The Brunch Table

Justina and I took advantage of the holiday to go through our video collection and get rid of all the old VHS tapes that we’d never watch again. VHS really has a horrible bulk-to-quality ratio! However, I did unearth a few gems that I thought I’d lost.

First up, Tayna tretey planety, a Russian animated sci-fi movie from the early 80’s. It has a wonderfully psychedelic synth soundtrack, and the visual style is foreign, somewhat weary and depressed. My copy is dubbed in French since it was taped off of Radio-Canada in the late 80s, but there are apparently several budget English-dubbed DVD releases of varying quality.

Next, Earth*Star Voyager. This was shown as a two-part Disney Sunday movie in the late 80’s, though it was apparently shot as a pilot for a full series that never happened. In the end, it’s pretty laughable (in the late 21st century of this film, they still use the dorky 80’s computer font on all their signage and UIs), but in that era the sci-fi pickings were pretty slim, so I have some fond childhood memories of this. Seems I’m not alone–it’s at least popular enough to warrant torrents of fan-made DVD versions (since Disney will likely never bother to release this on video).

Speaking of Disney, I’ve recently come across some great Ward Kimball animations from Disney’s earlier TV shows:

This segment from Mars & Beyond is mostly an excuse to create wonderfully whimsical creature animations.

Magic Highway USA has been making the blog rounds lately, and it’s easy to see why. It alternates between sensible and prescient predictions (in-dash GPS) and loopy petrocolonial fever dreams (electric hovercars driving by the sphinx in air-conditioned glass highway tubes!), set to a swinging jazz soundtrack. If you like the style, Paleo-Future has rounded up a great set of publicity stills from the collection of Kevin Kidney.

Marlies found the most remarkable item on YouTube today. At first I thought it was another fan translation…but it turned out to be something much more ambitious:

(direct link)

…photos coming soon.

Here’s one of my favorites:

Marlies found this:

(Nijntje is a Dutch cartoon character who predates Hello Kitty by about 20 years. Her name means “Little Rabbit,” and is pronounced “Nine-cha”.)

“I Wanna Be Famous” with Portuguese subtitles:

(direct link)

It starts off gently, but stick with this Dora the Explorer parody for about a minute. Things get weird fast after she starts speaking in garbled German.

( direct link)

Or, every Doctor Who intro sequence ever–spanning the past half-century of TV in just under seven minutes.

(direct link)

This also serves as a neat illustration of the tug-of-war between novelty and nostalgia. Notice how the titles are steadily “upgraded” with the new technology of each decade. We reach a dance-remix-and-flying-3D-text climax sometime in the mid-’90s–and then, photorealistic computer animation having become commonplace, we make an abrupt about-face, heading back to the classic ’70s we’re-zoomin’-through-a-tube version.

This is a beautiful thing, sort of like a cross between The Perry Bible Fellowship and the boiled-down, super-concentrated essence of every Saturday-morning cartoon produced over the entire Reagan Administration:

(direct link)

OK, I admit that I’ve been a bit behind the curve on The Knife. They’re one of those bands that I hear name-checked all over the place before I finally realize how awesome they are. I came across this video while going through Pitchfork’s top 100 list, and its stark animation and psychotic synth-pop sound immediately grabbed my attention. Like War Photographer, it’s the perfect visualization for its song. “Enjoy”:

Watch the video

Incidentally, watching YouTube on TV is the killer app for the Wii’s new web browser.

I’m glad to see that Run Wrake’s Rabbit is online…I think it was one of the best shorts at this year’s Ottawa Animation Festival. It’s the wholesome story of a boy and girl who kill a rabbit and find a tiny demon in its stomach who offers them vast riches in return for large quantities of jam…

I hereby dub the render progress bar the “Porcupine Racetrack.” This lets you cheer it on with cries of “Go, you porcupines, go!” (It feels particularly apt right now, when as I write a humble 1.33GHz iBook–for various reasons, the only computer in the room able to step up to the plate–has definitely bitten off more than it can chew. It’ll be done in about 35 hours from now, it thinks.)

I’ve actually never seen the real “Porcupine Racetrack.” Far as I know, it was broadcast only once in the mid-’90s; I know it only through later references. However, I think it’s a perfect conceptual fit.

Hey, quick plug…”The Little Bird of Disaster” got into the Rotterdam Film Festival…

I’m in a position now where I’ve got to learn 3D, quick, to stay employable. I’ve tried to learn Maya (In ‘99, I took a year of classes in version 1.0 at CMU), but always found it infuriatingly imprecise–and it’s considered the best of the consumer 3D programs as far as interface goes. (One general problem with consumer-level 3D, I’ve learned, is that a lone animator has wrestle with three or four diverse areas of human knowledge. On a big production, each of the other major tasks in CG, besides animating, can be handled by dedicated artists–sculptors model the characters, programmers decide the physics, etc.)

When I was at CalArts, I took a crack at Maya again…version 5 this time. There had been a lot of improvement, of course–modelling was now much closer to sculpting out of blocks of clay, and not so much like gluing spheres and cones together. And you could paint right on your model, too, which helped a lot. But getting around in it still felt awkward to me. Mondi Anyango, another student at CalArts, is in the business of creating custom interfaces for his 3D work, including one made with a freeware motion-capture program called EyesWeb. But that sort of thing is pretty well beyond me. (And also, I guess, the Polar Express folks–take a look at this animator’s opinion on what they did wrong, complete with photo examples.)

…so recently I downloaded the demo of version 6, ready to grit my teeth and try again…and I got a wonderful surprise. Version 6 has full integration with a Wacom tablet. They’ve let you paint and sculpt with the tablet for a while now, but you still needed a mouse to get around the 3D space. Now you don’t. The difference is amazing. Something in my brain just sort of clicks into place.

And now, the best part–they’re starting to make Tablet PCs that run Maya.

This week’s brain-melting internet folk art meme comes to you from Octopus Dropkick via Waxy. The monkey donkey will advise you on what to buy this Christmas season. This reminds me of Susan somehow. Incidentally, if you want to make your own creepy synthesized voice tracks, go here (Monkey Donkey uses the “Rich” voice).

I was privileged to be near a Demographic Moment on the bus the other day…two young women were (in English) dissing a third woman (not present); “She likes the dumbest movies, she’s all, have you checked out the latest new releases?” (laughter) “Like, Home on the Range, with the, you know, cows and…I mean, it’s not worth the time, you know, from my life–if I want to watch cartoons I’ll watch Pixar.” And 3,000 miles away Michael Eisner maybe turns really pale and has to lie down.

I got this from Boing Boing, but I had to give this Electric Company site another shout-out. Not only does it offer many of the great funk & psychedelic songs from the show (including some by Tom Lehrer and Morgan Freeman), but it also has a quicktime of my favorite children’s show bit ever, Counting Pinball. Watching it now, I find the style and music reminiscent of Fantastic Planet.

Leafing through the New York Times today, an ad for Areva caught my eye. Not only did it tout Areva’s expertise in nuclear and wind energy harvesting (the most promising “greenhouse-clean” energy sources for the post-petroleum era), but it did so in an appealing infographic style.

If the style is familiar, that’s because the it was created by H5, the French collective that was responsible for the nifty animated-infographic Royksopp video (not to mention a distinctively cel-shaded Goldfrapp video). Now, who is Areva? They’re the pseudo-privatized French atomic energy/weapons agency. I’m guessing that the campaign emphasizes wind power as a sop to those pesky environmentalists.

It happened that I was thinking of a Western (Red River, with John Wayne, 1948, very gay, and I don’t mean junior-high-lunch-period “that’s so gay”) with a cattle stampede scene in it. And suddenly I realized:

Vash the Stampede.

Vache the Stampede.

Geez. All these years it took me to figure this out.

Triplets of Belleville (in theaters 11/21) I was stunned when I saw the trailer for this francophone-produced animated feature earlier tonight.

Avalon (on DVD 12/16) This one’s a lushly photographed live-action/CG film from Ghost in the Shell’s Mamoru Oshii. I’m not as convinced that this one is actually a good film, but it’s got a unique look that its trailer shows off well.

Innocence: Ghost in the Shell (in theaters spring 2004?) Speaking of Ghost, a sequel is scheduled for next spring–I read somewhere that it will arrive on our shores soon after opening in Japan.

Palm Pictures Directors Label (on DVD Tuesday) I wrote about them before, but these collections of works by music video directors Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze are finally hitting shelves this week. What do these guys have in common? They’ve all done great videos for Bjork.

This week’s edition of The Onion AV Club includes a great interview with Peter Chung, the creator of Aeon Flux.