The music video is the one form where directors can be weird and experimental without fear of being shunned by the world at large. Made for the band N.A.S.A.’s album “The Spirit of Apollo,” where the concept was to pair unlikely musicians, “Spacious Thoughts” mixes the smooth rap of Kool Keith with the grumblings of ever-weird Tom Waits. Director Fluorescent Hill animates Keith as a black sphere wearing cowboy boots who breathes out Tom as an angry cloud.
Tag Archives: Animation
SATURDAY SHORT: BIMBO’S INITIATION (1931)
I know we’ve already featured a Betty Boop cartoon in this space (Betty Boop in Snow White), but this one was so good, we had to share. In this episode Bimbo falls into a manhole, and finds himself in a hideout for a group of people in black face with melted candle hats. Determined not to join their group, Bimbo puts himself in a lot of danger.
This cartoon contains a wonderfully outdated music score along with some sound effects that are very unique by today’s standards. There is a short peek at what looks like a famous Disney character at the beginning, and, as you may expect, some very surreal imagery throughout.
THE WILD AND ZANY WORLD OF TODD M. COE
Todd M. Coe is one of those secret finds that is all too tempting to keep secret.
Todd’s animated shorts evoke the decade of the 1970’s, which he is hopelessly in love with. Drive-in commercials, exploitation, cheesy horror, 70’s adult posters, variety show television specials, low budget spaghetti westerns, robots, the rock group Kiss, Aaron Spelling cop shows, feathered hair, plaid bell bottoms, and, of course animation are all manna from pop culture heaven for him.
Todd could undoubtedly add a few thousand items from that decade to the list, such as one of his favorites (and the delightfully of it’s period) Paul Lynde Halloween Special ,with Donnie and Marie Osmond, Mrs. Brady, Witchie Poo and Billy Barty all trading groan worthy barbs with the inimitable and much missed Mr. Lynde. Todd discussed this perennial favorite in a series of emails and his enthusiasm was admittedly infectious.
Todd is a post-modern, eclectic “slapstick surrealist”. His four shorts can be seen on both youtube (his channel is called school pizza) and on his website—http://www.toddmcoe.com/—where you can also view his numerous illustrations, drawings and paintings.
Todd pours his obvious love of subject into all of his amazingly detailed work and, boy does he pour it on, like a good oozing heap of Aunt Jemima syrup.
Taking a tour through Todd’s website is an inspiration. After a near fatal overdose from the increasingly bland overkill of Tim Burton’s monotonous school of animation, or even more monotonous, bland Japanese Animation, Todd’s work is a much needed breath of fresh red, white and blue air.
Don’t be surprised to find yourself humming the Love American Style and SchoolHouse Rock’s Conjunction Junction theme songs as you take the Todd M. Coe ride.
I certainly did, and now I’m really fighting the urge to throw in a video of the Banana Splits, locating my 45 record of Styx’s Mr. Roboto, re-read my Green Lantern comics, fall in love with the Farrah posterall over again (God bless that angel’s soul), take a whack at the etch a sketch, and pour myself a big bowl of Crisp cereal. I doubt I win that fight.
Thank you much Mr. Coe.
CAPSULE: 9 (2009)
DIRECTED BY: Shane Acker
FEATURING: Voices of Elijah Wood, Christopher Plummer
PLOT: Nine robotic ragdolls fight killer machines in a post-human, post-apocalyptic world.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: 9 is a visually thrilling movie set in a unique, humanless universe; with a more careful and detailed exploration of that world, the flick could have struck a mildly weird chord. As it is, the movie is mostly concerned with looking gorgeous (which it does) and providing the kiddies with rambunctious action sequences than it is in digging deep into the mysteries of its fascinating milieu.
COMMENTS: People constantly, and rightfully, complain about Hollywood’s lack of originality in plots; by the time a screenwriter’s fresh idea makes its way through the suit mill, strong and unique flavors have been ground out of it, replaced with formula salt. Sloppy, rote plotting, climaxing in a well-worn and obvious moral, is so omnipresent in Hollywood product that it seldom raises a critical eyebrow. That is, until something as visually inventive as 9 appears on the screen, when suddenly the relative poverty of imagination of the typical adventure script is thrown into stark relief. 9 is set in a brilliantly realized earth-tone post-apocalypse dominated by bombed-out buildings littered with ruined bric-a-brack. The animation is obviously influenced by Tim Burton disciple Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline), but in its brooding darkness and danger it brings to mind a more fluid and rational-minded version of Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay. Flashbacks of the man vs. machine war that wiped out humanity look like a 1940s propaganda film attacked by H.G. Wells’ Martians (they’re even in glorious black and white).
Such a visually inventive world promises, and deserves, to be the backdrop for an equally imaginative story, and here is where 9 falls apart. The characters (known only by number) are quickly and archetypically sketched, but that’s not a major problem; it’s satisfying enough to know that 1 is a fatally conservative leader, 6 is a visionary artist, 7 is a brash warrior, and so on down the line. The major problem is that there is little sense to the burlap doll’s very existence; they fight nightmarish robotic cats and an all-seeing globe which is capable (for some reason) of sucking out their little souls, but it seems like they should be solving the riddle of their existence. They do so, but when they get the answer, it’s a major letdown. The biggest plot problem isn’t that the Scientist created both the nine ragdolls and the beast that dogs them; it’s that, in an epic fit of absentmindedness, he imbued the same gizmo with the power both to activate the apocalypse and provide the last hope of humanity. It’s a bizarre and confusing plan (and for once, I don’t mean that as a compliment), and it’s based on some awfully hokey metaphysics that invokes the idea that if you create a device that shoots souls into the sky, it will eventually rain life-giving amoebas. The truth is, the nine exist in a script that needs menacing robots for them to fight with broken pocketknife blades as big as broadswords; therefore, these evil machines exist, and for no other convincing reason. The script isn’t interested in fleshing out this world or resolving these paradoxes, but only in getting us to the next action sequence or comforting cliche as quickly as possible. In the end, that leaves us with a film that, perhaps unfairly, disappoints us, because it has so much imaginative potential. We may be more forgiving towards Hollywood fare that aims no higher than to provide us with eighty minutes of eye candy and an injection of vicarious adrenaline, and squarely hits its mark.
Acker’s film is an Internet success story. Birthed as an eleven minute short film, 9 was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2005, but it was YouTube viewings that created the huge advance buzz for the feature version. The short contained no dialogue—only electronica, metallic battle sounds, and weird ambient noise—and also reveals none of the unsatisfactory backstory. It was far more mysterious, and a more impressive artistic achievement. When Tim Burton decided to adopt the film and serve as producer (by slapping his ticket-selling name on it), the project’s Hollywood credibility went through the roof—and the story was ground into the Hollywood scriptwriting gears.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
BORDERLINE WEIRD: $9.99 (2008)
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DIRECTED BY: Tatia Rosenthal
FEATURING: Voices of: Geoffrey Rush, Anthony LaPaglia
PLOT: A series of intertwined tales about the residents of a Sydney apartment complex, including a repossessor, a supermodel, a lonely old man, a dour angel, three miniature surfer dudes, and an aimless young man who buys a book promising to supply him with the Meaning of Life for the bargain price of $9.99.
WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE: Several of the multiple storylines generate absurd punchlines which depend on the element of surprise; I can’t reveal them without spoiling their intended effect, but be sure they are weird enough to merit our notice. But despite these (often black) magical realist whammies that invade the daily lives of the residents of Rosenthal’s Claymation apartment complex, $9.99‘s not entirely successful as weird film. By dividing its attention between an observational drama on the Way We Live Today and a surrealistic spectacle, $9.99 fails to find a viable tone. The bleak existential punchlines often fail to pop out of the flat dramatic background. Ultimately, the film works better as a feature-length advertisement for the short stories of Etgar Keret (who wrote both the original stories and the screenplay) than it does as a feature.
COMMENTS: Just like the promise embodied in the priced-to-move tome on the Meaning of Life, $9.99 is an intriguing work that constantly taunts us with hints that some great epiphany lurks around the next narrative bend, just out of our current view. In the end, the major lesson we glean from it is to temper our expectations the next time we hear a too-good-to-be-true pitch. The opening is a near-perfect, beautifully balanced and drawn-out battle of conflicting agendas between a passive-aggressive deadbeat begging for a smoke and a cup of coffee and a businessman whose sense of propriety ever-so-slightly exceeds his compassion. It’s easy to see how this exchange would have made a gripping short story, but the scene also sets up a darkly comic and ironic callback sequence near the end of the film. These great moments are, sadly, too few and far between. Although the individual story arcs of the nine major characters are interwoven seamlessly, the film suffers from trying to give each of them equal time, regardless of how inherently interesting they are. The anthology film is a difficult form to succeed in: even the master Robert Altman couldn’t always pull it off, much less a first time director. A storyline about a child and his piggy bank is unexpectedly sweet, given the morose tone of the rest of the film, but it lacks heft and a larger purpose in the story. The film would have worked better if it had revolved entirely around its most interesting character, the morose and afterlife-weary “angel” voiced by Geoffrey Rush, with the other tales submerged into subplots feeding into the main theme. Although I may be in the critical minority here, I found the Claymation to be unsatisfactory, and constantly wondered whether the film would have worked better as live action. The animation is only used to magical purpose in a couple of places; otherwise, its main effect is to make the characters less expressive than real actors. These clay figurines lack the human ability to express true wonder, fear, desire or disappointment. This may be a deliberate choice to highlight the characters’ alienation and strangeness, but in a mostly drab and a downbeat film in need of more warmth and richer textures, the tactic backfires.
$9.99 is an oddly positioned film that will have trouble finding an audience outside of dedicated Etgar Keret fans. It’s too weird to appeal to those looking for a thoughtful drama, but too dry and literary to build a cult audience. It’s worth a look when it shows up on DVD if some aspect of the production interests you—the author, the art of stop-motion animation, movies with thoughtful but inconclusive storytelling—but its not essential viewing.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
