s opera “The Ring of the Nibelung,” this short is purportedly the industry’s most highly regarded cartoon, topping the animator poll “The 50 Greatest Cartoons.” Elmer Fudd plays a Viking on the hunt for a rabbit (Bugs Bunny) who disguises himself as the Valkyrie Brunnhilda atop an obese equestrian to woo and eventually break Elmer Fudd’s heart, with tragic consequences. Jones admits to lavishing the project with far more time than usual, evident in the operatic visual extremes and the emphasis on pictorial humor and timing over wordplay and slapstick gags.
Along with “The Rabbit of Seville,” also by Chuck Jones/Warner Brothers, this is one of the great send-ups of opera, managing to earn both low brow and high brow appeal through its fun exaggerations and clever grasp of staging and music conventions. It remains one of the best known and most beloved cartoons of the golden era.
Title: Tale of Tales (1979)
Director: Yuriy Norshteyn
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: Masters of Russian Animation: Volume 3
Review:
“Tale of Tales” is a multi-layered allegory which touches upon national history, personal introspection and universal fairy tale tropes. Norshteyn, considered one of the greatest Soviet animators, structures the film as a series of interconnected memories which merge, recede, nest and shift in a fluid series of symbolic and nostalgic passages. At least three main stories are distinguishable: the tale of a childlike grey wolf in post-war USSR, a young artist at the beach with his fictitious creations and a festival on the eve before the WWII draft goes into affect. The art is a dreamlike collage of painted photographs, exquisitely detailed drawings and decorative landscapes peppered with cutouts creatures. Norshteyn demonstrates a brilliant sense of lighting, making scenes shimmer, glow and sink into shadow with expertise and instinct. His music is a similar collage of classical, tango and poetry.
Soviet censors freaked out when Norshteyn first submitted his work, worrying frantically that the film contained all sorts of social and political hidden messages. They were largely barking up the wrong tree, failing to understand (or perhaps understanding all too well) that the power of “Tale of Tales” came from its spellbinding humanist honesty and emotionally reflective tone. It has since grown to be regarded as one of the landmarks of short cinema and has been voted the greatest animated film of all time by international juries in 1984 and again in 2002. Other masterpieces by Norshsteyn include “The Hedgehog in the Fog” and “The Battle of Kerzhenets.”
Title: The Man Who Planted Trees (1987)
Director: Frederic Back
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: On DVD or online here.
Review:
Based on the popular story by Jean Giono, “The Man Who Planted Trees” is narrated by a traveler who happens upon a silent shepherd in desolate foothills of the Alps. When, as young man, he first meets the quiet, recluse, he is impressed by his stoic determination to carry out a self-proscribed task: to plant 100 acorns in the treeless valleys every day. The narrator revisits the site every few years, with absences during the first and second world wars to which the shepherd remains oblivious. After decades have passed, the entire region has become a lush “natural” forest which is declared a national park and celebrated by the local officials, tourists and immigrants who never know about the man who steadfastly planted trees. The art style has a water-colored warmth to it that flows like wind and water and fits well with the environmental themes and good-natured optimism. Originally made in French, Christopher Plummer provides the English narration.
“The Man Who Planted Trees” has long reigned atop the IMDB shorts list and quite deservingly so. The green, humanist themes occasionally border on melodramatic, but the sweeping allegorical charm is quite genuine and moving while the deft skill at story-telling is so realistic that for years many believed it to be a true story. A beautiful film, it should be required viewing (or reading) for all ages.
Saturday, April 19, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Guest Edition
Trying to covering a reasonable scope of the animated shorts available is not a healthy task for one person to attempt alone, so I dragged in a couple friends to help. It’s the Film Walrus’s first ever guest collaboration!
Two key areas where I have a rather limited knowledge are anime and music videos. I knew Mad Dog (John Mora), a veritable anime expert, would be perfect for handling the former. Folker (also known as my brother Patrick) is a musician and music blogger and he graciously agreed to write a review of his choice of music videos. I had originally suggested "Fell in Love with a Girl" by the White Stripes because of its interesting use of Lego stop-motion and CG, but I much prefer his own selection, “Agenda Suicide” by The Faint.
I didn’t plan it this way in advance, but it turned out I was already familiar with today’s three choices (frequent association with the authors does tend to do that) and I have to say that I think they are all highly worthy animated shorts. As usual, enjoy!
Title: Magnetic Rose (1995)
Director: Koji Morimoto
Time: 45 minutes
Availability: Available on the DVD “Memories”
Review:
In the not-too-distant future, a space debris salvage team gets an SOS signal in the form of an opera song from an abandoned zone of space with dangerous magnetic fields. They locate the origin of the signal, a collection of debris in the shape of a rose. When they investigate further, they find the debris actually hides an opulent mansion, presided over by a retired opera singer (based on the famous diva Maria Callas). As the rescue team begins to be terrorized by illusions and mind games, it becomes clear that the cause of this SOS may be something supernatural...
This is one of those rare animated shorts that manages to escape the animated short “ghetto” and become something that can compete with full-length features. Simply put, Magnetic Rose is one of the best animes I've ever seen. This is due in no small part to the impressive staff that worked on it. Koji Morimoto (Animatrix) is no stranger to shorts, and shows he can excel at convention as much as experimentation. Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue) wrote an incredibly dense, efficient screenplay. Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop) creates an indelible score that mixes saxophone, opera and Gregorian chant. The result is a truly haunting and masterful short.
Title: Noiseman Sound Insect (1997)
Director: Koji Morimoto
Time: 15 minutes
Availability: Availabile on R2 DVD or on Veoh here
Review:
In the futuristic city of Cahmpon, a scientist creates an artificial life-form made up of “noise,” which he dubs Noiseman. Noiseman is a capricious, selfish creature, however, and overthrows its maker to begin using his machines to enslave everyone in the city, giving him all their delicious sounds while turning them into helpless ghost-like creatures. A member of a biker gang and his female friend manage to break the mind control and try to stop Noiseman from completing his scheme.
It's not a stretch to say that this short is bizarre. The plot barely makes any sort of coherent sense, but the artistry at work is exhilarating. Cahmpon comes alive via some very sophisticated CG composite fly-through shots, giving it a totally three dimensional feel while remaining aesthetically 2D. Color and music are blaring at all times, with animation supervised by Masaaki Yuasa (Cat Soup) and a techno soundtrack by the legendary Yoko Kanno. Noiseman Sound Insect is more representative of Morimoto's frenetic, weird style, and it's a wild ride.
Title: Agenda Suicide (2002)
Band: The Faint (director unknown, made through Saddle Creek)
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Free for download from the band's website, but available in what I hope will be higher quality on the Agenda Suicide single.
Review:
The Faint are a dance-rock band, a sort of New New Wave thing. Continuing the New Wave tradition of writing dancy pop songs about dark subject matter (i.e., OMD's "Enola Gay" or Nena's "99 Luftballons"), "Agenda Suicide" is a song fairly clearly criticizing the typical 9-to-5 lifestyle: "As I lay to die the things I think / Did I waste my time? / I think I did, I worked for life," with the refrain, "All we want are pretty little homes." Things begin with a man waking up, taking some pills with his coffee, descending into a subway, and ascending into an office. At work, the man is pointed and yelled at by a presumed superior in what feels an abusive manner. Authoritative figures talk in screens in the background of a long line of people, and time feels omnipresent. The man seems suspiciously bored and removed, and on his ride home, he sees several people jump in front of his subway. When the next day starts, things are much weirder. People seem to fall down and/or die for no reason. Human heads are replaced with those of elephants'. The man occasionally phases slightly in and out of static. Ultimately, at the bottom of a structural nightmare, he steps in front of a subway and splinters into pieces.
The status quo appears bleak and the mood is grim. All the while, things keep moving, colors flash, text rushes by, and other people move around in a drone-like fashion. The subway and the office are often seen as a sort of architectural schematic; we see the lines of their outlines and form but no detail. The video is mostly CG with rotoscoped actors grafted in for people and photos overlaid for certain other objects. The photographic images are all black-and-white, and everything else uses fairly simply color schemes (with a lot of rather ugly orange).
Clearly, the Faint do not look fondly upon the regular live-work-die philosophy. This video was banned from MTV.
Two key areas where I have a rather limited knowledge are anime and music videos. I knew Mad Dog (John Mora), a veritable anime expert, would be perfect for handling the former. Folker (also known as my brother Patrick) is a musician and music blogger and he graciously agreed to write a review of his choice of music videos. I had originally suggested "Fell in Love with a Girl" by the White Stripes because of its interesting use of Lego stop-motion and CG, but I much prefer his own selection, “Agenda Suicide” by The Faint.
I didn’t plan it this way in advance, but it turned out I was already familiar with today’s three choices (frequent association with the authors does tend to do that) and I have to say that I think they are all highly worthy animated shorts. As usual, enjoy!
Title: Magnetic Rose (1995)
Director: Koji Morimoto
Time: 45 minutes
Availability: Available on the DVD “Memories”
Review:
In the not-too-distant future, a space debris salvage team gets an SOS signal in the form of an opera song from an abandoned zone of space with dangerous magnetic fields. They locate the origin of the signal, a collection of debris in the shape of a rose. When they investigate further, they find the debris actually hides an opulent mansion, presided over by a retired opera singer (based on the famous diva Maria Callas). As the rescue team begins to be terrorized by illusions and mind games, it becomes clear that the cause of this SOS may be something supernatural...
This is one of those rare animated shorts that manages to escape the animated short “ghetto” and become something that can compete with full-length features. Simply put, Magnetic Rose is one of the best animes I've ever seen. This is due in no small part to the impressive staff that worked on it. Koji Morimoto (Animatrix) is no stranger to shorts, and shows he can excel at convention as much as experimentation. Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue) wrote an incredibly dense, efficient screenplay. Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop) creates an indelible score that mixes saxophone, opera and Gregorian chant. The result is a truly haunting and masterful short.
Title: Noiseman Sound Insect (1997)
Director: Koji Morimoto
Time: 15 minutes
Availability: Availabile on R2 DVD or on Veoh here
Review:
In the futuristic city of Cahmpon, a scientist creates an artificial life-form made up of “noise,” which he dubs Noiseman. Noiseman is a capricious, selfish creature, however, and overthrows its maker to begin using his machines to enslave everyone in the city, giving him all their delicious sounds while turning them into helpless ghost-like creatures. A member of a biker gang and his female friend manage to break the mind control and try to stop Noiseman from completing his scheme.
It's not a stretch to say that this short is bizarre. The plot barely makes any sort of coherent sense, but the artistry at work is exhilarating. Cahmpon comes alive via some very sophisticated CG composite fly-through shots, giving it a totally three dimensional feel while remaining aesthetically 2D. Color and music are blaring at all times, with animation supervised by Masaaki Yuasa (Cat Soup) and a techno soundtrack by the legendary Yoko Kanno. Noiseman Sound Insect is more representative of Morimoto's frenetic, weird style, and it's a wild ride.
Title: Agenda Suicide (2002)
Band: The Faint (director unknown, made through Saddle Creek)
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Free for download from the band's website, but available in what I hope will be higher quality on the Agenda Suicide single.
Review:
The Faint are a dance-rock band, a sort of New New Wave thing. Continuing the New Wave tradition of writing dancy pop songs about dark subject matter (i.e., OMD's "Enola Gay" or Nena's "99 Luftballons"), "Agenda Suicide" is a song fairly clearly criticizing the typical 9-to-5 lifestyle: "As I lay to die the things I think / Did I waste my time? / I think I did, I worked for life," with the refrain, "All we want are pretty little homes." Things begin with a man waking up, taking some pills with his coffee, descending into a subway, and ascending into an office. At work, the man is pointed and yelled at by a presumed superior in what feels an abusive manner. Authoritative figures talk in screens in the background of a long line of people, and time feels omnipresent. The man seems suspiciously bored and removed, and on his ride home, he sees several people jump in front of his subway. When the next day starts, things are much weirder. People seem to fall down and/or die for no reason. Human heads are replaced with those of elephants'. The man occasionally phases slightly in and out of static. Ultimately, at the bottom of a structural nightmare, he steps in front of a subway and splinters into pieces.
The status quo appears bleak and the mood is grim. All the while, things keep moving, colors flash, text rushes by, and other people move around in a drone-like fashion. The subway and the office are often seen as a sort of architectural schematic; we see the lines of their outlines and form but no detail. The video is mostly CG with rotoscoped actors grafted in for people and photos overlaid for certain other objects. The photographic images are all black-and-white, and everything else uses fairly simply color schemes (with a lot of rather ugly orange).
Clearly, the Faint do not look fondly upon the regular live-work-die philosophy. This video was banned from MTV.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: CG Edition
Title: Geri’s Game (1997)
Director: Jan Pinkava
Time: 5 minutes
Availability: Online through Pixar’s site / iTune’s Store here.
Review:
Starting with “Luxo Jr.” in 1986 Pixar has created an winning streak of high-profile CG shorts, of which my favorite is “Geri’s Game.” Geri is an elderly chess player who squares off against his doppelganger in a scenic park. Moving back and forth around the board, a bespectacled version of Geri matches wits with his naked-eye twin and the combat soon heats up. With his strategies failing and checkmate looming, the glasses-wearing Geri fakes a heart attack, taking in his rival long enough to turn the tide (180 degrees). The loser must begrudgingly pay their usual wager, though of course, there is really only one Geri.
After a long hiatus from animated shorts, “Geri’s Game” made a huge leap forward for Pixar, demonstrating human movement, expression and depth along with the original goal of getting the clothing to look right. I think this one still plays well today though CG has reached all new levels of realism. Other popular Pixar shorts include “Tin Toy,” “For the Birds,” and “One Man Band.” In the last decade, the company traditionally presents an original short along with each new feature.
Title: 9 (2005)
Director: Shane Acker
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A zippered-up doll creature in a post-apocalyptic junkyard/toy-graveyard witnesses the deaths of his fellow kind at the hands of an insectoid-crab robot. Left alone in the rubble, #9 (each of his people is numbered on their backs and their pelts are stitched onto their killer) hatches a risky revenge, tricking the monster with the help of a soul-compass, a dummy and a carefully engineered deathtrap. “9” is one of the best-looking CG shorts yet made, making ample use of texture, shadow and a dense mise-en-scene to show off a sci-fi tinged world that feels immediately real.
The academy overlooked this one for reason of their own, but computer graphics showcase SIGGRAPH made no hesitation awarding this short their top prize. The film has been so successful that a feature length adaptation has been green lit with Acker in the director’s chair and an all-star voice cast that includes John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer. Focus Features is hoping to get it into theaters this year, but don’t be surprised if it slips to next.
Title: Elephants Dream (2006)
Director: Bassam Kurdali
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: Available as a free open-source download from the homepage here along with all the productions files or on YouTube here
Review:
Elderly, eccentric Proog leads his young skeptical accomplice Emo through a massive, unpredictable facility known only as The Machine. Each room of The Machine can vary widely from the next. They are connected by vast systems of passageways, catwalks and elevator shafts festooned with wires and populated by exotic robotic creatures. Proog expertly navigates the dangerous environment, but fails to impress his protégé. It becomes ever more obvious that Emo does not even see The Machine and that the vision presented to the viewer is only in Proog’s imagination.
“Elephants Dream” is a landmark in CG cinema, funded by donations and created entirely* with open source software (freely available programs whose code can be modified by any user): Blender as the 3D modeling suite and Linux as the operating system. The end result is a staggering demonstration of visual effects that outdoes most of the output from mammoth animation studios. Despite the gorgeous presentation, many viewers were disappointed with the highly abstract plot that leaves interpretation very open-ended. I, for one, see this as a plus, flexing the wider artistic choice available to independent production.
BONUS!!! (Extra review provided to shed some light into the obscure depths of internet-only CG shorts)
Title: The End (2005)
Director: Michel Samreth, Maxime Leduc and Martin Ruyant
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A scarecrow is put on trial and condemned for the crime of friendliness towards a crow. His ragtag peers throw him in a decrepit cell where he awaits a fiery death sentence. To add injury to insult, the crow returns and rips hay from his body for its nest. Exasperated at this last straw (myeh), the scarecrow collapses, awaking later to a very pleasant surprise. The B&W CG visuals are not as polished as some of the big studio output, but the bold character design manages to be creepy and sympathetic at once.
Burdened by a generic name and a total lack of publicity, I’m not surprised how hard it was to dig up information about this short. It was made by the talented students of France’s Supinfocom, a prestigious French animation school whose members put out a wealth of impressive material completely below the radar. You can add this to the long list of great shorts adrift in the swirl of obscurity along with The Black Heart Gang’s gorgeous gem “The Tale of How” (2006) which could just as equally have held this spot on my overview (follow the links and go watch that one as well).
Director: Jan Pinkava
Time: 5 minutes
Availability: Online through Pixar’s site / iTune’s Store here.
Review:
Starting with “Luxo Jr.” in 1986 Pixar has created an winning streak of high-profile CG shorts, of which my favorite is “Geri’s Game.” Geri is an elderly chess player who squares off against his doppelganger in a scenic park. Moving back and forth around the board, a bespectacled version of Geri matches wits with his naked-eye twin and the combat soon heats up. With his strategies failing and checkmate looming, the glasses-wearing Geri fakes a heart attack, taking in his rival long enough to turn the tide (180 degrees). The loser must begrudgingly pay their usual wager, though of course, there is really only one Geri.
After a long hiatus from animated shorts, “Geri’s Game” made a huge leap forward for Pixar, demonstrating human movement, expression and depth along with the original goal of getting the clothing to look right. I think this one still plays well today though CG has reached all new levels of realism. Other popular Pixar shorts include “Tin Toy,” “For the Birds,” and “One Man Band.” In the last decade, the company traditionally presents an original short along with each new feature.
Title: 9 (2005)
Director: Shane Acker
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A zippered-up doll creature in a post-apocalyptic junkyard/toy-graveyard witnesses the deaths of his fellow kind at the hands of an insectoid-crab robot. Left alone in the rubble, #9 (each of his people is numbered on their backs and their pelts are stitched onto their killer) hatches a risky revenge, tricking the monster with the help of a soul-compass, a dummy and a carefully engineered deathtrap. “9” is one of the best-looking CG shorts yet made, making ample use of texture, shadow and a dense mise-en-scene to show off a sci-fi tinged world that feels immediately real.
The academy overlooked this one for reason of their own, but computer graphics showcase SIGGRAPH made no hesitation awarding this short their top prize. The film has been so successful that a feature length adaptation has been green lit with Acker in the director’s chair and an all-star voice cast that includes John C. Reilly, Jennifer Connelly, Elijah Wood, Crispin Glover, Martin Landau and Christopher Plummer. Focus Features is hoping to get it into theaters this year, but don’t be surprised if it slips to next.
Title: Elephants Dream (2006)
Director: Bassam Kurdali
Time: 11 minutes
Availability: Available as a free open-source download from the homepage here along with all the productions files or on YouTube here
Review:
Elderly, eccentric Proog leads his young skeptical accomplice Emo through a massive, unpredictable facility known only as The Machine. Each room of The Machine can vary widely from the next. They are connected by vast systems of passageways, catwalks and elevator shafts festooned with wires and populated by exotic robotic creatures. Proog expertly navigates the dangerous environment, but fails to impress his protégé. It becomes ever more obvious that Emo does not even see The Machine and that the vision presented to the viewer is only in Proog’s imagination.
“Elephants Dream” is a landmark in CG cinema, funded by donations and created entirely* with open source software (freely available programs whose code can be modified by any user): Blender as the 3D modeling suite and Linux as the operating system. The end result is a staggering demonstration of visual effects that outdoes most of the output from mammoth animation studios. Despite the gorgeous presentation, many viewers were disappointed with the highly abstract plot that leaves interpretation very open-ended. I, for one, see this as a plus, flexing the wider artistic choice available to independent production.
BONUS!!! (Extra review provided to shed some light into the obscure depths of internet-only CG shorts)
Title: The End (2005)
Director: Michel Samreth, Maxime Leduc and Martin Ruyant
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
A scarecrow is put on trial and condemned for the crime of friendliness towards a crow. His ragtag peers throw him in a decrepit cell where he awaits a fiery death sentence. To add injury to insult, the crow returns and rips hay from his body for its nest. Exasperated at this last straw (myeh), the scarecrow collapses, awaking later to a very pleasant surprise. The B&W CG visuals are not as polished as some of the big studio output, but the bold character design manages to be creepy and sympathetic at once.
Burdened by a generic name and a total lack of publicity, I’m not surprised how hard it was to dig up information about this short. It was made by the talented students of France’s Supinfocom, a prestigious French animation school whose members put out a wealth of impressive material completely below the radar. You can add this to the long list of great shorts adrift in the swirl of obscurity along with The Black Heart Gang’s gorgeous gem “The Tale of How” (2006) which could just as equally have held this spot on my overview (follow the links and go watch that one as well).
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Claymation Edition
Title: Dimensions of Dialogue (1982)
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Time: 12 minutes
Availability: Available on “The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer” DVD and in two parts on YouTube (low quality).
Review:
“Dimensions of Dialogue” is divided into three parts. The first, “Exhaustive Discussion,” features three Giuseppe Arcimboldo-style heads made out of food, kitchenware and office supplies respectively. They take turns eating each other and variously crushing, mashing, chewing, tearing and decimating the contents of one another before vomiting, eventually reducing each other to indistinguishable homogenous profiles. In “Passionate Discourse,” a clay man and woman quite literally become one during sex, spawning an amorphous baby that they scorn. The child causes to fight, returning them to a churning mass of clay once more. In “Factual Conversation,” the least of the three segments, two busts emit complimentary items from their mouths (such as pencil and sharpener, shoe and shoelace, tooth and toothbrush) though they eventually cycle through every possible permutation at the expense of logic.
One of the seminal works of claymation, “Dimensions of Dialogue’s” brilliance hasn’t faded in the previous decades even as claymation and CG have become ever more complicated. Svankmajer’s early work with stop-motion would influence his entire career and find its way into nearly all of his feature films, which include “Alice,” “Conspirators of Pleasure,” “Little Otik” and “Faust.” Though you can find this one on the internet, I encourage anyone who wishes to see it to check their library or use Netflix and enjoy a pristine transfer.
Title: Closed Mondays (1974)
Director: Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here.
Review:
An elderly drunk wanders into a closed art museum (that advertises the “usual crap”) on a Monday evening. He experiences what might be hallucinations in which the artwork comes to life before his eyes, brought on either by his inebriated state or extreme Stendhal Syndrome. An abstract painting puts on a curious musical show of beating colors while a giant cat-like robot installation, once activated, undergoes a series of independent mutations beyond the understanding of even its “inferior creators.” While initially dismissing the art with phrases like “pshh” and “what the f?” the old man becomes increasingly distressed, eventually trying to escape through a painting of a window. Lunging for the door to escape, he steps onto a pedestal and learns the true cost of entering a museum that is Closed Mondays.
This 1974 academy award winner for best animated short manages to celebrate and mock art at the same time, while telling a brief little story full of character and humor and never resorting to repetition. If you enjoy this one, you might also like “The Critic” (which took the 1963 Oscar) about a cranky Jewish man in the audience of an avant-garde animated short who loudly makes derogatory comments much to the chagrin of the other patrons. It was written by none other than Mel Brooks nearly five years before he went into feature filmmaking.
Title: More (1998)
Director: Mark Osborne
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Available to watch on Osborne’s website here.
Review:
In a grey-scale alternative world of sad-eyed clay figures and urban uniformity a lowly worker toils a factory while dreaming of an invention that will bring back the innocence of his childhood. He eventually succeeds in transferring the glowing energy within himself into a pair of goggles. The new spectacles render the world in pulsating Technicolor hues, becoming an overnight sensation and getting him named “Greatest Inventor Ever.” However, rising to the status of manufacturing mogul only puts him in charge of the pitiable factory grunts he once worked next to and fails to bring him real happiness. Discovering that the light inside him has gone out, he peers out of his skyscraper office at the children whose joy he can never truly recapture.
Mark Osborne claims to have envisioned the entire story in his head whilst listening to New Order’s “Elegia.” It’s certainly understandable that the overpowering musical accompaniment should be so key to “More’s” emotion resonance. A definite labor of love, Osborne’s near-perfect elegiac mediation on the loss of innocence under capitalist society was made for IMAX, but couldn’t find an audience until he uploaded it to iFilms and got it played on MTV2 (where I first saw it). It’s a personal favorite of my own and is often hailed as the greatest stop-motion short of all time by my generation, yet it shockingly failed to clinch the academy award the year it came out.
Director: Jan Svankmajer
Time: 12 minutes
Availability: Available on “The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer” DVD and in two parts on YouTube (low quality).
Review:
“Dimensions of Dialogue” is divided into three parts. The first, “Exhaustive Discussion,” features three Giuseppe Arcimboldo-style heads made out of food, kitchenware and office supplies respectively. They take turns eating each other and variously crushing, mashing, chewing, tearing and decimating the contents of one another before vomiting, eventually reducing each other to indistinguishable homogenous profiles. In “Passionate Discourse,” a clay man and woman quite literally become one during sex, spawning an amorphous baby that they scorn. The child causes to fight, returning them to a churning mass of clay once more. In “Factual Conversation,” the least of the three segments, two busts emit complimentary items from their mouths (such as pencil and sharpener, shoe and shoelace, tooth and toothbrush) though they eventually cycle through every possible permutation at the expense of logic.
One of the seminal works of claymation, “Dimensions of Dialogue’s” brilliance hasn’t faded in the previous decades even as claymation and CG have become ever more complicated. Svankmajer’s early work with stop-motion would influence his entire career and find its way into nearly all of his feature films, which include “Alice,” “Conspirators of Pleasure,” “Little Otik” and “Faust.” Though you can find this one on the internet, I encourage anyone who wishes to see it to check their library or use Netflix and enjoy a pristine transfer.
Title: Closed Mondays (1974)
Director: Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here.
Review:
An elderly drunk wanders into a closed art museum (that advertises the “usual crap”) on a Monday evening. He experiences what might be hallucinations in which the artwork comes to life before his eyes, brought on either by his inebriated state or extreme Stendhal Syndrome. An abstract painting puts on a curious musical show of beating colors while a giant cat-like robot installation, once activated, undergoes a series of independent mutations beyond the understanding of even its “inferior creators.” While initially dismissing the art with phrases like “pshh” and “what the f?” the old man becomes increasingly distressed, eventually trying to escape through a painting of a window. Lunging for the door to escape, he steps onto a pedestal and learns the true cost of entering a museum that is Closed Mondays.
This 1974 academy award winner for best animated short manages to celebrate and mock art at the same time, while telling a brief little story full of character and humor and never resorting to repetition. If you enjoy this one, you might also like “The Critic” (which took the 1963 Oscar) about a cranky Jewish man in the audience of an avant-garde animated short who loudly makes derogatory comments much to the chagrin of the other patrons. It was written by none other than Mel Brooks nearly five years before he went into feature filmmaking.
Title: More (1998)
Director: Mark Osborne
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Available to watch on Osborne’s website here.
Review:
In a grey-scale alternative world of sad-eyed clay figures and urban uniformity a lowly worker toils a factory while dreaming of an invention that will bring back the innocence of his childhood. He eventually succeeds in transferring the glowing energy within himself into a pair of goggles. The new spectacles render the world in pulsating Technicolor hues, becoming an overnight sensation and getting him named “Greatest Inventor Ever.” However, rising to the status of manufacturing mogul only puts him in charge of the pitiable factory grunts he once worked next to and fails to bring him real happiness. Discovering that the light inside him has gone out, he peers out of his skyscraper office at the children whose joy he can never truly recapture.
Mark Osborne claims to have envisioned the entire story in his head whilst listening to New Order’s “Elegia.” It’s certainly understandable that the overpowering musical accompaniment should be so key to “More’s” emotion resonance. A definite labor of love, Osborne’s near-perfect elegiac mediation on the loss of innocence under capitalist society was made for IMAX, but couldn’t find an audience until he uploaded it to iFilms and got it played on MTV2 (where I first saw it). It’s a personal favorite of my own and is often hailed as the greatest stop-motion short of all time by my generation, yet it shockingly failed to clinch the academy award the year it came out.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Experimental Edition
Title: Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987)
Director: Todd Haynes
Time: 43 minutes
Availability: Available only in bootleg format.
Review:
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) launched his career with this unusual short, a biopic on the tragic anorexia death of musician Karen Carpenter told using Barbie doll reenactments. His illegal appropriation of tracks by The Carpenters and his unflattering depiction of her family led to Richard Carpenter successfully suing Haynes and having all the original copies except one destroyed. Despite this controversy and several questionable liberties with the facts, “Superstar” is a remarkably sensitive and even heartfelt study, clearly taking Karen’s side and somehow managing to keep the cascade of irony in check.
No amount of official censure could ever truly kill Haynes’s debut cult opus, and the documentary has led a healthy life in the black-market alleys behind America’s art houses. The picture deserves its reputation, setting the tone for later projects that tap kitsch, irony and parody as a form of loving tribute rather than jeering snub. The project still triggers debates on topics as diverse as eating disorders (Haynes is said to have carved the Barbie doll plastic away layer by layer throughout the film), celebrity status, feminism, music rights and middle-class hypocrisy. Though not technically a stop-motion film, it’s still must-see puppetry.
Title: A Walk Through H (1978)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Time: 40 minutes
Availability: The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: Volume 2
Review:
“A Walk Through H” is a narrated journey across 92 maps, arranged in a gallery for an ailing Peter Greenaway by his enigmatic fictitious alter-ego Tulse Luper. The maps serve as a visual motif upon which to meditate on the act of journeying, both literally and metaphorically. The landscapes are primarily surrealist fantasies and the narration is an elaborate game, but the tone is pitched towards playful profundity. “There will be plenty of time to decide what H is,” claims Tulse Luper, “along the way,” though the underlying implication is that it could stand for either heaven or hell, making the whole exercise an allegory for the commute between life and death.
While not as influential as Greenaway’s “Vertical Features Remake,” I find this short somewhat more satisfying and watchable. It has many of the traits most commonly associated with Greenaway’s work: sly narration, a systematic pattern, the number 92, the mysterious influence of Tulse Luper, self-reflexivity and subtle absurdist humor. It opens and closes with live-action sequences and uses stills of fake maps (which often look nothing like maps at all) for the bulk of its “story,” but I consider it an experimental kin of animation.
Title: Zorn’s Lemma (1970)
Director: Hollis Frampton
Time: 59 minutes
Availability: Available to watch legally online at UBUWEB here.
Review:
“Zorn’s Lemma” is divided unequally into three parts. It opens on solid black leader while a narrator reads alphabet rhymes from the Bay State Primer for puritanical children. The central core of the film runs through the alphabet showing each letter. It then loops through the letters over and over again, each time using different representations of the letters and replacing one of them with a found-text that starts with that letter (each from a different sign and never repeating a word). Once all the letters have become words, the cycle repeats, this time transforming the words into short video clips. The final passage is a long, nearly continuous take of two people walking through the snow towards the horizon while women alternate reading one word at a time from The Theory of Light.
Frampton’s “Zorn’s Lemma” made waves in the experimental New York underground circuit and influenced the coming generation of structuralists and formalists. His strict alphabetic organization was daring in its day, and the high contrast it makes with the first and last section of the film has led to plenty of academic speculation. The middle passage, however, is what truly defines the work and lends it a hypnotic, even tense, rhythm. I include it as animation, although others would say it clearly is not, because of the way he breaks down the imagery into a series of 24 (j and v are combined) single-second still/clips, artificially animating the alphabet in a way that consciously evokes projection speed. This is probably my favorite avant-garde short.
Director: Todd Haynes
Time: 43 minutes
Availability: Available only in bootleg format.
Review:
Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, I’m Not There) launched his career with this unusual short, a biopic on the tragic anorexia death of musician Karen Carpenter told using Barbie doll reenactments. His illegal appropriation of tracks by The Carpenters and his unflattering depiction of her family led to Richard Carpenter successfully suing Haynes and having all the original copies except one destroyed. Despite this controversy and several questionable liberties with the facts, “Superstar” is a remarkably sensitive and even heartfelt study, clearly taking Karen’s side and somehow managing to keep the cascade of irony in check.
No amount of official censure could ever truly kill Haynes’s debut cult opus, and the documentary has led a healthy life in the black-market alleys behind America’s art houses. The picture deserves its reputation, setting the tone for later projects that tap kitsch, irony and parody as a form of loving tribute rather than jeering snub. The project still triggers debates on topics as diverse as eating disorders (Haynes is said to have carved the Barbie doll plastic away layer by layer throughout the film), celebrity status, feminism, music rights and middle-class hypocrisy. Though not technically a stop-motion film, it’s still must-see puppetry.
Title: A Walk Through H (1978)
Director: Peter Greenaway
Time: 40 minutes
Availability: The Early Films of Peter Greenaway: Volume 2
Review:
“A Walk Through H” is a narrated journey across 92 maps, arranged in a gallery for an ailing Peter Greenaway by his enigmatic fictitious alter-ego Tulse Luper. The maps serve as a visual motif upon which to meditate on the act of journeying, both literally and metaphorically. The landscapes are primarily surrealist fantasies and the narration is an elaborate game, but the tone is pitched towards playful profundity. “There will be plenty of time to decide what H is,” claims Tulse Luper, “along the way,” though the underlying implication is that it could stand for either heaven or hell, making the whole exercise an allegory for the commute between life and death.
While not as influential as Greenaway’s “Vertical Features Remake,” I find this short somewhat more satisfying and watchable. It has many of the traits most commonly associated with Greenaway’s work: sly narration, a systematic pattern, the number 92, the mysterious influence of Tulse Luper, self-reflexivity and subtle absurdist humor. It opens and closes with live-action sequences and uses stills of fake maps (which often look nothing like maps at all) for the bulk of its “story,” but I consider it an experimental kin of animation.
Title: Zorn’s Lemma (1970)
Director: Hollis Frampton
Time: 59 minutes
Availability: Available to watch legally online at UBUWEB here.
Review:
“Zorn’s Lemma” is divided unequally into three parts. It opens on solid black leader while a narrator reads alphabet rhymes from the Bay State Primer for puritanical children. The central core of the film runs through the alphabet showing each letter. It then loops through the letters over and over again, each time using different representations of the letters and replacing one of them with a found-text that starts with that letter (each from a different sign and never repeating a word). Once all the letters have become words, the cycle repeats, this time transforming the words into short video clips. The final passage is a long, nearly continuous take of two people walking through the snow towards the horizon while women alternate reading one word at a time from The Theory of Light.
Frampton’s “Zorn’s Lemma” made waves in the experimental New York underground circuit and influenced the coming generation of structuralists and formalists. His strict alphabetic organization was daring in its day, and the high contrast it makes with the first and last section of the film has led to plenty of academic speculation. The middle passage, however, is what truly defines the work and lends it a hypnotic, even tense, rhythm. I include it as animation, although others would say it clearly is not, because of the way he breaks down the imagery into a series of 24 (j and v are combined) single-second still/clips, artificially animating the alphabet in a way that consciously evokes projection speed. This is probably my favorite avant-garde short.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Feline Edition
Title: Bad Luck Blackie (1949)
Director: Tex Avery
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Google video and YouTube here.
Review:
A tiny white kitten finds herself endlessly harassed by a sadistic bulldog, until a chance alley encounter with Bad Luck Blackie, a black cat who happily accepts commissions to incur bum luck on animal abusers. Simply by trotting past causes some grave misfortune to befall his victim, usually in the form a heavy object that befalls on their head. The dog is subjected to a rather senseless succession of cranial injuries including my personal favorite: he wields a lucky horseshoe to counteract the bad karma only to get conked on the noggin by three horseshoes from heaven… and the horse. When the villain contrives to paint Blackie white, it’s up to the kitten to save the day.
“Bad Luck Blackie” is the undisputed king of things-falling-on-people’s-head comedy, a joke that manages to stay funny despite repetition because of the brisk pace and surprising variation. There is a lot of graphic wit selling the physical comedy, including visual echoes on leitmotifs like stairs and B&W color, but the main driving force behind this being my favorite Tex Avery short is the fun-loving, zany violence (and the clear implication that Blackie is a hobo cat).
Title: The Cat Came Back (1988)
Director: Cordell Barker
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available to watch online at the National Film Board here.
Review:
This animated retelling of the vintage 1893 song “And the Cat Came Back” describes Mr. Johnson’s failed attempts to get rid of a rather destructive and tenacious cat. He tries abandoning it in the woods and even drowning it in a sack, but upon returning home he always finds the feline hard at work dismantling his property and lacerating his livelihood. The animation style is not particularly attractive, using the stout character design and wavy uncertain lines typical of Richard Condie and Cordell Barker, but the unkempt, dynamic visuals fit the manic music and mini-tragedy arc.
The National Film Board of Canada has helped produce many popular animated and stop-motion shorts including “The Big Snit” and “Every Child.” They also provided a lucrative home for experimental shorts auteur Norman McLaren, whose "Pas de Deus" and “Neighbours” (a personal favorite, dealing with escalating Cold War politics) should have gotten full reviews, but you can at least watch them through the links. “The Cat Came Back” is a good example of some of NFBC's best output, setting a catchy song to a memorable story and aiming for a broad appeal despite moments that might offend the sensitive (humane society alarmists in this case).
Title: Cat Soup (2001)
Director: Tatsuo Sato
Time: 35 minutes
Availability: Available on the self-titled DVD.
Review:
“Cat Soup” is a spirit-quest about a young cat named Nyatta who tries to pull back his sister from Death himself. He succeeds only in splitting her soul in twain and must take his zombified sibling on a journey through a phantasmagorical underworld to revive her. His adventures take him to a circus presided over by God, a desert where a liquid elephant marches and a dinner where he’s not on the guest list but the menu. Except for the plushie-potential character design this short defies most anime conventions (and even there the vacuous giant-eyes are more of a mockery than a rehash) and stands out as a creative tour de force that dips into ancient myths and contemporary psychoses with equal imagination.
“Cat Soup” was brought to my attention by “Mad Dog” Mora, and it has since maintained a place in my all-time pantheon of great films (not limited to animation or shorts). Few works ever break the mold so completely and do so while never sacrificing execution just for the sake of novelty. The DVD may cost a pretty penny, but the film itself is worth it and the disc case keeps up the experimental gimmickry with its pink gel-filled cover on which you can push around suspended character cutouts.
Director: Tex Avery
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Google video and YouTube here.
Review:
A tiny white kitten finds herself endlessly harassed by a sadistic bulldog, until a chance alley encounter with Bad Luck Blackie, a black cat who happily accepts commissions to incur bum luck on animal abusers. Simply by trotting past causes some grave misfortune to befall his victim, usually in the form a heavy object that befalls on their head. The dog is subjected to a rather senseless succession of cranial injuries including my personal favorite: he wields a lucky horseshoe to counteract the bad karma only to get conked on the noggin by three horseshoes from heaven… and the horse. When the villain contrives to paint Blackie white, it’s up to the kitten to save the day.
“Bad Luck Blackie” is the undisputed king of things-falling-on-people’s-head comedy, a joke that manages to stay funny despite repetition because of the brisk pace and surprising variation. There is a lot of graphic wit selling the physical comedy, including visual echoes on leitmotifs like stairs and B&W color, but the main driving force behind this being my favorite Tex Avery short is the fun-loving, zany violence (and the clear implication that Blackie is a hobo cat).
Title: The Cat Came Back (1988)
Director: Cordell Barker
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available to watch online at the National Film Board here.
Review:
This animated retelling of the vintage 1893 song “And the Cat Came Back” describes Mr. Johnson’s failed attempts to get rid of a rather destructive and tenacious cat. He tries abandoning it in the woods and even drowning it in a sack, but upon returning home he always finds the feline hard at work dismantling his property and lacerating his livelihood. The animation style is not particularly attractive, using the stout character design and wavy uncertain lines typical of Richard Condie and Cordell Barker, but the unkempt, dynamic visuals fit the manic music and mini-tragedy arc.
The National Film Board of Canada has helped produce many popular animated and stop-motion shorts including “The Big Snit” and “Every Child.” They also provided a lucrative home for experimental shorts auteur Norman McLaren, whose "Pas de Deus" and “Neighbours” (a personal favorite, dealing with escalating Cold War politics) should have gotten full reviews, but you can at least watch them through the links. “The Cat Came Back” is a good example of some of NFBC's best output, setting a catchy song to a memorable story and aiming for a broad appeal despite moments that might offend the sensitive (humane society alarmists in this case).
Title: Cat Soup (2001)
Director: Tatsuo Sato
Time: 35 minutes
Availability: Available on the self-titled DVD.
Review:
“Cat Soup” is a spirit-quest about a young cat named Nyatta who tries to pull back his sister from Death himself. He succeeds only in splitting her soul in twain and must take his zombified sibling on a journey through a phantasmagorical underworld to revive her. His adventures take him to a circus presided over by God, a desert where a liquid elephant marches and a dinner where he’s not on the guest list but the menu. Except for the plushie-potential character design this short defies most anime conventions (and even there the vacuous giant-eyes are more of a mockery than a rehash) and stands out as a creative tour de force that dips into ancient myths and contemporary psychoses with equal imagination.
“Cat Soup” was brought to my attention by “Mad Dog” Mora, and it has since maintained a place in my all-time pantheon of great films (not limited to animation or shorts). Few works ever break the mold so completely and do so while never sacrificing execution just for the sake of novelty. The DVD may cost a pretty penny, but the film itself is worth it and the disc case keeps up the experimental gimmickry with its pink gel-filled cover on which you can push around suspended character cutouts.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Interesting Anomalies
Title: Minnie the Moocher (1932)
Director: Max Fleischer
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here
Review:
“Minnie the Moocher” is an oddity that is better seen than described. This early Betty Boop cartoon features the flapper running away from her overbearing parents with her dog/boyfriend Bimbo. They take refuge in a cave haunted by a ghostly tentacled walrus (lending it special meaning for this blog) who is actually a rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing his drug-reference-inflected scat jazz hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Some friendly beasties join in the opium-fogged merriment before Betty flees back to her home, sweet home.
This is vintage Betty Boop before the Production Code came and spoiled everybody’s fun, making the now-iconic sex symbol lengthen her miniskirt and stop dating a dog. (Betty was originally a poodle, but since she’d evolved into a human as the cartoon went on the Hays Office was afraid it would teach kids that bestiality was OK.) Somehow the censors missed the references to marijuana, opium and cocaine in Calloway’s song (used in both a live-action intro and the phantom walrus’s subterranean shuffle), leaving the way clear for one of the earliest catchy, tripped-out toons. Incidentally, I had trouble finding very many examples of rotoscoping (animating on top of live-action film stock) that I liked, but another good example is Petrov’s “Firing Range” (1975).
Title: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)
Director: Bob Clampett
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: If you think for one moment that Warner Brothers will ever release this officially, you don’t know public relations departments. Pick your favorite bootleg method or try this site.
Review:
So White is a well-endowed laundry girl who is swept off her feet by Prince Chawmin to go jitterbugging downtown. Her petulant employer, a rich queen, is not particularly smitten with the idea and hires Murder Incorporated to deal with it. (The motto on the side of their black van reads “We rub out anybody $1.00, Midgets – half-price, Japs – free.”) The hired killers are all easily seduced by So White, so the queen has to bump her off with a poisoned apple. Afterwards Prince Chawmin tries to revive her with a kiss, but he lacks the dy-no-mite to recharge her batteries. A goofy American soldier is more successful.
“Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” is one of the better known cartoons from the Censored Eleven, a group of shorts deemed too racist to be unleashed upon audiences in the 1960’s and never since circulated except at rare festival screenings. While the rampant racist, sexist and politically incorrect material is enough to offend almost any watchdog group, it still has a loyal and loving following. Clampett, while misguided, intended the film to be a tribute to his favorite African-American jazz and swing musicians, some of whom provided the ending music. I can’t say I like this short, but I think that Warner Brother’s attempt to pretend it never happened isn’t the right solution.
Title: Mothlight (1963)
Director: Stan Brakhage
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Beautifully restored on Criterion’s “By Brakhage – Anthology” DVD.
Review:
Always redefining the way we look at the world, Stan Brakhage broke all the rules with “Mothlight,” a film which he created by taping hand-plucked moth wings, leaves, reeds, grass and flowers directly to the celluloid and then projecting it. The barrage of fast-flashing earthy debris doesn’t tell a story or even cohere as symbolism, but it can be stimulating to the receptive viewer.
Brakhage is hands-down more experimental than even the directors in my Experimental Edition, but his work is so foreign that I can’t recommend it to any but the most open-minded enthusiasts (although in this case it only requires 4 minutes of your time). Amongst Brakhage’s other innovations that could arguably be considered animation are scratching directly into the film stock (a painstaking method that shows some real dedication), pouring chemical mixes onto raw footage and hand painting onto it. Outside of “animation” he provoked interest and outrage with home movies of his wife giving birth in a bathtub and cadavers being autopsied. His longer works such as “Dog Star Man” and “Scenes from Under Childhood” are considered by many to be masterpieces.
Director: Max Fleischer
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Available on YouTube here
Review:
“Minnie the Moocher” is an oddity that is better seen than described. This early Betty Boop cartoon features the flapper running away from her overbearing parents with her dog/boyfriend Bimbo. They take refuge in a cave haunted by a ghostly tentacled walrus (lending it special meaning for this blog) who is actually a rotoscoped Cab Calloway singing his drug-reference-inflected scat jazz hit “Minnie the Moocher.” Some friendly beasties join in the opium-fogged merriment before Betty flees back to her home, sweet home.
This is vintage Betty Boop before the Production Code came and spoiled everybody’s fun, making the now-iconic sex symbol lengthen her miniskirt and stop dating a dog. (Betty was originally a poodle, but since she’d evolved into a human as the cartoon went on the Hays Office was afraid it would teach kids that bestiality was OK.) Somehow the censors missed the references to marijuana, opium and cocaine in Calloway’s song (used in both a live-action intro and the phantom walrus’s subterranean shuffle), leaving the way clear for one of the earliest catchy, tripped-out toons. Incidentally, I had trouble finding very many examples of rotoscoping (animating on top of live-action film stock) that I liked, but another good example is Petrov’s “Firing Range” (1975).
Title: Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943)
Director: Bob Clampett
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: If you think for one moment that Warner Brothers will ever release this officially, you don’t know public relations departments. Pick your favorite bootleg method or try this site.
Review:
So White is a well-endowed laundry girl who is swept off her feet by Prince Chawmin to go jitterbugging downtown. Her petulant employer, a rich queen, is not particularly smitten with the idea and hires Murder Incorporated to deal with it. (The motto on the side of their black van reads “We rub out anybody $1.00, Midgets – half-price, Japs – free.”) The hired killers are all easily seduced by So White, so the queen has to bump her off with a poisoned apple. Afterwards Prince Chawmin tries to revive her with a kiss, but he lacks the dy-no-mite to recharge her batteries. A goofy American soldier is more successful.
“Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs” is one of the better known cartoons from the Censored Eleven, a group of shorts deemed too racist to be unleashed upon audiences in the 1960’s and never since circulated except at rare festival screenings. While the rampant racist, sexist and politically incorrect material is enough to offend almost any watchdog group, it still has a loyal and loving following. Clampett, while misguided, intended the film to be a tribute to his favorite African-American jazz and swing musicians, some of whom provided the ending music. I can’t say I like this short, but I think that Warner Brother’s attempt to pretend it never happened isn’t the right solution.
Title: Mothlight (1963)
Director: Stan Brakhage
Time: 4 minutes
Availability: Beautifully restored on Criterion’s “By Brakhage – Anthology” DVD.
Review:
Always redefining the way we look at the world, Stan Brakhage broke all the rules with “Mothlight,” a film which he created by taping hand-plucked moth wings, leaves, reeds, grass and flowers directly to the celluloid and then projecting it. The barrage of fast-flashing earthy debris doesn’t tell a story or even cohere as symbolism, but it can be stimulating to the receptive viewer.
Brakhage is hands-down more experimental than even the directors in my Experimental Edition, but his work is so foreign that I can’t recommend it to any but the most open-minded enthusiasts (although in this case it only requires 4 minutes of your time). Amongst Brakhage’s other innovations that could arguably be considered animation are scratching directly into the film stock (a painstaking method that shows some real dedication), pouring chemical mixes onto raw footage and hand painting onto it. Outside of “animation” he provoked interest and outrage with home movies of his wife giving birth in a bathtub and cadavers being autopsied. His longer works such as “Dog Star Man” and “Scenes from Under Childhood” are considered by many to be masterpieces.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Children's Edition
Title: The Wrong Trousers (1993)
Director: Nick Park
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: In the “Wallace and Gromit” box set.
Review:
The second short in the “Wallace and Gromit” series (the others being “A Grand Day Out” and “A Close Shave”), “The Wrong Trousers” is arguably the best. Wallace, an eccentric inventor, has purchased a pair of robotic trousers to automate walks for his dog, Gromit. The unwanted gift strains the relationship between pet and master and things only get worse when Wallace takes on an enigmatic boarder, a penguin who may be planning a daring diamond heist. The art is notable for its exquisitely crafted claymation work, years in the making for a mere 30 minutes worth of footage but absolutely packed with in-jokes, atmosphere and personality.
Aardman Animations have been responsible for almost all the claymation out of Britain for the past 30 years. Nick Park is their star athlete, easily outpacing his colleagues and collaborators as the face of English stop-motion on the success of his Wallace and Gromit trilogy and “Chicken Run.” Despite ventures into feature filmmaking his best work is still to be found in his original trio of W&G shorts. “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave” both won academy awards while “A Grand Day Out” lost to “Creature Comforts,” which was directed by none other than Nick Park. Despite the short running time he maintains a ludicrously high volume of inventive gags, stirring action and character development. Even those who normally pass on British humor are likely to find the duo irresistible. A fourth episode is currently in production now, titled “A Matter of Loaf and Death” and due out later this year.
Title: The Old Mill (1937)
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Time: 9 minutes
Availability: You can find it on YouTube, but be mindful that Disney takes its copyright issues seriously.
Review:
An owl, a pair of pigeons, a colony of bats and an assortment of other animals spend the night in an abandoned windmill while a raging storm threatens their harmony. The gale bring the aging wooden gears to life, but the crumbled stone and rotting shingles may not survive the night, to say nothing of the innocent creatures within. Eschewing marketable anthropomorphized characters and well-worn fairy tale plots, this gorgeous Disney short predates the company’s growth into a soulless behemoth and feels fresh and honest even after 70 years.
Disney’s Silly Symphonies (rivals of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies) include some of the best animated music videos from the first half of the 20th century and are fondly remembered by viewers of several generations. Of the 75 symphonies, there are better known (“The Skeleton Dance”), more influential (the debut of the three-color Technicolor process in “Flowers and Trees”) and more acclaimed (“The Band Concert”), but none that I’ve seen surpassed “The Old Mill” for my money. The bare-bones story is naively unmarketable by today’s standards, but the realistic presentation, full colors and complicated weather effects showed a technical mastery that looked forward to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that same year.
Title: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Though exorbitant costs kept me away from the recent adaptation of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” one can thankfully still resort to this wonderful Norton Juster adaptation. Amongst its many references to the earlier work is a winking play on words which changes the meaning of romance from an adventure to a relationship, in this case a major crush on the part of a line for a “perfectly curved” dot. The only problem is that the circle would much rather live the wild life with a crazy jumble of squiggles than hang out with the straight and narrow. It isn’t until the line hones his skills as the basis for beautifully graphed equations that he can win the girl (eloquently punned in the film’s famed final line).
A cult treasure amongst math nerds, “The Dot and the Line” deserves a wider audience amongst children, not because of its after-school special lesson, but because of its implicit celebration of two things most kids hate: math and abstract art. This short diverges from Chuck Jones’s iconic imagery, yet the humor and wordplay and still unmistakably present as is his unremitting resolve to optimize even the most absurd premise. Robert Morley provides the somewhat overly prim narration.
Director: Nick Park
Time: 30 minutes
Availability: In the “Wallace and Gromit” box set.
Review:
The second short in the “Wallace and Gromit” series (the others being “A Grand Day Out” and “A Close Shave”), “The Wrong Trousers” is arguably the best. Wallace, an eccentric inventor, has purchased a pair of robotic trousers to automate walks for his dog, Gromit. The unwanted gift strains the relationship between pet and master and things only get worse when Wallace takes on an enigmatic boarder, a penguin who may be planning a daring diamond heist. The art is notable for its exquisitely crafted claymation work, years in the making for a mere 30 minutes worth of footage but absolutely packed with in-jokes, atmosphere and personality.
Aardman Animations have been responsible for almost all the claymation out of Britain for the past 30 years. Nick Park is their star athlete, easily outpacing his colleagues and collaborators as the face of English stop-motion on the success of his Wallace and Gromit trilogy and “Chicken Run.” Despite ventures into feature filmmaking his best work is still to be found in his original trio of W&G shorts. “The Wrong Trousers” and “A Close Shave” both won academy awards while “A Grand Day Out” lost to “Creature Comforts,” which was directed by none other than Nick Park. Despite the short running time he maintains a ludicrously high volume of inventive gags, stirring action and character development. Even those who normally pass on British humor are likely to find the duo irresistible. A fourth episode is currently in production now, titled “A Matter of Loaf and Death” and due out later this year.
Title: The Old Mill (1937)
Director: Wilfred Jackson
Time: 9 minutes
Availability: You can find it on YouTube, but be mindful that Disney takes its copyright issues seriously.
Review:
An owl, a pair of pigeons, a colony of bats and an assortment of other animals spend the night in an abandoned windmill while a raging storm threatens their harmony. The gale bring the aging wooden gears to life, but the crumbled stone and rotting shingles may not survive the night, to say nothing of the innocent creatures within. Eschewing marketable anthropomorphized characters and well-worn fairy tale plots, this gorgeous Disney short predates the company’s growth into a soulless behemoth and feels fresh and honest even after 70 years.
Disney’s Silly Symphonies (rivals of Warner Brothers Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies) include some of the best animated music videos from the first half of the 20th century and are fondly remembered by viewers of several generations. Of the 75 symphonies, there are better known (“The Skeleton Dance”), more influential (the debut of the three-color Technicolor process in “Flowers and Trees”) and more acclaimed (“The Band Concert”), but none that I’ve seen surpassed “The Old Mill” for my money. The bare-bones story is naively unmarketable by today’s standards, but the realistic presentation, full colors and complicated weather effects showed a technical mastery that looked forward to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that same year.
Title: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics (1965)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Though exorbitant costs kept me away from the recent adaptation of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions,” one can thankfully still resort to this wonderful Norton Juster adaptation. Amongst its many references to the earlier work is a winking play on words which changes the meaning of romance from an adventure to a relationship, in this case a major crush on the part of a line for a “perfectly curved” dot. The only problem is that the circle would much rather live the wild life with a crazy jumble of squiggles than hang out with the straight and narrow. It isn’t until the line hones his skills as the basis for beautifully graphed equations that he can win the girl (eloquently punned in the film’s famed final line).
A cult treasure amongst math nerds, “The Dot and the Line” deserves a wider audience amongst children, not because of its after-school special lesson, but because of its implicit celebration of two things most kids hate: math and abstract art. This short diverges from Chuck Jones’s iconic imagery, yet the humor and wordplay and still unmistakably present as is his unremitting resolve to optimize even the most absurd premise. Robert Morley provides the somewhat overly prim narration.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Postmodernism Edition
These shorts all concern the self-reflexive relationship between creator and creation.
Title: Duck Amuck (1953)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 1 DVD and The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Movie or on YouTube here.
Review:
Daffy Duck tries to tell a rousing swashbuckler in which he battles musketeers, but the animator has forgotten to draw in the backdrop, the props and the swordsmen. Daffy complains, only to have his every plea intentionally misinterpreted by the artist, who changes the setting, character design and audio effects at will to the consternation of our protagonist. After a back-and-forth game that drives Daffy crazy, we learn that Bugs Bunny is the culprit at the canvas.
“Duck Amuck” is my personal favorite Looney Tune/Merry Melody, with its ahead-of-its-time postmodern themes about the connection between artist, character and the act of creating. Various critics have interpreted this short as a cartoon declaration that God is cruel or that fictional characters take on a life and personality of their own. You don’t have to furrow your brow in philosophical thought, though, to enjoy this short; I always smile at the spotted flower-creature version of Daffy for its whimsical gaucheness.
Title: Rejected (2000)
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On the “Bitter Films Volume 1” DVD or on YouTube here
Review:
Situated as a sort of documentary retrospective on Don Hertzfeldt’s attempts to make animated shorts for commercial products, “Rejected” is a fictional parade of absurdist failures. In each of his supposed ventures into corporate salesmanship he refuses to retreat from his aggressively non-sequitur humor, often upsetting themes and total lack of marketing fervor. The result is deadpan hilarity for the audience and a downward spiral of bitterness for the artist. It ultimately culminates in an apocalypse within his animated universe, visualized through a series of crumples and tears in the paper itself.
Don Hertzfeldt had been making successful and critically acclaimed animations for five years before he hit cult pay-dirt with “Rejected.” His intentionally crude art style (featuring stickmen and almost no background detail) was matched with old-school camera techniques and new-school innovations that draw attention to the texture of paper, the act of sketching and the difficultly of finding paid work without sacrificing your artistic license. The anti-ad ethos and absurdist comedy struck a chord with young audiences, allowing the short to make the rounds of film festivals and college dorms like an outbreak. Many of the lines (“My spoon is too big.”) have made their way into popular culture and influenced a host of internet imitators that lack Hertzfeldt’s studied magic.
Title: Tim Tom (2003)
Director: Christel Pougeoise and Romain Segaud
Time: 5 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Tim and Tom are a pair of 3D would-be pals who struggle to meet against the wishes of their godlike creator. The two guys have notepad heads and they flip the pages over to reveal their changing expressions, generally becoming more perturbed as the arms of an off-screen meddler manipulates their environment to prevent them from meeting. One moment the ground between them is being stretched out indefinitely and the next thing they know they are being dropped through the 35 mm frame onto the soundtrack. Unlike “Duck Amuck,” “Tim Tom” is less a meditation on genre, style and presentation than an interrogation of film as medium and technology, updating the relationship between creator and creation to the 21st century.
“Tim Tom” features a tasteful art style using B&W CG and a minimalist setting. The 3D character have expressive 2D faces, “penciled” in with simulated graphite streaks. The result is not quite cute and not quite serious, while the impulsive investigation of phenomena like the flicker effect and the shape of sound waves on the audio track raise the material to new ground not found in many artist/art showdowns. “Tim Tom” has the spirit of golden era cartoons: efficient story-telling, regular laughs, charisma and spontaneity.
Title: Duck Amuck (1953)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On Looney Tunes Golden Collection Volume 1 DVD and The Bugs Bunny-Road Runner Movie or on YouTube here.
Review:
Daffy Duck tries to tell a rousing swashbuckler in which he battles musketeers, but the animator has forgotten to draw in the backdrop, the props and the swordsmen. Daffy complains, only to have his every plea intentionally misinterpreted by the artist, who changes the setting, character design and audio effects at will to the consternation of our protagonist. After a back-and-forth game that drives Daffy crazy, we learn that Bugs Bunny is the culprit at the canvas.
“Duck Amuck” is my personal favorite Looney Tune/Merry Melody, with its ahead-of-its-time postmodern themes about the connection between artist, character and the act of creating. Various critics have interpreted this short as a cartoon declaration that God is cruel or that fictional characters take on a life and personality of their own. You don’t have to furrow your brow in philosophical thought, though, to enjoy this short; I always smile at the spotted flower-creature version of Daffy for its whimsical gaucheness.
Title: Rejected (2000)
Director: Don Hertzfeldt
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: On the “Bitter Films Volume 1” DVD or on YouTube here
Review:
Situated as a sort of documentary retrospective on Don Hertzfeldt’s attempts to make animated shorts for commercial products, “Rejected” is a fictional parade of absurdist failures. In each of his supposed ventures into corporate salesmanship he refuses to retreat from his aggressively non-sequitur humor, often upsetting themes and total lack of marketing fervor. The result is deadpan hilarity for the audience and a downward spiral of bitterness for the artist. It ultimately culminates in an apocalypse within his animated universe, visualized through a series of crumples and tears in the paper itself.
Don Hertzfeldt had been making successful and critically acclaimed animations for five years before he hit cult pay-dirt with “Rejected.” His intentionally crude art style (featuring stickmen and almost no background detail) was matched with old-school camera techniques and new-school innovations that draw attention to the texture of paper, the act of sketching and the difficultly of finding paid work without sacrificing your artistic license. The anti-ad ethos and absurdist comedy struck a chord with young audiences, allowing the short to make the rounds of film festivals and college dorms like an outbreak. Many of the lines (“My spoon is too big.”) have made their way into popular culture and influenced a host of internet imitators that lack Hertzfeldt’s studied magic.
Title: Tim Tom (2003)
Director: Christel Pougeoise and Romain Segaud
Time: 5 minutes
Availability: On YouTube here.
Review:
Tim and Tom are a pair of 3D would-be pals who struggle to meet against the wishes of their godlike creator. The two guys have notepad heads and they flip the pages over to reveal their changing expressions, generally becoming more perturbed as the arms of an off-screen meddler manipulates their environment to prevent them from meeting. One moment the ground between them is being stretched out indefinitely and the next thing they know they are being dropped through the 35 mm frame onto the soundtrack. Unlike “Duck Amuck,” “Tim Tom” is less a meditation on genre, style and presentation than an interrogation of film as medium and technology, updating the relationship between creator and creation to the 21st century.
“Tim Tom” features a tasteful art style using B&W CG and a minimalist setting. The 3D character have expressive 2D faces, “penciled” in with simulated graphite streaks. The result is not quite cute and not quite serious, while the impulsive investigation of phenomena like the flicker effect and the shape of sound waves on the audio track raise the material to new ground not found in many artist/art showdowns. “Tim Tom” has the spirit of golden era cartoons: efficient story-telling, regular laughs, charisma and spontaneity.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Surrealism Edition
Title: Heaven and Earth Magic, Number 12 (1962)
Director: Harry Everett Smith
Time: 66 minutes
Availability: The Anthology Film Archives in New York City owns and occasionally exhibits the original print. There is also a rare VHS copy, though this might be the hardest short to find of any I mention.
Review:
“The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” –Harry Everett Smith describing his film. This relatively tongue-in-cheek explanation helps communicate the type of free-association that propels this bizarre paper cutout animation. Skeleton horses, a magic hammer, spoon-people, unpredictable eggs, tarot cards and all manner of alchemical, satirical and occultist mayhem surge across the screen in this phantasmagorical nightmare.
Harry Everett Smith was the most well-known animator in the New York City experimental underground of the 1960’s and many consider this film to be his masterpiece. Its inscrutable plot and symbolic density make it hard going even for lovers of surrealism, but its boundless originality is undeniable. The “lengthy short” reflects the broad range of interests of its creator, who is also famous for anthologizing folk music, practicing modern alchemy and Occultism (including compiling a book on the angelic language of Enochian), collecting tens of thousands of Ukrainian Easter eggs and tripping on all manner of drugs.
Title: Quasi at the Quackadero (1975)
Director: Sally Cruikshank
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: Kindly uploaded on YouTube by Sally herself here. She also has a blog called FunOnMars.
Review:
The adventures of two reptilian ducks (Quasi and Anita) and their robot pet are chronicled through a handful of mind-bending animated adventures. In “Quasi at the Quackadero,” the trio visits a theme park with all manner of unnatural attractions like a hall of mirrors that reflects your image at different ages, an artist who will paint your thoughts and, fatefully, a zoo of holes through time and space. The art is rendered in Cruikshank’s signature psychedelic style, full of rich color clashes and everyday monsters. The circus-pop music and oddball voice-acting contributes to the air of otherworldly strangeness.
Sally Cruikshank made a mark on 1970’s animation with her creative series and her generosity with making many available on YouTube (where she frequently responds to comments) have given her work a second life. Though her best work deals with many adult themes, she later worked on animation for the children’s show Sesame Street.
Title: Destino (2003)
Director: Dominique Monfery and Salvador Dali
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available on DVD from Disney’s “Treasure” series on Nov 11, 2008.
Review:
“Destino” originated as an unlikely collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali back in 1945, but the project was never finished until Roy Edward Disney rediscovered the project in 2003 and cobbled it into a polished finished product. I saw it run before “Triplets of Bellville” several years ago and it outshone even that fine feature. After a bit of dawdling, Disney is finally preparing it for DVD.
The short follows a ballerina through a series of bleak Dali-esque landscapes of spindly ruins, melting objects and warped artifacts. It captures the unsettling charm and evocative vision of the great surrealist, complete with his irreverence, weirdness and, above all, imagination.
Director: Harry Everett Smith
Time: 66 minutes
Availability: The Anthology Film Archives in New York City owns and occasionally exhibits the original print. There is also a rare VHS copy, though this might be the hardest short to find of any I mention.
Review:
“The first part depicts the heroine's toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” –Harry Everett Smith describing his film. This relatively tongue-in-cheek explanation helps communicate the type of free-association that propels this bizarre paper cutout animation. Skeleton horses, a magic hammer, spoon-people, unpredictable eggs, tarot cards and all manner of alchemical, satirical and occultist mayhem surge across the screen in this phantasmagorical nightmare.
Harry Everett Smith was the most well-known animator in the New York City experimental underground of the 1960’s and many consider this film to be his masterpiece. Its inscrutable plot and symbolic density make it hard going even for lovers of surrealism, but its boundless originality is undeniable. The “lengthy short” reflects the broad range of interests of its creator, who is also famous for anthologizing folk music, practicing modern alchemy and Occultism (including compiling a book on the angelic language of Enochian), collecting tens of thousands of Ukrainian Easter eggs and tripping on all manner of drugs.
Title: Quasi at the Quackadero (1975)
Director: Sally Cruikshank
Time: 10 minutes
Availability: Kindly uploaded on YouTube by Sally herself here. She also has a blog called FunOnMars.
Review:
The adventures of two reptilian ducks (Quasi and Anita) and their robot pet are chronicled through a handful of mind-bending animated adventures. In “Quasi at the Quackadero,” the trio visits a theme park with all manner of unnatural attractions like a hall of mirrors that reflects your image at different ages, an artist who will paint your thoughts and, fatefully, a zoo of holes through time and space. The art is rendered in Cruikshank’s signature psychedelic style, full of rich color clashes and everyday monsters. The circus-pop music and oddball voice-acting contributes to the air of otherworldly strangeness.
Sally Cruikshank made a mark on 1970’s animation with her creative series and her generosity with making many available on YouTube (where she frequently responds to comments) have given her work a second life. Though her best work deals with many adult themes, she later worked on animation for the children’s show Sesame Street.
Title: Destino (2003)
Director: Dominique Monfery and Salvador Dali
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: Available on DVD from Disney’s “Treasure” series on Nov 11, 2008.
Review:
“Destino” originated as an unlikely collaboration between Walt Disney and Salvador Dali back in 1945, but the project was never finished until Roy Edward Disney rediscovered the project in 2003 and cobbled it into a polished finished product. I saw it run before “Triplets of Bellville” several years ago and it outshone even that fine feature. After a bit of dawdling, Disney is finally preparing it for DVD.
The short follows a ballerina through a series of bleak Dali-esque landscapes of spindly ruins, melting objects and warped artifacts. It captures the unsettling charm and evocative vision of the great surrealist, complete with his irreverence, weirdness and, above all, imagination.
Monday, March 24, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Gothic Horror Edition
Title: Vincent (1982)
Director: Tim Burton
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Bonus feature on the “Nightmare Before Christmas” special edition DVD or on YouTube here.
Review:
You can see elements of most of his later films in Tim Burton’s “Vincent,” a humorous story about a boy named Vincent Malloy who wishes he was Vincent Price. He fantasizes a macabre environment and tortured existence based around the plots of old Price horror movies, visually rendered in “Cabinet of Caligari”-esque expressionism full of high-contrast shadows and gloomy fatalism. Vincent Price himself provides the rhyming narration.
A perfect pairing for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (you can even see the prototype for Jack Skellington if you look closely), Burton really displayed his budding talent for gothic charm. Despite the kid-friendly atmosphere and underlying silliness, Burton has the intelligence to fit his film with a tragic arc rather than deflate his miniature masterpiece with a punchline. The stop-motion effects and minute sets were way ahead of their time.
Title: The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)
Director: Ted Parmelee
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Bonus feature on the “Hellboy” DVD or on YouTube here.
Review:
UPA’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is narrated by James Mason. He does an excellent job delivering the inherit creepiness of an insane man who doesn’t consider himself insane, just a little nervous. Except that most people who are just high-strung don’t become obsesses with the bulging eye of an old man hey take care of. The deranged protagonist plots to savagely slay the elderly gent and bury the body under the floor. Now if only his heart would stop beating, beating, beating.
UPA (United Productions of America) teamed with Columbia Pictures to become a sort of edgy alternative to Disney realism and Warner Brothers wackiness. Though several of their animated shorts like “Gerald McBoing Boing” (available on the “5000 Fingers of Dr. T” DVD) have achieved cult status, few of their films ever matched story, image and audio so perfectly as this short. The odds transitions, bizarre angles, dark lighting and mature themes were the result of cheap animation techniques and a genuine desire to expand their audience. Adults took notice and hailed the film, but they kept their kids at home. In fact, British censors slapped it with a X-rating, a first in the animation industry.
Title: Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Director: The Brothers Quay
Time: 21 minutes
Availability: “The Brothers Quay Collection” DVD or pretty much any Quay anthology. You can also turn it up on YouTube though you’ll lose much of the textural detail that lends the film its unique atmosphere.
Review:
“Street of Crocodiles” is a stop-motion adaptation of brooding Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s (the same author who penned “The Hourglass Sanatorium”) short story. The Brothers Quay beckon it to life with their trademark tactile detail and haunting despair. The story, though vague, seems to be about the tentative adventures of a marionette who comes to life after his strings are severed by a man shutting down a theater during a live-action intro. The silent puppet wanders through a dreary rundown habitat covered in dust, grime and mechanical clockworks. He observes the tawdriness of his artificial world and eventually encounters a race of baby-faced dolls that conduct mysterious operations.
Probably the most acclaimed of the Quay’s work, the film is still not particularly accessible and moves with the slow, monotony of a funeral dirge. The pace fits the doom-laden locale which is meticulously sculpted from an assemblage of discarded newspapers, glass, lightbulbs, nails, rags and dolls. It is ultimately less of a story than texture/tone poem full of technical virtuosity. The brothers were early pioneers in the delicate craft of adding camera movement and focus pulls to stop-motion. The short would go on to influence Terry Gilliam (who called it one of the ten greatest animations of all time) and the brilliant Nine Inch Nails music video “Closer” amongst others.
Director: Tim Burton
Time: 6 minutes
Availability: Bonus feature on the “Nightmare Before Christmas” special edition DVD or on YouTube here.
Review:
You can see elements of most of his later films in Tim Burton’s “Vincent,” a humorous story about a boy named Vincent Malloy who wishes he was Vincent Price. He fantasizes a macabre environment and tortured existence based around the plots of old Price horror movies, visually rendered in “Cabinet of Caligari”-esque expressionism full of high-contrast shadows and gloomy fatalism. Vincent Price himself provides the rhyming narration.
A perfect pairing for “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (you can even see the prototype for Jack Skellington if you look closely), Burton really displayed his budding talent for gothic charm. Despite the kid-friendly atmosphere and underlying silliness, Burton has the intelligence to fit his film with a tragic arc rather than deflate his miniature masterpiece with a punchline. The stop-motion effects and minute sets were way ahead of their time.
Title: The Tell-Tale Heart (1953)
Director: Ted Parmelee
Time: 8 minutes
Availability: Bonus feature on the “Hellboy” DVD or on YouTube here.
Review:
UPA’s adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is narrated by James Mason. He does an excellent job delivering the inherit creepiness of an insane man who doesn’t consider himself insane, just a little nervous. Except that most people who are just high-strung don’t become obsesses with the bulging eye of an old man hey take care of. The deranged protagonist plots to savagely slay the elderly gent and bury the body under the floor. Now if only his heart would stop beating, beating, beating.
UPA (United Productions of America) teamed with Columbia Pictures to become a sort of edgy alternative to Disney realism and Warner Brothers wackiness. Though several of their animated shorts like “Gerald McBoing Boing” (available on the “5000 Fingers of Dr. T” DVD) have achieved cult status, few of their films ever matched story, image and audio so perfectly as this short. The odds transitions, bizarre angles, dark lighting and mature themes were the result of cheap animation techniques and a genuine desire to expand their audience. Adults took notice and hailed the film, but they kept their kids at home. In fact, British censors slapped it with a X-rating, a first in the animation industry.
Title: Street of Crocodiles (1986)
Director: The Brothers Quay
Time: 21 minutes
Availability: “The Brothers Quay Collection” DVD or pretty much any Quay anthology. You can also turn it up on YouTube though you’ll lose much of the textural detail that lends the film its unique atmosphere.
Review:
“Street of Crocodiles” is a stop-motion adaptation of brooding Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s (the same author who penned “The Hourglass Sanatorium”) short story. The Brothers Quay beckon it to life with their trademark tactile detail and haunting despair. The story, though vague, seems to be about the tentative adventures of a marionette who comes to life after his strings are severed by a man shutting down a theater during a live-action intro. The silent puppet wanders through a dreary rundown habitat covered in dust, grime and mechanical clockworks. He observes the tawdriness of his artificial world and eventually encounters a race of baby-faced dolls that conduct mysterious operations.
Probably the most acclaimed of the Quay’s work, the film is still not particularly accessible and moves with the slow, monotony of a funeral dirge. The pace fits the doom-laden locale which is meticulously sculpted from an assemblage of discarded newspapers, glass, lightbulbs, nails, rags and dolls. It is ultimately less of a story than texture/tone poem full of technical virtuosity. The brothers were early pioneers in the delicate craft of adding camera movement and focus pulls to stop-motion. The short would go on to influence Terry Gilliam (who called it one of the ten greatest animations of all time) and the brilliant Nine Inch Nails music video “Closer” amongst others.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: Nostalgia Edition
Title: Rikki-Tikki-Tavi (1975)
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 25 minutes
Availability: On DVD from Family Home Entertainment
Review:
This was sort of a family favorite growing up, and I watched it many times. I was too young to understand how awesome it was that you got Chuck Jones adapting Rudyard Kipling with narration by Orson Welles, but I clearly had good taste even from an early age. The story follows the friendship between an English family in India and the titular mongoose. A pair of evil cobras resents the interlopers and plans to kill the family’s boy, forcing Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to summon all the courage he can muster. The animation is not particularly sophisticated, but it communicates a deep sense of place, often times shaping the personality of the characters through color, texture and mise-en-scene.
I always hated “The Jungle Book” (the movie) and vastly preferred this humbler Kipling adaptation. Seen today, the film has some awkward wisps of imperialism (where are all the Indian people anyway?) and an overly pointed agenda about the importance of duty and bravery, but in many ways it is surprisingly mature (not to mention scary) for a children’s movie. The depiction of the scheming cobra couple with their soon-to-hatch eggs presents a dark mirror version of the humans, both of whom are willing to murder for the sake of their offspring. Underneath it all is a complicated message about patriarchy, xenophobia and violence that is far subtler than a first glance would reveal.
Title: Rupert and the Frog Song (1984)
Director: Geoff Dunbar
Time: 13 minutes
Availability: On the DVD of same title, and an abbreviated version on “We All Stand Together,” or on continuous loop at the Museum of Canterbury. It can also be found in two parts on YouTube, although the truncated version is inferior.
Review:
As the son of a die-hard Beatles fan, it should not be surprising that my family owned a tape of Paul McCartney’s short-lived animation studio. The frog song is basically an animated music video set within the universe of the British serial comic and TV show “Rupert.” In the framing device, Rupert Bear goes into the hills to play and eventually finds his way into a cave where he witnesses a secret society of frogs that sing a grandly choreographed orchestration, “We All Stand Together,” once every 200 years. The animation is a delirious blend of anthropomorphized frogs croaking and dancing interspersed with several sequences of amphibious abstraction.
“Rupert and the Frog Song” was a major hit in 1984, hitting #3 on the UK charts, becoming a top-selling short and winning a BAFTA. Across the pond it was hardly noticed, but it left a definite effect on my childhood. The sense of mystery and conspiracy, combined with the vocal variety and dusk-time scenery still impress me today.
Title: Tummy Trouble (1989)
Director: Rob Minkoff
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On the “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” special edition DVD.
Review:
After the success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” several Roger Rabbit shorts were made to play before other feature films, a practice which had died out twenty years earlier. “Tummy Trouble” played before “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and featured the usual setup of incompetent babysitter Roger Rabbit getting left in charge of Baby Herman. When the infant swallows his rattle, Roger rushes him to the hospital, but ends up with the surgery being conducted on him (with dubious medical instruments that include a chainsaw and a “hare”-splitting laser). The resulting debacle wreaks havoc throughout the hospital, generally inverting the care-giving potential of everything nearby. Jessica Rabbit, sultry voice courtesy of Kathleen Turner, makes an appearance as a nurse.
Though not as funny as the feature-length “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and its preliminary short “Somethin’s Cooking,” this was my favorite of the stand-alone Roger Rabbit cycle (others include “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” which was shown before “Dick Tracy,” and “Trail Mix-Up”). The hyperactive slapstick zaniness on display throughout may not be as appealing to me today, but it took the action of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies up a notch. I’m still impressed by the breakneck, imaginative violence, which strings together sequences of manic hyperbolic brutality that still get a smile from me today.
Director: Chuck Jones
Time: 25 minutes
Availability: On DVD from Family Home Entertainment
Review:
This was sort of a family favorite growing up, and I watched it many times. I was too young to understand how awesome it was that you got Chuck Jones adapting Rudyard Kipling with narration by Orson Welles, but I clearly had good taste even from an early age. The story follows the friendship between an English family in India and the titular mongoose. A pair of evil cobras resents the interlopers and plans to kill the family’s boy, forcing Rikki-Tikki-Tavi to summon all the courage he can muster. The animation is not particularly sophisticated, but it communicates a deep sense of place, often times shaping the personality of the characters through color, texture and mise-en-scene.
I always hated “The Jungle Book” (the movie) and vastly preferred this humbler Kipling adaptation. Seen today, the film has some awkward wisps of imperialism (where are all the Indian people anyway?) and an overly pointed agenda about the importance of duty and bravery, but in many ways it is surprisingly mature (not to mention scary) for a children’s movie. The depiction of the scheming cobra couple with their soon-to-hatch eggs presents a dark mirror version of the humans, both of whom are willing to murder for the sake of their offspring. Underneath it all is a complicated message about patriarchy, xenophobia and violence that is far subtler than a first glance would reveal.
Title: Rupert and the Frog Song (1984)
Director: Geoff Dunbar
Time: 13 minutes
Availability: On the DVD of same title, and an abbreviated version on “We All Stand Together,” or on continuous loop at the Museum of Canterbury. It can also be found in two parts on YouTube, although the truncated version is inferior.
Review:
As the son of a die-hard Beatles fan, it should not be surprising that my family owned a tape of Paul McCartney’s short-lived animation studio. The frog song is basically an animated music video set within the universe of the British serial comic and TV show “Rupert.” In the framing device, Rupert Bear goes into the hills to play and eventually finds his way into a cave where he witnesses a secret society of frogs that sing a grandly choreographed orchestration, “We All Stand Together,” once every 200 years. The animation is a delirious blend of anthropomorphized frogs croaking and dancing interspersed with several sequences of amphibious abstraction.
“Rupert and the Frog Song” was a major hit in 1984, hitting #3 on the UK charts, becoming a top-selling short and winning a BAFTA. Across the pond it was hardly noticed, but it left a definite effect on my childhood. The sense of mystery and conspiracy, combined with the vocal variety and dusk-time scenery still impress me today.
Title: Tummy Trouble (1989)
Director: Rob Minkoff
Time: 7 minutes
Availability: On the “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” special edition DVD.
Review:
After the success of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” several Roger Rabbit shorts were made to play before other feature films, a practice which had died out twenty years earlier. “Tummy Trouble” played before “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” and featured the usual setup of incompetent babysitter Roger Rabbit getting left in charge of Baby Herman. When the infant swallows his rattle, Roger rushes him to the hospital, but ends up with the surgery being conducted on him (with dubious medical instruments that include a chainsaw and a “hare”-splitting laser). The resulting debacle wreaks havoc throughout the hospital, generally inverting the care-giving potential of everything nearby. Jessica Rabbit, sultry voice courtesy of Kathleen Turner, makes an appearance as a nurse.
Though not as funny as the feature-length “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” and its preliminary short “Somethin’s Cooking,” this was my favorite of the stand-alone Roger Rabbit cycle (others include “Roller Coaster Rabbit,” which was shown before “Dick Tracy,” and “Trail Mix-Up”). The hyperactive slapstick zaniness on display throughout may not be as appealing to me today, but it took the action of Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies up a notch. I’m still impressed by the breakneck, imaginative violence, which strings together sequences of manic hyperbolic brutality that still get a smile from me today.
Friday, March 21, 2008
Poor Little Animated Shorts: An Introduction
I have always been a fan of feature films over shorts, television and internet videos, though increasingly it has become clear that traditional theatrical screenings are only one facet of what used to be called motion pictures. It’s tough to keep up; there are many more shorts made every year than feature length films, and yet I watch far fewer. So admittedly, I’m no expert. However, I have taken a recent plunge deeper into the world of animated shorts, and I thought I might share my impressions, call out some favorites and draw attention to a few neglected items of interest.
It helps that shorts are more accessible than ever before. There is YouTube, anthology DVDs and many websites set up by the creators where you can watch the shorts free and in their entirety (this is far rarer for feature films, where higher costs and higher profits are at stake). DVDs cover ground from Looney Tunes Golden Collection of classic cartoons to oddball themed collections like “Cartoon Noir,” and from the Masters of Russian Animation set with its admirable historical survey of serious Soviet shorts to the postcyberpunk tie-in project "The Animatrix." In addition, many shorts show up in the special features of full-length film DVDs, a generous way of reviving and redistributing works that would not be marketable alone. As part of this series, I will try to provide links or DVD advice for how to find the animated shorts I discuss.
In catching myself somewhat up to speed, I have used several sources, including the Jerry Beck’s 1994 book “The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals,” the nominee lists for the short animation academy award which has been given out since 1931, “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” and a many others. I haven’t had the time to even scratch the surface, but I’ve at least started to grasp the scope of what’s out there.
As I said, this is far from my specialty, so I’m going to do this series as more of an overview of shorts I find noteworthy for one reason or another. I simply haven’t seen enough to rank them or to offer a complete historical overview. There will be widely-recognized “obvious” shorts along with some obscure items. There will be classic cartoons, ambitious works of high-minded art and blatant concessions to nostalgia. I’m including CG, claymation, stop motion and several shorts that stretch the definition of animation, but which fit better here than in the “live-action” category.
I hope everyone will enjoy! Oh, and send suggestions: I’ll add new installments as I view more.
It helps that shorts are more accessible than ever before. There is YouTube, anthology DVDs and many websites set up by the creators where you can watch the shorts free and in their entirety (this is far rarer for feature films, where higher costs and higher profits are at stake). DVDs cover ground from Looney Tunes Golden Collection of classic cartoons to oddball themed collections like “Cartoon Noir,” and from the Masters of Russian Animation set with its admirable historical survey of serious Soviet shorts to the postcyberpunk tie-in project "The Animatrix." In addition, many shorts show up in the special features of full-length film DVDs, a generous way of reviving and redistributing works that would not be marketable alone. As part of this series, I will try to provide links or DVD advice for how to find the animated shorts I discuss.
In catching myself somewhat up to speed, I have used several sources, including the Jerry Beck’s 1994 book “The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals,” the nominee lists for the short animation academy award which has been given out since 1931, “They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?” and a many others. I haven’t had the time to even scratch the surface, but I’ve at least started to grasp the scope of what’s out there.
As I said, this is far from my specialty, so I’m going to do this series as more of an overview of shorts I find noteworthy for one reason or another. I simply haven’t seen enough to rank them or to offer a complete historical overview. There will be widely-recognized “obvious” shorts along with some obscure items. There will be classic cartoons, ambitious works of high-minded art and blatant concessions to nostalgia. I’m including CG, claymation, stop motion and several shorts that stretch the definition of animation, but which fit better here than in the “live-action” category.
I hope everyone will enjoy! Oh, and send suggestions: I’ll add new installments as I view more.
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