Posts Tagged ‘Colossal Pictures’
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn”*…
Via Io9, news of your correspondent’s alma mater, Colossal Pictures…
We don’t know just how long MTV has been releasing old Liquid TV shorts on their website, but what we do know is that this news is pure, uncut awesome. After years of watching crummy youtubes of the most f-ed up cartoons and shorts ever made, MTV has finally decided to release all the contents of Liquid Television online. Which means, all the Psycho-Grams and Winter Steele episodes you want!
So many wonderful things came from this late night animation and puppet variety show: Æon Flux, Beavis and Butt-Head, heaps of They Might Be Giants music videos, and more. It was just solid crazy-person programming…
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Hours of fun at Liquid Television.
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As we color outside the lines, we might recall that it was on this date in 1929 that Walt Disney released El Terrible Toreador, the second cartoon (following the epic The Skeleton Dance) in the Silly Symphony series (which, unlike Disney’s other consistently character-themed series, like Mickey Mouse, had no continuing characters; rather they were whimsical accompaniments to pieces of music– in the case of El Terrible Toreador, a snatch of Carmen).
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Shooting oneself in the foot with an air-to-air missile…
Foreign Policy suggests that China is using Top Gun footage as Chinese air force drill reportage… (particularly amusing to your correspondent, as his alma mater [USFX, part of Colossal Pictures] created the shots in question :-)
As part of its ongoing expansion, has the People’s Liberation Army signed up Goose and Maverick? Chinese bloggers are accusing state broadcaster CCTV of using repurposed footage from the 1986 film Top Gun for a story on a recent air force drill. “Ministry of Tofu” explains:
In the newscast, the way a target was hit by the air-to-air missile fired by a J-10 fighter aircraft and exploded looks almost identical to a cinema scene from the Hollywood film Top Gun.
A net user who went by the name “??” (Liu Yi) pointed out that the jet that the J-10 “hit” is an F-5, a US fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5. Looking at the screenshots juxtaposition, one cannot fail to find that even flame, smoke and the way the splinters fly look the same.
Assuming the above screen shots [more at the links in the first paragraph, above] are genuine, the rip-off seems pretty clear. In related news, CCTV recently aired footage of the Chinese Olympic volleyball team at their secret training facility.
As we remind ourselves never to trust our eyes, we might recall that this date in 1959 was “the day the music died”: the day that a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, J.P. Richardson (aka, The Big Bopper), and pilot Roger Peterson.
Photo-journal(ism)…
An old Colossal Pictures friend, Dan Hanna, has been pursuing an unusual project:
Every day I position myself in the center of this ring and take two simultaneous photos (180 degrees apart). The ring is marked off for the 365 days of the year and a pair of crosshairs (mounted on a sliding wooden fixture) are incremented along the circumference of the ring to line up with these markings. I use the crosshairs to position my head as nearly as possible in the center of the ring. So far, I’ve accumulated approximately 17 years worth of photos (the project was started in ’91).
See all 17 years worth of The Photo Aging Project here. (Thanks, PR, for lead.)
As we check our hair and make-up, we might tilt at a birthday windmill in honor of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, the author of Don Quixote; he was born on this date in 1547… and we might marvel that what is arguably the first novel (in the Western canon, anyway) may also be the best.
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