Space Stallions, a bachelor film project from the 2012 Animation Workshop, plays like every Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood boiled down into one four minute concept. Created by Thorvaldur S. Gunnarsson, Jonatan Brüsch, Ágúst Kristinsson, Arna Snæbjørnsdottir, Esben J. Jespersen, Touraj Khosravi and Polina Bokhan, it appears to have everything: spaceships, spandex-clad heroes, rainbows, unicorn-shaped hoverbikes, moustaches, and laser eggs. It’s like someone put peyote in your Lucky Charms.
The best, sales silliest thing: Aardman Animations — the studio responsible for Wallace and Grommit and the series Creature Comforts, among others — teams up with DC Comics to produce a series of shorts for Cartoon Network. This one uses a setup similar to the aforementioned Creature Comforts, here taking some familiar DC villains and heroes having children voice them. So silly, but so, so good.
A short film by Jim Henson from 1963 created for an AT&T seminar on data communication:
The organizers of the seminar, Inpro, actually set the tone for the film in a three-page memo from one of Inpro’s principals, Ted Mills to Henson. Mills outlined the nascent, but growing relationship between man and machine: a relationship not without tension and resentment: “He [the robot] is sure that All Men Basically Want to Play Golf, and not run businesses — if he can do it better.” (Mills also later designed the ride for the Bell System at the 1964 World’s Fair.) Henson’s execution is not only true to Mills’ vision, but he also puts his own unique, irreverent spin on the material.
Sure beats a PowerPoint presentation. This wasn’t the first gig for the smoke-belching, metal host either, it had already made a previous, corporate appearance in 1961, at the US Food Fair in Hamburg, Germany:
Spanish artist Oscar Sanmartin Vargas has a staggering portfolio of mixed media work, and ranging from dioramas, pharm to surreal architectural etchings, to detailed studies of alien biological specimens. The drawings are especially haunting; all their subjects depicted under a perpetually overcast sky. In regards to those strange animals: he released a book in 2007, entitled Leyendario: Criaturas de Agua (Legendary Creatures of the Water), a video preview of which can be found below. I am completely smitten with these — the line work, the use of empty space, the mystery of them. They are simply wonderful.
A quick Google search shows that this video is pretty much everywhere, but I just can’t resist putting it here. Following up their Star Wars themed Passat commercial for last year’s Super Bowl, Volkswagen returns this year, and once again puts “The Imperial March” to excellent use, in this case having it performed by twelve dogs, some in various forms of Star Wars costumery. It’s so very silly but I love it so very much; especially the grand entrance of the twelfth and final member of this canine chorus. So. Good.
Korean artist Minjeong An’s oeuvre is varied but these self portrait diagrams stand out. Mind-bogglingly detailed, they invite the viewer to fall into their complex webs of lines and labels. Visually they’re almost overwhelming, the lines seeming to shift between abstract patterns and strictly ordered plans. These you really have to check out on her site in high resolution, as our image sizing here doesn’t do them justice.
“Two Against One” from the album Rome, a collaboration between Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi, which came out last year. Featuring vocals by Jack White, it’s been supplied with a spectacularly hallucinatory video directed by Chris Milk and Anthony Francisco Schepperd. Just beautiful work.
Don’t get me wrong, dear readers, I love me some pizza, but that love has its limits. Take, for example, the boomerang shaped pizza featured in this “ad” by Sofa Experience Communications. Hurled down from the heavens by a Fabio-esque, greased up, and bespectacled man-god it seems delicious enough, but around the time it severs the genitals of a creepy gentleman exposing himself to a young lady in a park it loses some of its luster. In fact, it is exactly at that point that it loses all of its luster.
In all seriousness though, I have no idea what is supposed to be going on here. It’s like someone took a bunch of random ideas and a rubber dick, threw them in blender, and called it an advertisement. It’s the [adult swim]/Old Spice, Absurdist aesthetic taken to its logical conclusion, really. Where you would go from here, well, best not to imagine it.
It would seem, at first glance, that this is not a thing that should exist in this reality. This is something that should be glimpsed only when gazing into some dark mirror of this world; something seen on the other side of a portal opening into the formless Void. Here, in the emptiness of this Other Place, one might find this scene, a Fellini-esque performance in which a sweaty, rotund gentleman sings an off-key, off-tempo version of “Jesus Loves Me”, to the decidedly mechanical beat of a cat named Midnight on organ and a mouse named Squeaky on the drum, mallets taped to its paws. No, this is something that should not be a part of our world. Alas, however, it is. Specifically, it is an excerpt from the late 50s children’s television program Andy’s Gang, filmed in front of an audience of what I can only assume were budding sociopaths who did not find this horrible in the least and, indeed, seem quite entertained. For the curious, context does little to make this clip any less dismal.
I’ll admit, I know very little about the Swiss, stop-motion cartoon Pingu other than that it is a Swiss, stop-motion cartoon about penguins. That does little to dampen my enthusiasm for this, a remake of John Carpenter’s sci-fi/horror classic The Thing by Lee Hardcastle, starring the adorable cast of the aforementioned cartoon and animated in the same style. It is just as good as it sounds.
