Here's another reason why I love animation: anytime you think you've seen it all, someone goes and proves you wrong. Blu's Muto sits on the fringe of several techniques—stop-mo, painted animation, pixillation—while throwing out obsessive control mechanisms like, say, locking down the camera. And like the street art that it's built from, Muto incorporates elements of its surroundings, even acknowledging "interfering" passers-by in the audio. Have a look.




[Thanks, Penny Arcade.]

Labels: painted animation, shorts, stop-motion

The last time you were working on your computer and it crashed, did you do it? Smash it, I mean.

On Halloween night 2005, local artist Eric Bond celebrated in public his frustration with computer malfunction in an intensely hilarious performance piece called "Goreputer" (I was present). The performance was videotaped, but most of the footage was lost due to another type of malfunction… Human error. Bond, also an animator, did not want lose the evidence of what he did to a computer on that night. He filled in the lost footage with stop-motion. This is how in 2007, "Goreputer" the performance piece became Goreputer the animated short.

Labels: computer, crash, Darth Vader, Eric Bond, malfunction, Montreal, performance, shorts, stop-motion

If there were awards for truth in advertising, then Kino International would have to win something for the use of one adjective. The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto contains the bulk of the animation master's work, seven short films made between 1968 and 1979.

Kawamoto is considered a stop-motion animator, and his recent feature-length masterpiece, The Book of the Dead, features gorgeous sets to accompany his beautiful puppets. However, this DVD serves as a reminder that his shorts were rarely quite so straightforward. All of the films on the DVD involve the manipulation of physical objects—if not puppets, then cutouts—but Kawamoto freely mixes them with drawn animation and flat paper cutouts with varying degrees of abstraction.

In earlier films like 1972's The Demon, Kawamoto plays with this stylization by having characters move in sync with the background music's rhythm, almost as if they were performing the story as a dance. By the time of the final film, 1979's House of Flames, he's also using stark lighting and elegant compositions to suggest, at times, a stage play. The three middle films in the collection, An Anthropo-Cynical Farce, The Trip and A Poet's Life (from 1970, 1973 and 1974) all break from the use of puppets and the use of ancient Japan as a setting, but are no less compelling. They are perhaps a bit more obtuse in that unique way that independent animation from the 1970s could be.

Kino has also released the feature-length The Book of the Dead, which features some of Kawamoto's most exquisite—there's that word again—stop-motion work to date. Like his best-known short-form films, the movie features Buddhism in ancient Japan. However, this time Buddhist teachings are central to the film, as it takes place in the eighth century, around the time that Buddhism was being introduced to Japan from China. Unlike his shorts, Kawamoto has chosen here to fill out his sets with physical objects and far more characters, all realized with considerable detail. It's hard to watch a sequence with a room full of elegantly dressed puppets with their clothes blowing in the wind and not be awestruck by both the scene's verisimilitude and its poetry.

As lovely as these releases are, there are a few things I'd have liked to have seen. The Book of the Dead uses the English narration with no option to hear the original Japanese (though all the dialogue is still in Japanese, with optional subtitles) and neither disc includes any kind of extras. While Kawamoto's work speaks for itself, the level of craftsmanship on display on both DVDs leaves you wanting to see and hear more. Finally, completists are likely to wag their fingers: The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto lacks four shorts that were included on the Region 2 Kihachiro Kawamoto Work Collection DVD.

Where to Get It
Buy The Exquisite Short Films of Kihachiro Kawamoto from Amazon.com
Buy The Book of the Dead from Amazon.com
Buy Kihachiro Kawamoto Work Collection from YesAsia.com

Labels: anime, features, Kihachiro Kawamoto, shorts, stop-motion

I'm generally not a fan of live-action adaptations of animated TV shows, because they almost always disappoint. The problems usually start with the choices the filmmakers make in order to get animated (or animated-looking) characters into a live action universe. The Flintstones had fake-looking rock sets; Alvin and the Chipmunks and Scooby Doo had CGI critters in an otherwise realistic universe; Fat Albert had the TV characters coming to life in the real world.

In Speed Racer, the Wachowskis do what none of the creators of these other films had the will to do: they created a cohesive universe in which all of the elements in any given frame look like they belong together. In the process, they also highlight something that's been missing from mainstream animation for quite some time.

As I was sitting in the cinema watching Speed Racer, it occurred to me that I already knew how most journalists were going to describe the movie's look. Some would say that it looks like a video game, or that it's anime come to life. They're dead wrong. Outside of some race scenes the movie looks nothing like any video game you've actually played, and outside of a few Akira-like shots and a nod to the original series opener, it looks nothing like any anime you've ever seen. Really, these are just phrases that reviewers use when they want to say that there are lots of things moving around very fast, or that have bright-coloured, futuristic-looking elements.

In a strange way, however, they're also right. Speed Racer, like many video games, demands that its viewers process a lot of visual information at once. Like anime, it stylizes motion in a way that isn't entirely realistic but is believable within its own reality.

If anything, Speed Racer's filmic cues come from green-screen/digital-set movies like the most recent Star Wars trilogy and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, along with shorts that feature heavily processed and manipulated live action, like Gaëlle Denis' City Paradise. But the Wachowskis' real inspiration here is manga. This doesn't just apply to the racing scenes, but to just about anything set outside of the Racer family home. Take a look at these images, and pay special attention to how they put the focus on certain foreground objects or characters and use the backgrounds to denote movement, atmosphere and mood, These compositions are pure manga:







Better still are the transitions, in which the camera moves around a foreground character's head and the backgrounds change to show scenes either as a transition or as a flashback to the past. Some of these scenes are multi-layered, including audio from both the current time and place and the location or time being referenced. There's even one scene where one character tells Speed about about something that will happen in the future; as the camera whirls around Speed, the background shifts to show scenes that highlight what the other character is saying—and eventually we discover this isn't speculation, but what actually happens in the future. The whole sequence interleaves between the present moment and flash-forwards, kind of like an episode of Lost on, well, speed. (Lazy journalists will look at all this and make references to audience members with short attention spans or ADD; the truth is, you really have to pay attention if you want to follow it all.)

I'm just scratching the surface here. All in all, Speed Racer is a visual effects spectacle that doesn't reserve its inventiveness for eye-candy money shots; rather, it's a carefully constructed, dynamic reality that is unlike anything seen on the big screen. All of which brings me to the question I kept asking myself when I left the cinema: why haven't I seen anything like this in feature animation for so long?

It's a cliché these days to say that effects-heavy summer movies are cartoon-like, and there's some truth to that. But it's also true that live-action movies have, through the heavy use of CGI, taken animation's "anything can happen here" mentality and run with it. Meanwhile, feature animation has largely concerned itself with looking more realistic, obsessing over things like realistic fur and hair. Even those productions that aren't so fixated are, relatively speaking, conservative. I've very much enjoyed Pixar's films, but when you get right down to it they mostly fit into a niche best described as "Talking ____s," with the blank filled in by toys, bugs, fish, rats or what have you. The Incredibles was an exciting departure, but so far the new direction that it signalled appears to be a dead end.

Where's the wow? Where's that moment when you jump up in your seat, excited because you've been shown something you've never seen before? Speed Racer provides that in spades, but in feature animation it's been sorely lacking. I remember seeing Tron in 1983, Akira in 1988 and Mind Game in 2005 and each time feeling like someone had redefined what was possible in animated cinema because I was being shown things I hadn't seen before. I've had that same feeling many times over since then, but when it comes to animation it's generally been in OAVs, shorts and—much to my surprise—television.

I'm all for the blurring of boundaries, but to me movies like Speed Racer indicate that feature animation is ceding ground to live action. Something is very wrong with this picture.

Labels: anime, CGI, features, live action, manga, Speed Racer, visual effects, Warner Bros.

If you're in Montreal this week, check out Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema's 35th Year End Screening at Cinema du Parc. There are 5 screenings left from this year's Film Production and Film Animation programs—2 on Tuesday, 2 on Wednesday and the Best of the Fest on Thursday night. If getting a fix of student animation is what you need, then your best bet is to attend the 7pm and 9pm screenings on Wednesday, for a total of 11 animated films. Although, I should add that a lot of the experimental films that come out of the Film Production program are as graphic and fun to watch as their animated cousins. For a full program schedule, go to Concordia's School of Cinema website and click on the text below the Super-8 camera image.

Labels: Concordia University, Montreal, student animation

It's not that hard to create a first-person rollercoaster animation using CGI—I knocked off a half-decent one shortly after I first picked up the Softimage|3D user guide. But it is tricky to come up with a good reason to create a first-person rollercoaster animation, and trickier still to pull it off well. I think this ad for the Zürich Chamber Orchestra succeeds on both counts.



[Thanks, Steve Bass.]

Labels: CGI, commercials, computer animation, motion graphics, shorts

Toon Boom Animation, the University of Trinidad and Tobago and the Animae Caribe Festival have teamed up to launch the first Caribbean and Latin America Edition of the Toon Boom Animation Festival. As in previous editions of the festival, they're looking for short films produced in the Caribbean and Latin America using Toon Boom Studio, Digital Pro, Adobe Flash, Shockwave or similar packages. The submitted shorts must fit the theme "Bridging the Caribbean and Latin America through the Arts and Local Festivals." The top ten finalists' work will be shown at this year's Animae Caribe festival, which is being held September 25–27 in Trinidad.

Labels: Caribbean, festivals, Flash animation, Latin America, Trinidad