It's the time of year for my annual sojourn in and around Barcelona. I'll be gone for a month or so, enjoying the sights, sounds, smells and flavors of Mediterranean Spain, and posting an occasional tidbit on this here blog.
Tidbits such as this very clever 90 second history of Catalan moderisme, created by the Barcelona design team TigreLab. Enjoy, and have a hell of a summer wherever you happen to read Gurldoggie.
The Japanese animation powerhouse Studio Ghibli was founded in 1983 by animation directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata. Ghibli produces films that are a wonderful antidote to American commercial animation - featuring genuine originality, dazzling animation and true storytelling weirdness. With baffling images and strange and subtle themes, many of their best works are truly not suitable for children.
SIFF Cinema is producing a second annual retrospective of Studio Ghibli’s films with glorious new 35mm prints of both the studio's biggest hits and some films that are rarely shown in the U.S., with most films presented in both English and in their original Japanese language with subtitles.
Wonderful stuff, and a great opportunity to see this gorgeous and unusual imagery on a big screen. Starting tonight at the SIFF Cinema downtown, and running until February 21. Tickets available here.
Hypnotic new music video by illustrator and design wizard Cyriak Harris for Bonobo that re-purposes mid 20th-century stock footage to create landscapes, machines, and, um... just watch the thing. Scored via Colossal.
A great weekend of film coming up for the younger set and the adults who love them.
On Thursday night, the Children’s Film Festival opens at the Northwest Film Forum on Capitol Hill. Over the past 8 years, this has become the largest and most respected film festival on the West Coast dedicated to children and their families. Over the next week, the NWFF will screen more than 120 films from 35 countries, all geared toward young people.
The festival opens with the local premiere of Zarafa, a gorgeous film from French animators Rémi Bezançon and "Triplets of Belleville" supervising animator Jean-Christophe Lie about an escaped slave boy and the baby giraffe he befriends. Saturday morning brings a special screening of live action and animated short films proceeded by an all-you-can-eat pancake and bacon breakfast. A wonderful annual event, not to be missed.
On Sunday night, and completely unrelated to the film festival, the Seattle musical duo Miles & Karina come to the Royal Room in Columbia City with a rare live performance of their original score to the oldest existing, full-length animated film, "The Adventures of Prince Achmed," made by film pioneer Lotte Reiniger. Taken from The Arabian Nights, the film tells the story of a wicked sorcerer who tricks Prince Achmed into mounting a magical flying horse and sends the rider off on a flight to his death. Miles and Karina have traveled the world with this film, and are bringing it back to Seattle for one night only. Sunday at 7:30, and open to all ages.
I know Jim likes these.
Luminaris is a new stop motion short from Argentine director Juan Pablo Zaramella which very cleverly uses shadows, lightbulbs, and marbles to document one man's escape plan. The 6-minute film won the Audience Award and Fipresci Award at Annecy 2011, and was included in the Oscars shortlist for Best Animated Short.
Sasquatch, the annual music festival at the Gorge ampitheatre, has announced their line-up. Some of the bands listed are intriguing, and who knows? I may wind up there myself.
An appearance by Nobody Beats the Drum grabs my attention. This very creative claymation video from 2011 is totally hypnotic, but what in the world is their live show like?
Watch this fun new animated video called Mourir Auprès de Toi, set in the after hours world of the legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris. The stop-motion short is a collaboration between director Spike Jonze and the French designer Olympia Le-Tan.
Unfortunately, the video can't be embedded, but you can watch it to your heart's content right here.
Completely unexpected and wildly creative animations by Dutch animator Johan Rijpma. Up above, he organizes thousands of photographs of sidewalk tiles and street cracks to create the illusion of motion. Down below he arranges rolls of scotch tape - yes, scotch tape - to an utterly hypnotic effect. Don't take my word for it, you just gotta see this.
Did you know that French Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet has a blog? And that she regularly posts things like disturbing collages and this lovely abstract animation? Now you know. You're welcome.
[Flash 10 is required to watch video]
The apartments here are so small! There's some beauty in all this closeness - one certainly knows one's neighbors in Barcelona - but I could use a little elbow room. Or perhaps some "Quadraturin." Quadraturin comes from Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s Soviet-era short story about a mysterious substance that transforms small spaces (in this case a shared apartment) into large ones. Below is Valeriy Kozhin’s perfectly claustrophobic animated adaptation of the story. “Quadraturin” is collected in Krzhizhanovsky’s collection Memories of the Future.
A little late perhaps, but still well worth posting.
Being an American living in Canada, and missing the July 4th fireworks, designer Sean Ohlenkamp decided to make his own with some stop motion pinhole animation.
Doc Popular found himself with some time to kill in San Francisco, so he wandered around checking out the tags and street art. Turns out the sidewalks of the city are covered with stencils of Lou Reed from the cover his Transformer album. Doc went ahead and made this sweet animated GIF from 25 photos of the stencils! So nice!
The original photos look like this:
Nothing but busy. Where does the time go?
I can't pretend I have time to get out and see or do much that's social these days. So maybe I'll just post a few days worth of true distractions. As a case in point ... you've seen parkour. You've seen flip-books. But I'm guessing you still haven't seen this inventive painstakingly hand-made film by Singapore-based designer Serene Teh. Only 45 seconds! Watch it twice!
A new stop motion film from world class animator PES!
...and in a related development, Sea and Spar Between is a poetry generator using words that come exclusively from Emily Dickinson’s poems and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The generator defines a space of language populated by a number of stanzas comparable to the number of fish in the sea, around 225 trillion. Each stanza is indicated by two coordinates, as with latitude and longitude. They range from 0 : 0 to 14992383 : 14992383.
For example, this is the poem at coordinates 6995, 548
One air one art one art one world
another! dying!
how to enjoy the webjay course
then guileless is the sun
Sound complicated? Try it!
“Wishery” is the newest track from sample magician Nick Bertke a.k.a. Pogo. Bertke uses nothing but sounds from Walt Disney’s classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarves to construct a mesmerizing trip-hop soundscape. Absent for the past year due to, it would seem, a contract with Disney, it’s good to see the man who brought us Alice return, and in such spectacular fashion. For those of us living in the Northwest, these may well be the brightest sounds and colors we experience until Spring.
I want a beggar's eyes
A winning horse
A tidy Mexican divorce
St. Mary's prayers
Houdini's Hands
And a Barman who always understands
Two beautiful and simple pieces of music animation from Montreal based animator Renaud Hallee in which notes, beats and the time between them are represented in various forms. The one above is abstract but extremely effective; the one below is concrete but somehow even more mysterious. Enjoy.
Don't laugh. This could really happen.
A perfect little short film by French animator Patrick Jean. I defy you to keep it to yourself.
I love this idea. A team of 473 movie makers and animators are in the process of recreating the first Star Wars film, 15 seconds at a time. Masterminds Aaron Valdez and Casey Pugh have split the entire movie into 473 equal length clips. Any film maker in the world - professional, amateur or certified lunatic - can claim a scene, film it, and upload it. When every scene has been recreated, the auteurs will stitch them together into a new feature length film - Star Wars Uncut.
At this point, about 80% of the film has been claimed. I watched a handful of scenes - some of which are great, some of which are mediocre, and some of which defy description. I quite like this one from Montreal animator Malcolm Sutherland.
Stay tuned to watch the whole thing!
