Igor Kavalyov is an animator born in Ukraine in 1963 at the time part of the USSR. Igor animated a short in 1990 called Yego zhena kuritsa. I haven't any idea what the piece means however I am in love with the illustrative treatment and the kinetic residue on even the stillest of frames. In moments of stagnancy the animation still jets color about abstractly within its strong graphic containers in a type of frenetic dance.

Igor Kavalyov later directed and played integral roles in the making of a variety of american popular animated television shows like Rugrats, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, and Duckman. All of which share Kavalyov's manic illustrative line work, and slight creepiness.

Bjork has good taste.

Revisiting an old tidbit of information from a previous animation course, "Human Behavior", the music video to the song of the same title by singer Bjork, gives little nods to the classic short film "Hedgehog in The Fog". The references, most notably the hedgehog running through the woods, the setting, and the small hint of the latter's musical score, are neat to see in the more current piece. It's nice to see popular artists pay homage to obscure films like this, and shows just how influential these films have been.

-Lily.

The Quay Brothers: The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer

The image above is a still from The Quay Brothers' animation The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (1984). In a world of banal objects and structured environments a series of events both surreal and unexpected are wielded into the world by these objects. In dissecting the structure and mind of Jan Svankmajer, The Quay Brothers (pictured below) create a clever dialogue with the master animator, but also create a complexity that highlights how simply objects transform themselves. Objects in the similar Svankmajer manner transcend themselves and defy their meaning. They create new meaning for themselves acting out of an almost existentialist paradigm--they become autonomous, leading the lives that we could only dream they live.

The Quay Brothers

Much as we see in Jan Svankmajer's Meat Love (1989), there is a transcendence of the object's usefulness in The Quay Brother's animation. We find that we are looking at the inner and private life of an object and the surrealist and whimsical take that presents itself as a result. Svankmajer (pictured below) is known as a pioneer in the animation community--the tragedy and comedy that is present in his work expresses an other-worldliness that is moody, poetic, and dream-like.

Jan Svankmajer

Reference:

Zeitgeist Films

|| Post by: Stephanie Clark ||

Mythology and the Uncanny

The use of mythology has been a constant theme in our class. In Harpya(Harpy) an extremely creepy and unreal short made by Raoul Servais. In the Greek Mythology Phineas who had the gift of prophecy angered Zeus by revealing too much of the future. He was punished by being blinded and left stranded on an island with a large buffet of food which he could never eat. The harpies always swooped in and ate their fill then ruined the left-overs.

The mustachio man in Harpya hears the cry of a woman and saves her from her assailant who is choking her. Then it is revealed that she is a Harpy. Enthralled by her he takes her home to care and feed her, and much like in the tale of Phineas she eats all of his food. Yet, seemingly unsatisfied she continues to not only eat his parrot, but also his legs when he tries to escape. Ultimately unable to escape her dominion the man resorts to choking her, which leads to a policeman to intervene starting the cycle again.

It seems that this film focus is combined with the danger and allure of the femme fatale with abjection of the Freudian concept of the uncanny. The Harpy is both the combination of a woman and a raptor. Both are familiar, but when combined create a form that is unknowable, a horror. Yet the man does not recoil in terror, yet. Maybe he is initially drawn to her by her other-worldly beauty. The fact remains when the Harpy is true to her Hellenistic pedigree the man is ravaged from the waist down. The man driven by hunger and fear is left to attempt to break out of his slavery. That isn't the case as he now a cripple is stymied and is introduced to what I assume is a long list of hosts. She looks knowingly hungry like somehow it was all part of the plan. There is no relief in the harpy's eyes. Just the knowledge of survival and preservation of self.

-Ben

Priit Pärn

Born in Estonia in 1946, Priit Pärn is one of the most recognized animators from the area. Although art and animation were not Pärn's first profession, he always found time to draw. His drawing were featured in local papers and he eventually was asked to work with Rein Raamat on the film Kilplased. After this experience, Pärn directed his own film, called Is the earth round?
In the years after, Pärn made many films that have won numerous awards. A good number of his films subject matter involve dark and historical reference to growing up in Estonia under the Soviet rule. His drawing style was concidered unusual and non-Disney-esque, which is what the Soviet's wanted. His way of drawing became influential however in his native Estonia, as well as around the world. His influence can be seen in television shows such as Rugrats, and AHHH! Real Monsters.
Today Priit Pärn teaches at the Turku University of Applied Sciences: Art Academy, in Turku Finland, as well as continuing his art practice.

Kas maakera on ümmargune? (Is the Earth Round?)

|-Kelly-|

Jan Svankmajer

Jan Svankmajer is a Czech artist known for his unique surreal animations. He attended the College of applied Arts in Prague as well as the Department of Puppetry at the Prague Academy of Performing Arts. The study of puppetry greatly influenced his animation works; especially with the use of stop motion. Svankmajers animations are amazing examples of the stop motion technique and often include live action. He experiments with speeding up and slowing down certain objects as well as exaggerating their sounds. Svankmajers imagery is eery with a nightmarish quality yet at the same time the films are playful and fun. He often uses food as a subject matter as well as a medium. A great example of this can be seen in Meat Love (1989). In the early 1970s communist government temporarily banned Svankmajer from making films. Later in his career he started working with claymation creating some interesting works such as Darkness/Light/Darkness. Svankmajer did not gain much recognition in America until the 1980s. Today he is a well respected animator greatly influencing other artists such as Tim Burton





Meat Love is a great example of his use of food as well as exaggeration of sounds

--callie

Raoul Servais

Raoul Servais, an independent film maker "The Magician from Onsted" earned a world famous reputation. In 1963 Servais attended The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, this school has produced many animators and film makers who soon made it to The United States of America. Servais felt comfortable there because of a teacher named Albert Vermerien . Servais' first camera was made out of a cigar-box , but he wasnt impressed by the image quality of it. Servais was born in Onsted , his career began in the 1960's. His early films illustrated his rich sensibility in , Chromphobia (1965) and Sirene (1968). All of Servais' films have a an original theme. Nachtvlinders (Nocturnal Butterflies) he resources himself as delicate and nostalgic. Also , In Servais' films he visualizes human values that are threatened and degraded and his images open up a new view of the world.

-Arianna

http://www.raoulservais.be/

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

Jiri Trnka’s The Hand is a puppet animation with a theme equivalent to the Twilight Zone. It is a story about an artist who makes ceramic pots, so that when the pot for his beloved plant breaks, he can replace it with another one. Here he lives his peaceful life, devoid of any awareness to events that would be taking place in the world outside. But then, he suddenly hears a noise coming from the window, and a giant hand swoops into his house. The hand starts to overstay his welcome when he changes the artist’s clay pot to a pointing hand, suggesting that the artist should make more clay hands like this. The artist dislikes this suggestion, and nudges the hand out the door; only for the hand to return, more persistent, and assertive, then before, until it reaches the point, where the hand is demanding that the artist make clay pointing hands instead of clay pots for his plant. He delivers a phone to the artist and calls him on it. Over the phone he tries to persuade the artist to make clay hands by offering him money, the artist denies the offer and kicks the phone out the window. The hand then returns with a television, and shows him how wonderful, and important the hand is. But again the artist refuses, and tries to smash the hand with a hammer, only for a darker hand to return and place him under arrest. He is hypnotized into placing his hands into hang ropes, where he is made into a marionette. The dark hand then carries the artist into a cage where he is forced to carve a giant pointing hand out of a stone block. The artist manages to escape and return to his home, only for the hand to come back, and back, and back, and back, up to the point where the artist can stand it no longer, and dies. The dark hand, realizing that the artist is dead, provides a funeral for him, making it appear that the artist died a peaceful death. This film was an allegory, about life in a totalitarian society. The hand represented the central power, and the artist represented the citizen. It was first released in 1965, but was criticized by the “Cult of Personality” which was pretty much run by Stalin, and was shortly after banned and never released to the public again.  

- Jon

image was taken from flikr.com 

Yuriy Norshteyn was born during a World War II evacuation in Penza Oblast. He studied at an art school, but his first career was working in a furniture factory. He soon took a two year animation course, though, and was able to find work at an animation studio. He was involved with the animation for the 1962 film "Who Said Meow?" He would work on about 50 films before getting the opportunity to co-direct the 1968 film, "25th October, The First Day" and he went on to work on other films such as "Times of the Year" and "The Battle of Kerzhenets". He works with the multiplane camera technique.
He was working on an animated adaption of Gogol's Overcoat when he was fired from the studio for working too slowly. By that time, he and a few other people had managed to finish 10 minutes in 2 years. H managed to overcome this and co-found an animation studio/school. 26 years later, he is STILL working on "The Overcoat". About the same number of minutes have been completed as the nuber of years it has taken to work on it. It is going to be about 65 minutes long when it is finished. He has also written the book, Snow on the Grass.

Image+info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuriy_Norshteyn

Lenica and the Grotesquery of Ubu Roi

There are some high quality images from Jan Lenica's animation film, "Ubu et le Grande Gidouille," posted on one of my favorite image-sites, 50watts.com. The explosive, grotesque and surreal theatre work by Alfred Jarry is an inescapable one, revisited and re-made numerous times by the creative minds it attracts. Lenica's own aesthetic makes it his own, especially with his strong and bold, yet highly organic graphics. The animation utilizes cut-outs, drawing and painting in a collagist's manner. Pieces and parts of bodies float serenely, suddenly twitch, fly off screen, lay leaden in sullen austerity, and generate a tense, surreal and phantom-like landscape.

Jan Lenica is an essential part of the animation filmmaking landscape. His role as a Polish poster designer brought him success, but his eventual move into animation cemented his legacy. Initial animation explorations with his compatriot, Walerian Borowczyk, or "Boro," garnered the art world's response, culminating in the film "Dom" ("House")

Lenica and Boro were referring to their own style as barbaric, in that their efforts to bring life to their images using animation were not concerned with graceful qualities. Instead, their style was halting, twitchy, crude (sometimes) and gestural. Their subject matter was most frequently about the political, and the crushing control of the individual's spirit, which was necessarily disguised in metaphor and symbol as a way to get past the Soviet Communist censors.

Lenica's death in 2001 left behind a proliferation of compelling work in both design and animation.

(Here's a not-so-great quality upload of his film here (or directly on youtube), but copy nonetheless.)

| post by Lorelei |

Self Reflexivity, Modernism, and the American Cartoon

While reading Norman M. Klein's Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, one aspect that was fascinating was Klein's relations between the modern constructs of painting and the advent of modern American animation. The major characteristic that makes both a painting and an animation modern is self-reflexivity (as seen in the 1863 painting Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe (The Picnic) by Edouard Manet--pictured at the beginning of this post). There is a self-reflexivity of medium in the sense that both the limitations and boundlessness of the medium are reflected and made aware to the viewer. The artist always returns to the specific tendencies of the medium in order to communicate the narrative. Klein states:

"Truth to materials is also amounted toa simple act of isolation. Locate a device that is essential to your medium, like the texture of paint, then isolate it. Keep the device quarantined from the standard vocabulary in the art-form. Eventually, after a great deal of work, the device replaces the vocabulary altogether and becomes the entire piece." ( Klein 169)

Looking at pieces like Bobe Canon's Gerald McBoing Boing (1951), and the piece One Froggy Evening (1943) by Chuck Jones, one can see that there is a concern to design and consideration to medium. There is a self-reflexivity of the medium that makes us not only aware of the constraints of the work as an animation, but also, we are made aware of its limitless in content and form because of its dedication to its medium.


References:

Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Cartoon by Norman M. Klein

|| Post by: Stephanie Clark ||

Disney World

Both Warner Brothers and Disney are incredible forces in film. Perspective on the origins and development of these major studios is incredible. Disney's successive failures before professional success. The bouts with Disney and his employes to the crossovers of staff to Warner Brothers. Considering the volume of internal drama its remarkable the amount of work that was produced, the stability of the studios and the quality of the work composed. Its Hard think of small animation studios emerging in the same fashion in contemporary market. In fact it makes me worried for the sake of independents, start ups and even other semi large organizations. For example Marvel Entertainment is now owned by Disney, and Warner Brothers controls the licenses of DC comics. These are not small studios, these are large corporate identities that have been absorbed by if you can imaging even larger identities. Obviously its a great thing that these franchises were saved from possible fiscal doom. However the more identities the larger companies are able to house under their umbrella, the more a general standard is created, the stronger this standard is the more difficult it becomes to break through.

In some cases independents and smaller studios are forced to work in the stylistic parameters set by these larger studios based on demand for similar work. The problem with this is that truly experimental works may not flourish do to lack of financial support or commercial demand, or worse yet, be consolidated by these umbrella corporations. I don't want to ramble about big corporations, there is a place for them. Seeing these mega studios meager beginnings offers a great deal of insight into the incredible difficulties and relentless will of the humans who procured them. However culture and capitalism has evolved well beyond what anyone would have imagined in the thirties and it worries me the fate of young animators intellectual properties, the currents of creative thought and the influence these corporations have over their germination and maturation.

(>.<) tim