NFB of Canada

Check out who's got the goods! The National Film Board of Canada just put up a new website featuring full length films, animations, as well as clips and trailers from throughout their history all posted online for your viewing pleasure. It's a nice resource for this ground breaking publicly owned organization. And if you dig a bit you can find some full length films and videos; a collection I'm sure they'll be expanding as time goes on. Who needs to convert their teevee to digital? Not me (okay, I will miss the Dr. Phil.....).

It did remind me of this Malcom Mclaren animation:




mmmm... publicly funded arts....

Fleischer Brothers give chase to rain

From the weather outside my window, I believe we can all agree (at least in Portland) it's a cartoon kind a day. Here are two rarely seen Fleischer Brothers' films from the thirties

The first is about a hick couple at the World's fair from 1938

and the second is entitled "Dancing on the Moon" 1935, which features lots of. you guessed it, dancing on lunar surfaces:

One cool thing to take note of here is Fleischer's innovated use of the "stereoptic effects" used to achieve the highly realistic looking backgrounds. The studio would build models of the background and photograph them moving along with the actions of the cell animated critters. Pretty amazing effects, especially considering it was all done in the 1930's!

Classic Sesame Street

My search for animated inspiration has lead me to rediscover these childhood gems from the olden days of Sesame Street:

First it's the Teeny Little Super Guy!

An Orange Singing "Carmen" and warping young minds, possibly from Jim Henson:

And finally, some really worthy animation from Jeff Hale (note the Pointer sisters backing up the soul on the soundtrack)
This one is even better than I remembered...

Wow, what a great show!  Good old PBS.  xoxo.

Jan Svankmajer's Sileni (Lunacy)

I had the pleasure last night of watching Jan Svankmajer's 2005 film Sileni or "Lunacy".

The narrative structure is hung on two Edgar Allan Poe tales "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and "The Premature Burial" and features a character developed around the philosophies and politics of Marquis de Sade. Anyone familiar with Svankmajer's work will anticipate the dark themes, surrealist imagery, and stop motion animation that run amok in this film. Essentially, I interpreted it as a political work, much like de Sade's essays written just before the French Revolution, Svankmajer lays out questions of personal freedom, acceptance of normalcy, and getting a laugh out of shocking bourgeois sensibilities.

The main character is snapped out of night terror fits throughout the film.  He fears the fate and label of inherited insanity brought on by his mothers funeral. I found the repeated sequence of him awakening suddenly quite effectively used to establish questions of the hero's sanity, as well as the reality of the world he is awaken to. Each scene is sandwiched by short sensual plays acted out with animated chunks of raw meat. This film is NOT vegan, however I especially appreciated the disembodied tongues copulating, if I am allowed to separate my own personal beliefs for the sake of discussion.

  If I had any critical observations to make, I felt that the stop animation perhaps could have been integrated into the film with a little more finesse. The main story was strong enough that it could have stood on its own without the short plays, except perhaps to add a strongly disturbing graphic element to the social commentary of the film.

As Svankmajer commented in the prologue of the film, it is a horror movie, but the horrors presented seem to be more of the brutalities of oppressive absolute beliefs and the violence of a ruling class. But I may just have a strong stomach.