His 1957 experimental film Kineformy (Cineforms) consisted of projecting moving abstract models onto a screen using a special image-distorting lens. Pawlowski devised a light machine with two crank-like handles to move the models and the lenses. The light, passing through the lenses, distorted the forms, resulting in a series of very complex images - wispy smoke, diaphanous curtains, passing ghosts and then suddenly solid organic forms. This light performance was then filmed.
Which sounds intriguing, though I'm still not sure if any of this makes it animation.
matrixschmatrix wrote:Speaking of Fischinger- I'm planning on voting for Motion Painting No. 1, with Study No. 7 as a maybe (pending a rewatch.) Is anyone planning to vote for anything else of his? They seem to me to encompass the height of his creativity with the former- which feels almost like an entire medium unto itself, besides being physically very lovely- and the sheer joy of his work with the latter.
Raumlichtkunst will figure very high on my list. Studie No. 8 will also be there. After that, I've tried to limit the Fischinger, because there's so much else I need to fit in.
This page needs some prettying up, so here's a still from Raumlichtkunst:
swo17 wrote:Raumlichtkunst of course being impossible for the layman to see/possibly invented by zedz.
Well, to be fair, it's a film that cannot rationally exist: a grand statement on the potentiality of the film medium, in widescreen and in colour, made in 1926.*
* Always assuming, of course, that the present reconstruction is remotely like Fischinger's original performance, but the evidence supports it, and all of those component parts have been floating around, mysteriously and provocatively, for years. Basically, it's the Smile of animation.
karmajuice wrote:
The Thief and the Cobbler (Richard Williams, 1993) - A botched masterpiece, but one that still dazzles and more than merits your attention. It's one of the most immaculately crafted animated films ever made in terms of its technique, and no corners were cut to save time or money. The production went over budget and was in production for about 30 years when they yanked the film from Williams and cut it down into an incomprehensible mess. But a fan version of the film has come out, The Thief and the Cobbler: The Re-Cobbled Cut, and while imperfect, it's an heroic act of perservation/reconstruction and an attempt to look at what the film might have been. They include animatics and sketches for the unfinished portions of the film. Anyway, the film is graphically inventive and non-stop visual wit and beauty -- it is very much a film about form.
The Re-Cobbled cut can be found via youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E62ibzd8WX4" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
or via torrent here, which I recommend: http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/4112127/ ... obbled_Cut" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
(Williams was the animation director on Roger Rabbit, by the way.)
So I just rewatched this for the first time in years (I think I saw the first iteration of the recobbled cut when that became available) and I agree, it's a movie that has such astonishing visual pyrotechnics that it could have literally no other virtues and still feel like a major work- the Escher chase scene and the incredibly elaborate Rube Goldberg sequence at the end are highlights, but virtually the whole construction of the movie is gorgeous, fluid, gravity and logic defying artistry. Beyond that, the acting on all three leads (the thief, the cobbler, and Zigzag) is marvelous- the thief has a great Buster Keaton determination about his movements, a combination of grace and ineptitude that makes all of his just-barely survivals visually convincing, and makes him likable despite having no real characteristics beyond avarice. The cobbler is sort of a Pierrot figure, displaying a lovely heart in the gentility and delicacy of the way he moves (not to mention that his basic costume seems consciously Pierrot-esque.) And Zigzag, the vizier, has this insinuating quality, about four knuckles on each finger and shoes that slither out like snakes and a face that expresses a leer and a sidelong smile better than anything else. It's perfect for Vincent Price, too- I just saw The Great Mouse Detective the other day, which has its good points but puts Price into a hulking brute's body, which doesn't fit him at all. Here, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role.
It's surely a far from perfect movie- the way the animation is broken up by animatics and stills is just part of the incompleteness of the thing, though it occasionally ruins a great sequence, but to me the larger problem is the pacing; perhaps because it's so thoroughly founded on jaw-dropping set pieces, a lot of the rest of it has a tendency to drag, particularly as the movie loves nothing more than repeating a sequence ad infinitum, and every voice actor drawls like they just downed half a gallon of codeine cough syrup. It's the kind of thing that a bit of polish probably would have fixed- a version of this movie tightened to a brisk 75 minutes might be an almost perfect work- but even as it stands, it's a monument to ambition and creativity that demands a place on my list.
Speaking of animated features with long and troubled production histories, I watched Le Roi et l'oiseau a few nights ago. Fortunately it fared a bit better than The Thief and the Cobbler, in the sense that we ended up with a complete work, finished by its creator.
It's an exquisite film: inventive, beautifully animated, endowed with that unique charm found only in fairy tales. But it's also strangely structured, or rather, it has very little structure. What initially seems like a non sequitur ends up being the foundation of the entire plot (if you can call it a plot). There are echoes of Metropolis, but that theme is never very central to the film. It's more preoccupied with its various flights of fancy: the elaborate castle setting (like something out of a Jules Verne novel), dancing lions, a giant robot that exists for its own sake, and guards who wear bats wings and swoop around like Feuillade villains. The whole film has a playful, Surrealist vibe to it, apparent not only in its imagery (the backgrounds vaguely recall de Chirico and similar painters) but in its plot progression as well. The film veers from tangent to tangent, held together by the slimmest of threads: the escape of an innocent young couple from the clutches of the king. Jacques Prévert scripted the film, so the Surrealist flavor makes sense, but it bears little resemblance to his more somber works with Carné.
I really enjoyed the film; its extravagant set pieces and its disregard for narrative logic seem downright audacious at some points. However, the film is a flight of pure fancy, and anyone looking for coherence or thematic richness may come away feeling disappointed.
(Its final shot is a loving and delicate condemnation of oppression, but it doesn't hold much water, given how little they develop the theme earlier in the film.)
Well, I'm three for three on really enjoying Stanton's movies- this was a delight. It was more visually interesting than I had imagined it would be, given both the limited expressiveness of fish as characters and the relatively early CGI- I think whatever was lost in the conception of the fish was largely made up for with the really stunning color palette, one of the major tools of expression for the whole movie. I think too that, while Pixar movies generally have really wonderful voice casts, this one might be the best- I'm a sucker for comics as voice actors, and Brooks and Degeneres steal the film in a walk, selling the quest backbone of the thing without ever making it feel as though they're dumping exposition or teachable moments on the audience.
I don't have any thematic quibbles with it, either- I feel as though a common theme in kid's movies is a Hook style idea that if you aren't paying attention to everything your children do 100% of the time, you're a horrible parent, so the focus on that children needing to have a life of their own here is a particularly refreshing one. The value of friendship is a fairly common kid's theme, but it's expressed really charmingly here- both because the actual friends involved are so charming, but also in that it really gets across why friendship, and the way it can take one out of oneself and expose one to the greater world, is so important. The movie stresses the value of community, too- its Ghibli-esque in its lack of villains, and though some characters are jerks all of the actual groups we see, the sharks and the turtles and school and the tank- are pretty decent and willing to take an interest if approached properly. There's never a moment when a trusted ally reveals themselves a secret villain (Bruce the shark comes close, but there's certainly no sense that he was secretly a bad guy or anything), and it seems as though the overall arc of the movie is towards self actualization through opening oneself to others, rather than setting oneself apart from them. Even the climax is a victory through collective action; given my known predilections, how could I not like this?
That said, I think it falls somewhat short of both Up and Wall-E, but I think that's more a matter of those two being spectacularly good than any fault in this one- it's limited somewhat by the technology of the time period, and I think Stanton's storytelling benefited enormously from the acting and detail that a few more years of advancement would bring. This is a slightly less ambitious movie to me, too- it's a story not that far removed from The Little Mermaid in some beats (particularly the running from the shark scene), while his other two feel pretty wildly original in both conception and execution to me. But overall, I'm kind of shocked in retrospect how much his John Carterdoesn't work for me, because his animated features are all pretty killer.
(A side issue that doesn't really affect my view of the quality of this one way or another- Pixar in general and this movie in particular often seem to fall in a slightly strange place in terms of how anthropomorphized the nonhuman figures are. It makes sense when it's Disney style, and everyone's either an animal or a human in animal shape, and it makes sense when it's limited to slightly human features on primarily animal supporting characters, but here, we have a very human family relationship between clownfish, who do have huge broods but don't change genders, and we have an AA for sharks to quit eating fish (what else can they eat?) while heroic pelicans still implicitly eat sentient beings, just not sentient beings they've heard of- I think it's a way to go that makes sense here, as locking things down in either direction would limit the storytelling, but I do spend a lot of time trying to resolve things and make rules in my head. I suppose that's a problem on my end and not Pixar's, though.)
matrixschmatrix wrote:(A side issue that doesn't really affect my view of the quality of this one way or another- Pixar in general and this movie in particular often seem to fall in a slightly strange place in terms of how anthropomorphized the nonhuman figures are. It makes sense when it's Disney style, and everyone's either an animal or a human in animal shape, and it makes sense when it's limited to slightly human features on primarily animal supporting characters, but here, we have a very human family relationship between clownfish, who do have huge broods but don't change genders, and we have an AA for sharks to quit eating fish (what else can they eat?) while heroic pelicans still implicitly eat sentient beings, just not sentient beings they've heard of- I think it's a way to go that makes sense here, as locking things down in either direction would limit the storytelling, but I do spend a lot of time trying to resolve things and make rules in my head. I suppose that's a problem on my end and not Pixar's, though.)
I think this kind of inconsistency is a common enough hazard when it comes to anthropomorphized animals. Mickey Mouse owns a dog as a pet, Pluto, but he also has a best friend who's a dog, Goofy. Similarly, Donald Duck has various misadventures as a dog catcher, dog groomer and dog walker, but also comes up against the anthropomorphized Beagle Boys. I actually think the Pixar approach of having a foot in both camps (animal and humanized) for most characters is less confused and more consistent than that. Plus you get the nifty gags that come from only slightly humanizing typical animal behaviours, as with Finding Nemo's seagulls.
Big Bang Big Boom, by 'Blu' (sigh), and viewable here, is pretty astonishing for what seems as though it could have been little more than a flash mob style YouTube publicity stunt kind of thing- it's a hybrid between stop motion and animation, executed in public spaces, with drawings continually moving from building to building and interacting with the scenery, recreating itself in a way that both calls attention to the animation process and fools the eye nonetheless. It reminds me somewhat of Fischinger's Motion Painting, in that it feels less like a cartoon than a single work that somehow moves in extra dimensions- though I would say the camerawork here is a bit amatuerish, and the soundtrack less well chosen, it also shares with Fischinger the feeling of an entirely new approach to filmmaking or art or something that's pretty stunning to see.
This artist has made a couple of these installations but the previous ones were more freeform figures moving through space- impressive for their virtuosity, but feeling more like tour-de-force demonstrations of what could be done than fully realized works in themselves. This one commits to a theme, albeit a loose one, and feels as though it's moving towards a definite end throughout- it gives the work a sense of definition, while not restricting the constant invention that's really the core of what makes it special. It's only about ten minutes long, and you will probably get the idea in a minute or so- I'd say it's very much worth a watch, and I suspect it will make my list (it's even got an imdb entry!)
zedz wrote:I think this kind of inconsistency is a common enough hazard when it comes to anthropomorphized animals. Mickey Mouse owns a dog as a pet, Pluto, but he also has a best friend who's a dog, Goofy. Similarly, Donald Duck has various misadventures as a dog catcher, dog groomer and dog walker, but also comes up against the anthropomorphized Beagle Boys. I actually think the Pixar approach of having a foot in both camps (animal and humanized) for most characters is less confused and more consistent than that. Plus you get the nifty gags that come from only slightly humanizing typical animal behaviours, as with Finding Nemo's seagulls.
I agree that it works well for gags- the dogs in Up mine a lot of humor out of their highly doggie behavior, too- and definitely Pixar makes a more coherent world than Disney does. But while Disney has weird overlaps of animals and human/animals existing in the same world, it's generally pretty clear which are which, and it's rare than a human/animal in Disney displays any real animal behaviors- whereas Pixar seems painstakingly researched and thought out (like, the clownfish relationship with the anemone is something that was obviously put in because it's something that happens in nature, and not because it's something people know and expect) even for their most human main characters. It's not a problem, really, it's just that for me it's tricky to resolve it, and to know where a relationship should be seen as an animal one and where it should be seen as it would if both parties were human- again, the pelican's behavior sort of requires it to be both at once. Which is interesting, and which I think gives their movies a bit more depth (compare Nemo to A Fish Tale, where there's no effort to make the fish real at all), but it's something that I find tricky.
I agree, "Big Bang Big Boom" is really impressive. There's a DVD available that includes 10 years worth of BLU videos.
swo17 wrote:Any recommendations from the Anxious Animation disc?
Yes, I think the Lewis Klahr, Janie Geiser, and Jim Trainor shorts on it are all well worth watching (and they only total just over an hour). Below is a brief attempt to put into word some of my impressions of about the Klahr collage films, from an earlier thread. It doubles as a comment on Jordan, whose work I hope people will watch for this list. I realize it won't be up most people's alley. I'll surely vote for "Sophie's Place," for starters, which I see that five people at IMDB have rated, and the weighted average is 2.2 out of 10. It's definitely not "entertaining" in the way nearly all animation is meant to be, and it's fairly esoteric stuff, so no big surprise I guess.
Klahr's work reminds me of Larry Jordan's, although it is less (or at least less apparently) spiritual. Whereas Jordan uses mainly 19th century engravings, Klahr uses a lot of magazine illustrations from the 1940s and '50s. The latter's use of collage is equally dazzling and skillful, and the way they fit into the films' motifs or even story arcs reminds me of something Jordan once said about how he does not want whatever stories or ideas he has in mind when he makes the film to determine, or even influence, the meanings that others connect to the films as viewers. Nonetheless, in some works by both filmmakers' there is a clear trajectory or odyssey that the central figure or follows, but the nature of it is left somewhat obscure. He seems to share the commitment to psychodrama found in earlier films by Jordan and Brakhage. I find that something about the way he puts these images into motion gives them a kind of smoldering quality that adds a great deal to the films' often intense moods.
I haven't bought it so I don't know for certain. I would guess so, as BBBB and the DVD are both from 2010 and the latter was a pretty comprehensive collection of video work.
We finally sat down and watched An American in Paris on bluray. and afterwards I watched the two shorts, the animated one, Symphony in Slang by Tex Avery is pretty solidly humorous in an endless machine gun of literal visualizations of verbal slang in a puntacular fashion. It's definitely superior to the feature film it was paired with, which has never been much more than middling (and I'm always baffled anyone would pick the very strange (and somewhat unpleasant) looking Caron over the much hotter older blonde).
And I took a spin through the first half of Disc 2 of Vol 1 of the LT GC DVDs. Duck Amuck remains a wonder and a masterpiece. It seems to get more brilliant each time I see it.
Dough for the Do Do is crazy in the background animation but a bit slight feeling in the main Porky/Do-Do variant. It's a good film to pair with Duck Amuck though, but I'd reverse the order and do Dough for the Do Do first.
Drip Along Daffy is another solid film that feels slight overall, there's only three gags in the picture: sending up the western, the Drink-from-Hell, and Porky's victory, but they don't really cohere or feel like a clean storyline. It feels like three gags strung along.
Scaredy Cat is almost a standout picture. The one thing holding it back is the bizarre button at the end of the picture, where the headsman moose pulls off his mask. It's so out of step with the rest of the picture it sort of ruins the whole experience. But everything else was outstanding, great creative mayhem with Sylvester barely escaping with his nine lives. Particularly good was the gag where the bed is pushed out the window, that was strung along with a brilliant escalation at each stage of the gag.
The Ducksters is not my cup of tea. It's a mean cartoon, and not particularly funny at any given point.
Scarlet Pumpernickel is outstanding. Daffy reading his script to the executives and acting out his swashbuckling epic. It's consistently funny though at times the meta layer doesn't work quite as well as Dough for the Do Do or Duck Amuck.
I watched about a quarter of the Disney's Goofy box set last night, and I ran into the problem I often have with shorts- they're all pretty good, but none of them really stand out in a way that makes me say 'this one is listworthy, the others are not.' Part of the problem, I think, is that Disney always suffers a bit in comparison to the best of Looney Tunes- they're a bit safe, less inventive and less mean, and while they're consistently quite good (there's nothing I can't stand in there, while I'd happily go the remainder of my life without ever seeing a Tweety cartoon again) they also don't seem to scale the heights the way Looney Tunes sometimes does.
That said, I very much enjoyed 1941's The Art of Self Defense- particularly the opening gag, showing the history of warfare as being little more than a series of pairs of dudes bonking one another over the head- and the 1940 Goofy's Glider, which pares down the Goofy how-to to its essence, Goofy endlessly trying to do something correctly and failing over and over again, without losing any of his optimism (and which also rather sweetly gives him a victory at the end.) Goofy strikes me as very much a Stan Laurel character without a Hardy (though Pete serves that purpose in a few cartoons) and the shorts featuring him have very much the careful construction through repetition that the Laurel and Hardy shorts often did. It's something very charming (Vonnegut observed that he admired Laurel and Hardy for their dedication to life, despite the clear fact that they weren't very good at it, and it applies even moreso to Goofy) but it feels unambitious at times.
I think, and this applies to Pixar too, that the ambition of Disney, especially after Iwerks left, was more to a solid form of animation which frankly is boring as hell but works in making features and sustaining your brand.
Well, I'm going to be voting for a number of Disney (and Pixar) features, so I don't think I'd agree with you entirely, but I do think that strict focus on staying on model and so forth grounds things a bit in a way that doesn't work so well for shorts, and tamps down the possibilities a bit.
Yes, Disney's eventual style works well for narrative features and comics (seriously if I could vote for Carl Barks I would have) but I don't think it works well for shorts which to be great need a short explosion of inventiveness. The Donald and Goofy shorts work better than most in part because of the teams (the aforementioned Barks, Kinney, and King for example) and because of how great the characters are. If you don't keep that personality up in well told economical stories though they flop which I think happened more often than not. Though by flopped I mostly mean they tend to be very average.
Yeah, I don't disagree- some of the best Disney shorts are things like The Old Mill, which don't even try to be funny, but the run of Mickey cartoons or whatever is often pretty sitcomesque and lacking in any real spark.
