I found some of the camera techniques to be a bit out of sync with the animation style, but this seven-minute-long film is well-worth watching through to the end and shows off some of the talents of Soyuzmultifilm's animators, circa 1986 (previously referenced in my blogging here).
Toddler Animation Week comes to a close at ZRecs today with three music videos young kids will love: Royksopp's "Remind Me," Minilogue's "Hitchhiker's Choice," and Harry Nilsson's "Think About Your Troubles." Head over to ZRecs and you can also check out our entries on Art Clokey's bizarre Gumbasia, Canadian Norman McLaren's film etching, Czech animator Jiri Trnka's cut-paper Merry Circus, and Yuriy Norshteyn's multimedia masterpiece, Hedgehog In the Fog. All videos are YouTube-embedded for easy viewing.
Fuse #8 reports on the availability of the title of the seventh Harry Potter book on J.K. Rowling's website. Title aside, I like the publisher's use of the site as a promotional vehicle. It takes several mysterious steps to get to the underwhelming title, and there are other goodies on the site as well. My favorite is the "Rubbish" section, accessible from the main desktop by clicking on the pencil sharpener; the trash can contains responses to critics of the Harry Potter books and debunkings of various myths surrouding the series or its author.
I'm guessing a lot of kids will be pretty jazzed at having the opportunity to find out the title through mysterious means, so I won't give it away here. But Fuse #8 can tell you the steps to take to find it.
At some point this afternoon, forty-one of the most recent 100 visitors to this blog arrived by searching for something and following a link to a Think In Pictures post in their search results. This is what they were looking for when they found TiP:
I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence - to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation - whose invented interplay - allows me to "entertain" the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own. What can be addressed, in the consideration of the Orient, are not other symbols, another metaphysics, another wisdom (though the latter might appear thoroughly desirable); it is the possibility of a difference, of a mutation, of a revolution in the propriety of symbolic systems.- Roland Barthes
There are obvious discrepancies - the artist saw fit to add an eardrum-endangering volume slide and "Go" and "Stop" buttons for visual effect. But the combination of the click-wheel and the iconic white body and matching earbud headphones are clear indicators of the brand in the early days of the player when Jobs, taking a cue from Henry Ford, offered the iPod in every color, as long as it was white, and when there was no such thing as the Zune, or even any plans for Microsoft to get into the music-player market.
If past behavior is any indication, the unnamed iPod will stay. You don't have to look far to find other examples of clip art that would be retired if they were the product of any other medium. Many of these not only incorporate outdated technologies, like the illustration at right , but also a clear sense of style and even of attitude has been superseded and is no longer of use to anyone aware of the current culture. It is of another time, one we have lost direct contact with but can infer from the historical record. How often do these symbols represent ideas that have also lost their lustre? One axis of clip-art organization is its "Style," and all clip-art images are categorized using numeric codes. Can a style of clip-art, like a style of painting, itself embody a set of beliefs which can become culturally dated? How does a clip-art artist's view of the world, and their view of their audiences, relate to the true nature of their audiences, and to those who are not in their audiences, that is, to the world at large?
Drawn! passes on the report that Joe Barbera died yesterday.
Hanna-Barbera made many of my least favorite cartoons and many of my favorites as well. A lot of that was timing. The studio put out a lot of low-budget fare, and although story was their emphasis (as opposed to Disney cartoons, which emphasized character) the stories were often very formulaic. But there was also a wildness to a lot of their best work that made some H-B cartoons very fun for a kid to watch.
John Kricfalusi wrote of the best critiques I have read about a Hanna-Barbera cartoon. It's about the painting of the backgrounds in Yogi Bear cartoons. Read it here.
If you haven't tried Linerider yet, you're missing a treat in free Flash games. If you have tried Linerider, you'll know that the below represents countless hours of work and the tireless quest to perfect a profoundly useless craft.
One form of purity in this craft is the unity of purpose we associate with great works of visual art, in which every stroke of the digital pen serves an essential function, where every ramp seems to comes just in time and at the impossibly right place. These are my favorite, a dance between sled and line that has all of the drama of dance because we can only judge its shape as it creates that shape in front of us. (Woe to the Linerider artists who screendrag through their entire course before launching us into it; the loss of agency, confusion, and anticipation a viewer feels when watching these films are half the fun.) Another, less graceful use of the medium leaves all strokes intact, creating a narrowing band of evolved intention that provides an interesting window on the development process. An amusing course design is the primary plank of a good Linerider movie, but if the designer sticks to a visual style, there is also a curiously authentic authorial voice that can be felt in this trivial pursuit.
I was also excited to see how this game has progressed since I first played it. In its previous version you had to download it, something I am rarely willing to do, and could only play it on a PC, not a Mac - suffice to say that it was only due to the impassioned chatter of its players that I went through the trouble. Now you can play it online, and you can erase lines, a "feature" that either the first version didn't have or I just never figured out how to use. I really don't have time to mess around with this game, but apparently I do have time to watch videos of "rides" other players create. Keep 'em coming!
UPDATE: Among the many great YouTubed entries to a Linerider contest is this brilliant "Cave Adventure":
Here's one where Linerider is quickly ejected from his sled and the two bounce around independently in a lurching, pinball-style course before mercifully coming to rest.
A recent post on parenting blog DaddyTypes noted that a video of innovative abstract films by Oskar Fischinger might be of interest to young kids. Fischinger was a German-born filmmaker and painter active from the 1930s to 1950s who had little popular success in his lifetime due to various setbacks and his own uncompromising vision of the role of abstraction in film.Internet video creators can now stream digital video to YouTube as it's shot, although no editing is possible once the video is captured. Gotuit now allows for anyone to clip a segment of online video from any source to create a separate embedding tag for use in blogs and websites which appears to avoid copyright violations by linking to the existing video rather than copying it. Can you see where this is headed? Come, sweet convergence...
The Wooster Collective often rubs me the wrong way. From their refusal to critically discuss works of graffiti art to the deafening silence of readers in their comment-disabled blog, the efforts of the graffiti art movement's leading proponent in the blogosphere leave much to be desired. But Marc and Sara Schiller, the couple behind Wooster, have done an amazing thing. Here's hoping they do many more amazing things in the future.
It will be interesting to see how many of the future inhabitants of the condos of 11 Spring St. will recover/uncover the works the developer will be covering up in the renovations. I would be surprised if they could not find ways to sell units with sections of the artwork still intact and uncovered. This graffiti art has the makings of accent walls for the NYC glitterati - profoundly hip, and with a story to tell; a conversation piece about the history of contemporary New York.
Google has rewritten patent search. If you have ever tried to use the U.S. Patent Office's own patent search portal, you will understand how nice this is for both casual Internet meanderers and serious inventors.
One of the worst features of the U.S. Patent Office's application is its handling of images. Whenever you load one it is a roll of the dice whether you'll actually get it or not. The massive database relies on some outdated version of Quicktime that half the computers I have ever been on do not have and are unable to download. Then if you do have the "right" plugin it still screws up on the image loading (just tried it from a new computer and it loads about 1/5 of the page before getting stuck and giving up).
Compare them yourself: Google Patents | U.S. Patent Office
Chalk another one up for the technocrats.
From the New York Times:
Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards, no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million, overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to press the “delete all” button and offer its residents an unimpeded view of their surroundings.[Link]
Think Justice League meets your childhood Saturday morning commercials. Truly surreal, and also very exciting. Creator Brendan Douglas Jones does his best to send up the genre and always makes the most of character casting and their delicious introductions. There is even a tight and complex storyline and mystery to keep you turning pages after the initial humor has worn off. Highly recommended - join the crowds. [Via|Link]
You may be familiar with the 1969 Rankin/Bass holiday special Frosty the Snowman (produced by the same lead director and producer of the 1964 Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and many other holiday specials). What many people don't know is that this wasn't the first animated version to hit television.
The 1950s were an interesting time in television animation. Walt Disney was the strongest force in the industry and there was no competing with the levels of realism that his techniques had achieved. Other animators were beginning to wonder if Disney's obsession with heightened realism were limiting animation, and explored more "cartoonish" styles. In 1951, United Productions of America had their first success with Gerald McBoing-Boing, an adaptation of an adaptation - a story by Dr. Seuss that had been made into a record already in 1950. It's the story (in Seussian rhyme, of course) of a boy who speaks in sound effects instead of words.
Another record that came out in 1950 was the first recorded version of "Frosty the Snowman," by Gene Autrey. He had already had a big success with "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" in an era when songwriters, fresh from writing love songs for WWII soldiers and their honeys back home, were finding that there was a big market for new, secular holiday music. The genre had pretty much been invented by Irving Berlin with "White Christmas" 1940 and several songs had been big seasonal successes throughout the war years thanks to the soldiers on the front who were missing their families and communities in the USA. My grandmother still tells the story of how my grandfather wrote her the lyrics from the record "I'll Be Home For Christmas" in a winter letter in 1943, and how she had gotten so excited that she didn't read the last line - "If only in my dreams" - and was devastated when she realized he wasn't coming home yet. The miracle of Christmas, as far as 1950s Hollywood was concerned, was its proof that American pop culture was capable of producing media products that crossed over between adults and children, or, rather, that adults could be made to consume products designed for children.
UPA went on to produce a "music video" for "Frosty the Snowman" in 1954. It's a lot of fun to watch if you have seen the Rankin/Bass version too many times, of which I have never been a big fan. [Via]
I get tired of cartoons aimed at little kids which always seem to have to have a villain and major drama. Children have the natural capacity to appreciate the same kind of subtle tension and drama that adults enjoy - the issues and concerns are just different, and thus the sources of drama must be different. But young children are also happy experiencing things which are not plotted in the same conflict/resolution format as stories produced for adults.
This is one of the reason I've never been a huge fan of the 1960s' Frosty. But I also personally get tired of their animation style very fast; I think their stop-motion work in Rudolph and other animated specials has held up much better. The form is reminiscent to me of old cereal box characters, which look great on cereal boxes but there I don't have to stare at them for half an hour at a time. There is something that is way too basic about them to hold my interest, and the plots are usually wholly consistent with that simplicity. 
It took Chuck Jones to help usher in a new level of artistry in holiday movies that showcased a signature style with an intensity and subtlety that a cereal box can't encompass. From How the Grinch Stole Christmas to the amazing Raggedy Ann and Andy Great Christmas Caper (Brother-and-sister rag dolls vs. Wile E. Coyote? Have I died and gone to heaven?) Compare the Grinch and Professor Hinkle. Could you just see Professor Hinckle and Hocus Pocus shilling for some wheatieo cereal with marshmallow top hats?
The Snowman is a perfect example of the kinds of story young kids can enjoy following. Where's the villain there? Where's the conflict? For young children, adventures can often be encompassed by exploring a new idea or vision. When the vision has been explored, the adventure ends. It's my daughter's holiday favorite for the year, for sure. (Click here to visit her blog.) I will show her the 1954 Frosty the Snowman on this blog, but that's plenty for this year - I'll wait a few more years before inflicting the Rankin/Bass version on myself.
Think In Pictures is now accepting submissions (links only, please) of calendars which feature the work of living, non-media-saturated artists in any medium. You are welcome - nay, encouraged! - to nominate your own calendar, or that of someone you know personally. The judges (and there will be several) will give preference, but not overwhelming preference, to calendars which are self-published by emerging artists, and no demerits are given for calendars published through print-on-demand services, or for calendars which are hastily put together only after reading this call. We welcome submissions which feature reproductions of any art form.
Please do not recommend or send links to calendars which meet any of the following criteria:
The folks at IconFactory (who, incidentally, make the world's greatest desktop icons) have posted a wonderful illustration set to Flickr which carry the message of the Japanese Wii safety warnings to their logical and illogical conclusions. Download the desktop wallpaper versions here.
[Link]
From the uploader's description:
Octopuses have an amazing ability to squeeze through tiny crevices, cracks and holes. My fall BIOS independent studies student, Raymond Deckel is investigating just how small a hole Octopus macropus can fit through as well as how long it takes them to squeeze through different sizes of holes. CAABS intern Rowena Day, NSF-REU intern Jared Kibele as well as teaching assistant Abel Valdivia help wrangle the 232 g octopus, Ray times its escape through a one-inch hole while I shot video clips for later analysis. Location: Whalebone Bay, St. George’s, Bermuda.
Someone at Gizmodo noticed the oddness of the warnings in the Japanese version of the manual for the new Wii gaming system and posted them online.
I just posted a classic public-domain film by master stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen on YouTube. A series of four animated nursery rhymes, it was the first piece of animation the young Harryhausen made after returning from WWII with the leftover film stock he had been assigned while producing military training films.
The movie is embedded below and now available on YouTube.
"Grace" by Ann Texter
We interviewed photographer Ann Texter for our second installment of or advanced arts & crafts profiles on the blog for all things kids, Z Recommends. Her five-year-old daughter, Grace, is active as a digital photographer and also makes Polaroid transfers and cyanotypes with her mother.A recent article describes the slope that has led from the marketing of films and products in churches which began with The Passion of the Christ test screenings and has now led to a dream vacation giveaway among pastors who can prove they mentioned the "Chronicles of Narnia" film series in a sermon, as well as new-car promotions tied to church events. Wharton's marketing program reports:
I'm willing to assume that non-churchgoers find this dissimulative. But if you are a regular churchgoer, I'd be very curious to know if this bothers you. Personally, I think evangelical churches need to operate on the same principles as journalists. In publishing, if it looks compromising to outsiders -- even if you believe passionately that you're above being corrupted -- you'd better not do it, because it will compromise your ability to reach your audience. What do you think?Now some advertisers are taking the next step: marketing products -- like an SUV -- with no intrinsic religious value through church networks. "If we are going to target the African-American consumer, we have to go where they go, rather than ask them to come to us, and the church is a major institution for that community," says James Kenyon, Chrysler Group brand marketing senior manager.
[Patti] LaBelle's tour, which features both her November-release gospel album and Chyrsler's 2007 "Aspen" SUV, is passing through 14 of the largest predominantly African-American megachurches in the country. Some participating churches are also organizing "ride and drive" events, where church members and others can test-drive Chrysler vehicles.
I've begun a series of features on creative types who involve their very young children in their art, and am publishing them on Think In Pictures' sister blog, Z Recommends. First up is Lizette Greco, the Flickr-famed seamstress who has her two kids, age six and seven, using a sewing machine to create improbably hip stuffed creatures from their own drawings. (Above is "Trinoceros," currently available at her Etsy store.) From our interview:
"When I need a drawing for a non-gift project like a softie, I go through the piles of their drawings that have accumulated in their room and pick one up, or I choose from the hundred that I have filed away through the years. If I don't find what I need, I ask if they can draw "something" (a particular animal or creature) for me. Sometimes the kids share their ideas of what an ideal softie should look like (color, size, how many limbs) or what my next one should be, such as another fish to accompany the first one I've made or an octopus, squid, turtles..."
Read more on Z Recommends.
Don't hit 'play' unless you want to watch a racist rant and a celebrity nervous breakdown.
I can imagine that dealing with hecklers is hard. No matter how funny your prepared material, intrusions from the audience force you to think on your feet, which is a pretty good sign of your true sense of humor. It is also a test of your ability to command an audience, which is essential to the performer's role as a temporary leader of the group's shared psychological state. A really good comedian could have made those people miserable that they had said anything. Of course, a really good comedian would also very carefully control how much of him or herself was exposed onstage, and that's Richards' real problem.
Comedian Andy Kaufman often left audiences puzzled, uncomfortable, even angry - in his brilliant filmed performance art piece I'm From Hollywood, Kaufman played himself as a misogynist pig who wrestled women to "prove" their inferiority - and won. The joke was on the audience who believed him, and because Kaufman put himself in an uncomfortable personal place to mine for comedy, it was sort of on him too. But he preserved control because he was the only one who really knew what was going on, and played through the role even after the game was up, always reserving his right to make more comedy from territory he had already covered, and preserving a mystique about his opinions and personality that kept audiences rapt.
Others, like the multi-talented Crispin Glover, like to keep us guessing as to whether they really are who they say they are or not. His "performance" on David Letterman in 1987 is a great example of this. Personally (and I consider this a personal weakness) I find such antics funny only when I am confident that I'm in on the joke - unless, of course, there is fake karate kicking involved. That's pretty much a trump card.
Richards, on the other hand, if ever he were a friend to ambiguity, to nuance and insinuation, no longer has that option. And that is a comedy killer, unless you're a great comedian. Ironically, his outburst both closed that avenue and proved that he wasn't a talented enough stage presence to overcome it.
I'm not much of one to follow the comedy circuit, but I have to wonder if it would be a breach of some unwritten code for comedians to take up this sorry spectacle as a source of humor. Lenny Bruce certainly would - Richards' outburst is the perfect exemplar of the buried racism Bruce skewered in many of his own sketches. Bruce mocked the white middle class' smiling confusion at accommodating blacks and made deep psychological comedy out of the undercurrents of mistrust, exoticism, and narcissism that lay underneath. Unfortunately for Michael Richards, he has simply proven Bruce's continued relevance. And it's sad to see this proven so blindly.
Richards has now prostrated himself and apologized on cable television, live via satellite while Jerry Seinfeld sat solemnly in the visitor's chair on David Letterman. (After initially refusing to apologize publicly, he was threatened with being banned from the club in question and had a long session with Seinfeld, who convinced him to try to turn the situation around with a public apology.) Would the public reaction, and Richards' handling of the situation, have been different if it had not been recorded by an audience member? Is this the end of Richards' already hanging-by-a-thread career in show business? Would Mel Gibson's career have been over if a recording had been released?
What do you think? Hecklers welcome.
This post welcomes guest contributor Joshua Gibson, whose own blog, Fagistan, features great criticism of literature, film, photography, and pop culture. If child-prodigy painter Akiane proves to be a spiritual fraud, you will have heard it on Joshua's blog first. Links: Gibson's Blogger profile | his blog
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Robert Altman, whose death on Monday night has left a raw wound in American cinema, had a career that is impossible to summarize. The obituaries take a brave stab, but the lists of hits (MASH, Short Cuts) and bombs (Popeye, Dr. T and the Women) are the least interesting thing about one of the most startling voices in film.
As little interest as I have in merely listing Altman's achievements and failures (you can see the Internet Movie Database for a full filmography, or get some context here), even less do I have in writing about Nashville or The Player, films that have been, and will be, discussed for years. Rather, I'd like to take a few moments to celebrate a film in which Altman's art, sinister and beautiful, was at its mystical and aesthetic peak.
By the time he made 3 Women in 1977, Altman had already made four masterpieces. These films deconstructed and illuminated everything from the war movie to the Western to the noir gumshoe. 3 Women can be seen, then, as Altman turning his eye toward horror. But to me it is also the supreme embodiment of the narratives that flow from his aesthetic sensibility. Many great directors allow aesthetics to swallow narrative whole (Cocteau, Tarkovsky) and many others fashion an aesthetic to fit their narrative desires (Bergman, Kurosawa) but rarely does a filmmaker's aesthetic sense produce the narratives to support and reflect it. Admittedly, as soon as I write such a sentence, a dozen examples come to mind (Eisenstein, Renoir, et cetera) but Altman deserves such exalted company.
3 Women tells the story of a shy, naive young girl (Sissy Spacek) who falls into a bizarre friendship with her seemingly wiser co-worker and roommate (Shelley Duvall.) As so often before and after, Altman shows their lives in a series of partially realized scenes, snippets of lives we can never fully grasp. Even as the camera lingers, lovingly and threateningly, on their faces, the lens never penetrates beneath their glassy eyes. And here it is, the profound insight of Altman's work: cinema can never do more than gaze. The voyeur's dream of slipping into another's life, of understanding her desires and fantasies, can never be realized on screen.
And so, Altman lets us gaze. He lets us gaze upon Duvall's insipid flirtations with men who laugh behind her back, and upon Spacek's frightened and frightening games of deception. Slowly, Spacek's slippery grasp on sanity loosens and Duvall finds herself, once the object of desire and lust, cast aside as Spacek's character dies and is reborn as... Duvall. And here, the narrative proves Altman's point. Spacek changes her name and her behavior, transforms herself into the woman she believes Duvall is. But what emerges is a grotesque caricature of womanhood and strength, mocking Duvall's essential innocence with lustiness and vulgarity. In trying to take Duvall's place, Spacek succeeds only in unleashing her own hungry ghost.
And all through the film wind the visual manifestations of this ghost in the form of murals painted by the third woman of the title, a silent crone who paints looping serpents that gaze up from the depths of a swimming pool, silent but hungry, unknowable but full of desire. These serpents are Spacek and they are Duvall, they are the painter and they are Altman.
And most chilling of all, they are also us: gazing, always gazing.
This is brilliant - Flickr now offers current graphs showing what cameras are the most popular among users. For those of us with holiday shopping to do, this information has immediate, tangible value. But the rest of us can certainly recognize that this is just plain smart. [Via|Link]
Online, surely for a limited time. [Via] Watch for the Peter Lorre caricature fish who commits suicide at 6:40.
"Git-R-Done," by Judy Andrus Toporcer. [Link]
