Posts Tagged ‘Animation’
“Better not bring up a lion inside your city, but if you must, then humor all his moods”*…
Historian Bret Devereaux on why it’s ill-advised to idolize Spartans…
The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well.
Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises—an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society…
Eminently worth reading in full. U.S. admiration of a proto-fascist city-state is based on bad history: “Spartans Were Losers,” from @BretDevereaux in @ForeignPolicy.
In the spirit of offering alternative perspectives: Brad DeLong in defense of Gates of Fire, if not of the worshipful view of the Spartans.
* Aristophanes, The Frogs
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As we rethink role models, we might recall that it was on this date in 1951 that Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its American premiere (in New York, two days after premiering in London).
Walt Disney first tried to adapt Alice into a feature-length animated feature film in the 1930s, but were scrapped in favor of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). The idea was revived in the 1940s. The film was originally intended to be a live-action/animated film, but Disney decided it would be the fully animated feature film. During its production, many sequences adapted from Lewis Carroll’s books were later omitted, such as Jabberwocky, White Knight, the Duchess, and Mock Turtle.
Alice in Wonderland was considered a disappointment on its initial release, so was shown on television as one of the first episodes of Disneyland. Its 1974 re-release in theaters proved to be much more successful, leading to subsequent re-releases, merchandising, and home video releases.
“The earth is what we all have in common”*…
Explore a catalog of NASA images and animations of our home planet: “Visible Earth,” from @NASAEarth.
* Wendell Berry
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As we peruse our planet, we might recall that it was on this date in 1965 that NASA turned on planetary science mode on the Mariner IV spacecraft (which had been launched on November 28, 1964 from Cape Canaveral) as it flew by Mars. Over the next two days, Mariner IV captured the first “close up” pictures (21 in all) of the planets surface. The images taken during the flyby were stored in the on-board tape recorder; each individual photograph took approximately six hours to be transmitted back to Earth.
While waiting for the image data to be computer processed, the team used a pastel set from an art supply store to hand-color (paint-by-numbers style) a numerical printout of the raw pixels. The resulting image provided early verification that the camera was functioning. The hand drawn image compared favorably with the processed image when it became available.
“Animation isn’t the illusion of life; it is life”*…
A unsung pioneer…
A decade before Walt Disney Productions came into existence, making its name synonymous with animated films, there was another pioneer of the art form — Lotte Reiniger.
Reiniger’s filmmaking career spanned 60 years, during which she created more than 70 silhouette animation films, including versions of “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots” and “Hansel and Gretel.” She’s perhaps best known for her 1926 silent film “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” a fantastical adaptation of “The Arabian Nights” that was among the first full-length animated features ever made [and the oldest still in existence]…
Beginning with “Prince Achmed,” she also created an early version of the multiplane camera, which gave two-dimensional animation a hitherto unexplored depth, movement and complexity. She called her device a tricktisch, or trick table…
More of Reiniger’s work: The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and a Nivea commercial (1920).
More of Reiniger’s remarkable story: “Overlooked No More: Lotte Reiniger, Animator Who Created Magic With Scissors and Paper” (gift article) from @nytimes, and on Wikipedia.
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As we sit with the shadows, we might recall that it was on this date in 1935 that Mickey’s Garden was released. Directed by Wilfred Jackson, it was the second Mickey cartoon produced in color and the first color appearance of Pluto. It is also, notably, the first short on which Ollie Johnston (a cleanup artist at the time, ultimately, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men“) worked.
“What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence”*…
From Matthijs Van Mierlo‘s The Gaze, via Laughing Squid, an appreciation of the evocative background art in Looney Tunes cartoons…
When you strip Looney Tunes from all its characters and movement and music, you discover this hidden dimension filled with beautiful images that are abandoned, silent, and kind of creepy sometimes. It’s the complete opposite of what Looney Tunes is. Filled with life and very loud. These background images are liminal spaces. Spaces that are usually filled with life, but are now dead silent…
Layout designers come up with the designs and the lighting and the camera angles for each shot of the cartoon, and those initial designs are then used by the background artists to create the actual backdrops. These artists are the unsung heroes of the Golden Age of American animation. An age that ran from the 1930s up until the early 70s…
One of the things [iconic background artist Maurice Noble] quickly threw out the door was a style of realism that was often used at Disney. …He said that if you have characters that are mainly lines and flat color, you should follow the same approach in your backgrounds. And if your characters are caricatures of reality, your background art should be a caricature as well. For instance by adding lots of exaggerated imperfections or by using stretched out and distorted perspectives…
More at “The Quietly Elegant Background Art of Looney Tunes” via @LaughingSquid.
See also the Instagram feed looneytunesbackgrounds.
* Claude Monet
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As we set the scene, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008 that Disney released Pixar’s WALL-E. Directed by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote with Jim Reardon, the tale of a maintenance robot who falls in love won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (with five additional Oscar nominations), Hugo Award for Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation, the final Nebula Award for Best Script, and the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film. In 2021, WALL-E became the second Pixar film (after Toy Story) to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
While WALL-E was (like all of Pixar’s films) animated entirely by computer, the convention of developing character animation and background art separately survives from the days of cel animation. In a way that echoes the thought that went into the aesthetic of Looney Tunes backgrounds, Pixar artists consulted with cinematographer Roger Deakins and effects genius Dennis Muren to set the tone of backgrounds in WALL-E– settling on the mix of handheld imperfections and unfocused backgrounds that contain the action.
“The Surrealist tradition in all these arts is united by the idea of destroying conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-meanings through radical juxtaposition (the ‘collage principle’)”*…
California-based artist Bill Domonkos takes old photos and footage and turns them into surreal, witty GIF mash-ups. Flashbak reports…
As he says of his multimedia collages:
I experiment by combining, altering, editing and reassembling using digital technology, special effects and animation to create a new kind of experience. I am interested in the poetics of time and space—to renew and transform materials, experiences and ideas. The extraordinary thing about cinema is its ability to suggest the ineffable—it is this elusive, dreamlike quality that informs my work…
I think a lot of my work comes into being by chance. It’s all about making visual associations between things I’ve seen in the public domain. The back and forth experimentation of combining different elements usually leads somewhere unexpected…
More– and more wonderful examples: “Artist Creates Brilliant Surreal Animations from Archival Photos and Film,” from @billdomonkos in @aflashbak.
* Susan Sontag, “Happenings: an art of radical juxtaposition“
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As we muse on montage, we might send squawky birthday greetings to Donald Duck; “born” (in that he made his first screen appearance) on this date in 1934 in “The Wise Little Hen.”
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