One man animation machine Nick Cross describes his short The Pig Farmer thus:
A simple tale of a wayward soul, click awash in an ocean of tragedy and regret.
Which, sick while succinct, does not, perhaps, do a proper job of accurately describing the character of the porcine homesteader at the center of this tale. No, at the very least I believe a modifier is required here, “naive” being my suggestion; for surely it is a dearth of worldly experience that best explains why he would trust those sly and treacherous Vulpes, enshrined, as is their wont, in a world of cheap sex and illicit substances. To suggest otherwise would be to assume our hero a complete idiot, and I am loathe to paint all those who live off the land as brainless rubes. I pity this poor, anthropomorphized pig, then. He really could not have seen it coming.
Another week has come and gone, dear readers. Where the time went, I cannot say. And yet, here we are, on the cusp of another weekend. This week has been a blur; my ability to retain information seemingly non-existent. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m getting sick, or maybe Zo has been spiking my water again. Regardless of the cause, in the spirit of my hummingbird-like attention span, the FAM presents a grab bag of short stories on film. Continue, and be entertained!
Thursday by Mathias Hoegg. Sometime in the future there is a family of blackbirds and a young couple living in a vast metropolis. What will happen when their paths cross? CLICK TO FIND OUT.
Blinky™ by Ruairi Robinson, director of Fifty Percent Grey and The Silent City presents a tale that even my dessicated, pea-sized brain can wrap itself around. It’s the story of a robot gone bad, as robots are wont to do. Seriously, they’re evil.
Chernokids by Marion Petegnief, Matthieu Bernadat, Nils Boussuge, Florence Ciuccoli, and Clément Deltour tells the creepy, sad story of four, mutated children living in an un-named industrial zone and their devotion to a being they call Mother. At one point they turn into superheroes, but not really.
Jons and the Spider by Marie-Margaux Tsakiri-Scanatovits and Soyoung Hyun uses cutout animation (computer simulated or not I am unsure) to tell the story of a young boy, left in a cabin deep in the woods to make violins. This one is more about creating an atmosphere, perhaps, than telling an actual story. I think. I could be wrong. Again, tiny brain.
And that’s going to do it for the FAM. Have a good weekend everyone. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find somewhere quiet and collapse into a quivering heap.
I can’t help but admire Ian Obermuller’s whacked-out Self Absorb Awash in a sea of near future cautionary tales and space-marines, paranoid psychothrillers and myriad different flavors of “-punk” appendaged sub-genres, there seems to be less and less work being produced that features the truly alien. Self Absorb tells the story of a young man who awakens in an alien jungle with no memory of how he arrived there. He eventually finds himself in the presence of one Dr. Trellis, a “metaphysicist” who counts among his assistants two individuals whose consciousnesses he has transferred into his pet cats. Yeah, it’s that kind of story. As far as animation goes, it is, perhaps, not the most jaw-dropping display you will ever see, but it does a wonderful job of creating a sense of place. Regardless of its art direction, its embrace of the bizarre has me interested in seeing what comes next.
Artist Molly Crabapple, songstress Kim Boekbinder, and animator Jim Batt have teamed up to create an animated film based on Kim’s song, “The Organ Donor’s March.” This morning, the three launched a Kickstarter page to raise funds for the project. The final result will be an animated stop-motion story featuring original characters and sets. Crabapple, Boekbinder and Batt are looking to raise $7K to fund studio rent, 2-3 months of full time animating, printing, lights, hard drives, animation software, specialized camera equipment, and the manufacturing of the DVDs.
At thispoint I’m probably in danger of turning Coilhouse into a Graham Annable repository, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take, lest any of our faithful readers forget or, perhaps, for new readers who may not have had a chance to delve into the archives. His newest is The Smartest Dog in the World which, as the title suggests, is the tale of the world’s most intelligent canine, told with Annable’s Gorey-esque flair for dark humor. If you dig this, you can see more at the links provided earlier and, of course, the Grickle Channel on YouTube. Meanwhile, I’ll do my best to resist the urge to post everything he has produced here.
TV on the Radio’s new song “Will Do” has a tenderhearted, lovely new video… replete with VR cybergoggles. Their next album, Nine Types of Light, drops April 12th. Best wishes to bassist Gerard Smith for a speedy recovery.
Director: Dugan O’Neal / Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde / Director of Photography: David Myrick / Visual Effects: BEMO / Art Director: Ashley Fenton and Megan Fenton / Editor: Dugan O’Neal and Isaiah Seret / Virtual Reality Goggles by Nikolai Hass and Simon Hass / Commissioner: Michelle An / Production CO: Doomsday Ent.
The creative team of Celine & Yann have created a trio of animated shorts entitled Giant which feature enormous, ask anthropomorphized objects and their interactions with tiny, triangular humans. They are delightful in their succinctness. Each one has a stinger so make sure to watch through the very brief credits.
Way too much going on today to put up a proper, full-length FAM. Instead, we present the 2011 Oscar winner for Best Animated Short: The Lost Thing by Shaun Tan, which tells the story of a young man who comes upon a giant, bio-mechanical “thing” on a beach and follows his efforts to help find a place for it in a world built on uniformity and order. It’s a beautiful 15 minutes with an unexpected dystopian streak. Give it a look while you can, for like all things posted in this feature, it may be pulled down at any moment by the powers that be.
The official video for “Caffeine”, sovaldi off of the album You Make Me Real by Brandt Brauer Frick. Written and directed by Danae Diaz and Patricia Luna it follows the rebellion of a businessman — clad in suit, sildenafil tie, and hat — against his assembly line existence. I especially the additional elements that work their way into the scenery as he makes his way home, especially the figures in the windows of the building he scales during the finale, showing that everything is, perhaps, not as well ordered as they appear at first glance.
I’m not sure how Hulu works in countries outside the US at this point. My apologies if you cannot watch this, it’s one of the reasons I try to avoid sites like Hulu.
It’s Friday, people, which means that there’s only a few more hours until you can stick a fork in another soul-crushing work week. Allow the FAM to help that time pass a little more quickly with this week’s presentation of Don Bluth’s 1982 classic The Secret of NIMH, starring, among others, Mary Elizabeth Hartman (in her last role before her suspected suicide), John Carradine, Dom DeLuise, Aldo Ray, and Wil Wheaton.
An adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the movie tells the story of Mrs. Brisby, a widowed field mouse, whose son falls ill with pneumonia and cannot leave the house for three weeks. At this time, Spring plowing is set to begin on the farm the Brisbys live on and Mrs. Brisby, knowing she cannot stay where she is, visits the Great Owl who directs her to a group of mysterious rats who live in a rose bush and are led by a wizened old rat named Nicodemus. Brisby learns that the rats, along with her late husband Jonathan, were part of an experiment performed at the National Institute of Mental Health which boosted their intelligence to human levels at which point they made their escape.
The Secret of NIMH was a favorite of mine as a child and recent viewings have done little to dampen my enthusiasm for it. Bluth and his partners, most of who had defected from Disney with him, were fixated on what they perceived to be the decline of animation as an art form. The Secret of NIMH, then, was a collection of expensive and, even at the time, outdated animation techniques. The glowing eyes of Nicodemus, for example, were created by back-lighting colored gels. Characters had different color palettes for individual lighting situations (Mrs. Brisby alone had 46). It’s a veritable showcase of animation and it all makes for a beautiful film. Still, it came at a price, and the film came in so over the original budget that Bluth and his co-producers had to collectively mortgage their homes to finance some of it. There was even a problem with their diminutive protagonist’s name:
During the film’s production, Aurora contacted Wham-O, the manufacturers of Frisbee flying discs, with concerns about possible trademark infringements if the “Mrs. Frisby” name in O’Brien’s original book was used in the movie. Wham-O rejected Aurora’s request for waiver to use the same-sounding name to their “Frisbee”, in the movie. Aurora informed Bluth & company that Mrs. Frisby’s name would have to be altered. By then, the voice work had already been recorded for the film, so the name change to “Mrs. Brisby” necessitated a combination of re-recording some lines and, because John Carradine was unavailable for further recordings, careful sound editing had to be performed, taking the “B” sound of another word from Carradine’s recorded lines, and replace the “F” sound with the “B” sound, altering the name from “Frisby” to “Brisby”.
In the end, there are really two things that make NIMH stick out: its tone and its protagonist. The mood of the film is exceedingly foreboding, especially for a G-rated feature intended for children, without crossing into the historical seriousness of, say, Grave of the Fireflies or the political allegory of Watership Down. When I think of it, the images that come to my mind are bleak, eerie, and filled with fire. Likewise, its heroine is unlike anything one would have seen from Disney. Mrs. Brisby is no princess. She is a middle-aged mother and widow. Her quest is not an epic struggle between good and evil, it is to save her family. She doesn’t fall in love with a dashing male lead, she is not even looking for it, the love she had for another is in her past, before we are even introduced to her. Is she one of the great feminist characters in film? No. But she is a refreshing change from the typical Barbie doll pap most peddle.
Watching The Secret of NIMH it is perhaps most evident that it is a labor of love, both for its story and for the medium it is presented in. It is not a stretch to say that they don’t make them like this anymore. After all, who would be crazy enough to try?
