The Yoke of the Horde

Some works are beyond criticism.

It's not necessarily significant of "greatness" -although it can be. And most great films have plenty of room for criticism.

In animation, I can only think of a handful of works that fit this category.

Priit Parn's "1895" is one:




Martha Colburn's "Evil of Dracula":




Of course, Hubley's "Moonbird":




Perhaps the "gesamkunstwerk" nature of animation allows for even greatness to have it flaws. J. J. Villard's "Son of Satan", for instance, amongst the most powerful films of the decade, still has a thing or two that stick out -the dad's voice, for instance. His "Chestnuts Icelolly" may be more refined, may still be great, but doesn't have near the impact of "Son of Satan".

My old high school pal David Prior has just published a book which, in my opinion, is beyond criticism.

"The Yoke of the Horde"

Here's an excerpt that's off the narrative track of the book, but humorously pertinent to our profession.

'Well, heck, I know it's my logo but I wonder if that's enough. I mean, I wonder if we could somehow get the logo in that little movie with the old man and the truck.'

'You don't need a logo during that part. People are going to identify you with the old man and the truck. You just said so yourself.'

'I know that and you know that, but crazy as it sounds there are a lot of people out there that don't know the first thing about BFT&H. They're likely to see this here commercial and not make the connection between BFT&H and wholesome goodness. I don't need Bobby Beercans sitting at home saying to himself... Well heck, I don't know those kinds of people will say about all of this. He might like the truck but... oh hell. Can't we just the logo or a voice in there, something beside the spiritual music, so people know what its all about?'

'Of course people are going to know what it's all about, Mr. Susskind. That's why we add your name to the end of the commercial. Believe me, we test run commercials all of the time in order to see what the most effective ways for a company to get their point across is, and this approach always does very well. It's a tried and true performer, and if you don't mind me saying so, from your reaction just a minute ago, you thought the bit about the farmer was very engaging, and it was a very good, very effective commercial.'

'No. It needs something more. It's my company, and it's my commercial, and I say it needs a little something more.'

'Okay, fine. Look, maybe I can have some of my people at CPS&D make it so the hat the old man is wearing is a BFT&H hat. How about that?'

'No, someone might miss that. Uh-uh. I want something big, something major, so not even the damnedest fool imaginable would be able to miss it.... You know what I want, Miss Borimmer? I want the old man, when his grandchildren come running to him, that part that you described the people at the agency liking the most, I want that part to be the BFT&H moment. Pinpoint it. Right at that moment, right at that moment you get your marketing stat people to sit around with a bunch of stop watches, and you tell them to watch for the reactions on peoples' faces, you know, these test tube guinea pig people you have watching the new commercials, the...'

'The focus group.'

'Right, those people. See I want those people monitored. You got that? Strictly monitored, that's how we're going to have to do this. Now bear with me, Ms. Borimmer, because we're all on the same team now, BFT&H, CPS&D, we're all going to have to work together now. So what you guys and gals over there at CPS&D are going to do now is watch those little people and once they get to the part you said they all liked, you- no, better yet. Tape them. Yes, tape them and slow down the tape, right. And right at the millionth of a second when they first smile, weep, whatever the hell they do to show we've made them happy, that's when we have the BFT&H appear, and I don't mean I want to see on some fellow's hat. I mean appear. We're talking a crash of thunder, a bolt of lightening, whammo bammo sis boom bah, and then across the sky BFT&H.'

If you don't buy the book, you'll regret it for the rest of your life.

Animation In The Cinema

Last week I picked up a queer little book "Animation in the Cinema" by Ralph Stephenson published by A. Zwemmer, LTD, London in 1967.

almost pocket sized (still from George Dunning's "The Apple")

I've decided to keep a running list of the films he mentions.

Parasite - Vladimir Lehky, Czechoslavakia
The Wardrobe - George Dunning
The Insects - Fred [sic] Murakami (I guess he means Jimmy Murakami -there are several errors like this in the book)
Archangel Gabriel and Mother Goose - Jiri Trnka
Rythemetic - Norman McLaren
La Demoiselle et Violoncelliste - Laguoinie
Once Upon A Time - Jan Lenica



Neighbors - McLaren



Ondonnane - Arcady (Yugoslavia)
Justice - Ante Bajaja
City of Gold - Colin Low
Very Nice Very Nice - Arther Lipsett
House - Charles & Ray Eames
Death Day - Eames
Axe & The Lamp - Halas & Batchelor
The Duel - Janusz Majewski (live action)
Help! My Snowman's Burning Down - Carson Davidson (live action)

Unexpectedly excellent!

These are all mentioned in the opening chapter. Short films which the reader would have heard of, known about, or could access at the local library.

I've heard of maybe three or four. I've seen work from about half of the filmmakers.

Will the festival circuit films we know so well today be obscure curiosities in two generations?

Origami - post 4

We were up at Sesame Workshop yesterday. We stopped by to see Matt Stoddart and I realized we never posted the final "Origami" we did together for Nickelodeon.

While in his office Matt gave us an Abelardo doll.

Abelardo is the Big Bird of Plaza Sesamo

Here's "Origami":



Ed Smith did the animation of the boy. Winnie Tom did the CG animation and most of the compositing.

The music is performed by Yomo Toro on the cuatro which is a ten string guitar associated with Puerto Rico. This is what makes the piece, in my opinion. It's a melancholy sound that provides an emotion weight for the picture.

We went to a basement studio in Jersey City where Yomo likes to record and they laid down the recording in multiple takes on a quarter inch, eight track tape. JZ Barrell was responsible for synchronizing the speeds (long story there) and cutting the track down from roughly five minutes to song you hear in the final.

And Away!

One benefit of working on antique machines is long render times. A sequence which would take five minutes on a newer computer can take hours on one that's just a few years old.

Two hours of waiting, plenty of time to skip out to the movies.

Prior to sneaking out to see "Up", I had only see a couple feature films from Pixar. I liked the fish one, it hit all the right marks. The superhero one left me cold, if I were a 12 year old it may have seemed clever.

"Up" starts out strong enough. A real human, in a real state. Even though its a little sappy, its a well earned.

The first ten, fifteen minutes establish a concrete reality. I don't mean a house-flying or not-house-flying reality, I mean the old guy behaves in a recognizably human fashion. And it's not a kiddie movie. What eight year old knows the long ache of bygone love? It's a cheap emotion, for sure, but it's a real emotion -reminiscent of Jonas Odell's "Family and Friends" -a little dark, a little humorous.

realism courtesy of: the internet

Then, in the lingua franca of the internet - WTF? "Up" is less a hot air balloon, more of a 30,000 foot drop into kiddie film. The craft of the writing is evident -people laugh at jokes that aren't clever or remotely funny because they are properly timed and executed.

Here's what bugs me. Romeo and Juliet, you know Romeo and Juliet, they fall in love but their families will kill one another if they find out. This grim fact colors and forces every action that follows. In "Up" we've got this old guy set on remembering his wife in a grand fashion, there's a kid that tags along (because it seems like the buddy film is the new Broadway musical)and then we get unnecessary hijinx.

I'll admit, I hate the hijinx. I like the crabby old man.

Here's the real thing: the old man, in the presence of his childhood hero, his dead wife's childhood hero, the catalyst for their love decides FOR NO REASON AT ALL to obstruct the hero's seemingly innocent (if obsessive) quest for redemption thus throwing away all hope of finishing his own quest.

Beyond the first section, I found the film to be a mess of cuteness and unmotivated characters. Big disappointment, especially compared to "Finding Nemo" which used many of the same tropes but maintained emotional realism throughout.

Notice how I hadn't mentioned the "Real 3D". It's a creatively bankrupt gimmick which adds absolutely nothing, and possibly detracts from the film experience.

And the "balloon" musical theme is noticeably overused and not very good.

Internet

I did a "google" image search for "animation" and this was the first choice.



This was the second.



The collective unconscious of the internet has yet to define the word.

Checking our metrics, these are some phrases that google has drive to this site:

naked animated queen
origami monkey kids
nedd toons.com
evil toons animation cells
twilight of the gods nude
squiggly line
etchings of athena goddess of war
asterisk after a word in loveletter

In the future, we will be defined by boolean searches. Today, we're not yet * after a word in a loveletter.

Why? Because It's Nuclear

Here's another old, popular one we did for Ka-Blam!

After "Dr. Worm" they sent us another They Might Be Giants track, this a live version of they early cover "Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas)" which was released on the compilation "Severe Tire Damage".

The popularity of this video is completely attributable to the song. After "Hockey Monkey" and "Dr. Worm" our team was sort of coasting.

Again, directed by Jesse Gordon with animation direction by Maciek Albrecht. Todor Radosz did the animation.



Our idea centered around looking at the sun through a telescope. I know, I know, you can't do that. We knew it at the time and figured as long as everybody wore goggles while looking through the telescope, we'd be OK.

Surprisingly, Nickelodeon legal had nothing to say.

The only person who cared was the astronomer at Staten Island University Observatory who refused the use of their facility after finding out our plan. He was a nice guy, and I don't at all blame him.

After that we decided to build a set. Maciek took charge here, and did a pretty good job on limited resources.

Of course we had like $250 in budget for lighting. Scott Levy at Eastern Effects took pity on us and rented an amazing package which allowed us to properly light the stage.

Beyond that, what? The casting. The main kid was cast through Nickelodeon casting. I can never understand why doing something like that is so hard, casting through a network casting office. We're doing a segment for your network, what's the problem? There's always a problem. The rest of the kids were taken from the grade school at the end of my block on 8th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn.

Nostalgia, Nostalgia

It couldn't wait.

Nostalgia, nostalgia -I just had to write about WHT.



For over 20 years I thought it was Womeco, and that it broadcast out of the (apparently non-existent but plausibly named) Womeco, New Jersey.

I imagined a tribe of heroic Indians aiding General Washington in late December 1776 being repaid with a bedroom community named in their honor. But no, it's Wome[i]t[/i]co and has little to do with New Jersey.

WHT was similar to then-fledgling HBO (or our local Philadelphian "Prism"), it was a single channel carrying movies and occasional fights directly into the home. HBO, or Home Box Office as we called it back then, used "cable" technology -like the telephone only carrying pictures. WHT used the traditional broadcast signal, picked up by a special antenna and decoded with a TV top box.

the antenna looked something like this

A ten foot antenna affixed to the side of our small military-issue house. And if you wanted to watch the movie that night, you'd first have to lean out the window and knock the antenna around with a broom to get reception -all the time hollering downstairs to verify the operation's success.

This is how I first saw "Alien". My father, at the time much younger than I am now, invited the whole neighborhood (meaning ten to fifteen 10 to 15 year olds). We all crammed into our 8 by 10 living room. I remember covering my eyes in embarrassment as Sigourney Weaver pranced about in her bra.

Near three decades have intervened. My father, no longer with us. Broadcast television, soon to follow. WHT, long passed.

The sensation of a dozen friend lying on the floor screaming at a brand new experience, that can be everlasting.

That's why we're planning a some screenings in a couple weeks at our new space. I'd say we're open for suggestions, but we're not. I'd say we're kicking it off with "Alien", but nostalgia is only useful if it brings you to a new place.