Certainly for me, and perhaps for many of you, there’s something eerily familiar about the scene that plays out in this animation. Here’s the backstory: Starting when he was 12, Mike Cohen, a kid growing up in Buffalo, began recording the arguments he had with his parents (unbeknownst to them). At least one of the tapes, recorded in 1985, recently ended up in the hands of Rodd Perry, a first time animator, who created the cartoon above. By the looks of things, Brother Mike is still part of the music scene today.
Some enthusiasts of 19th-century American psychological horror master (or, in a very real sense, 19th-century American psychological horror inventor) Edgar Allan Poe find his work best read aloud. Thus we’ve previously featured Poe delivered in the gravitas-filled voices of such noted thespians as Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone, Christopher Walken, Christopher Lee, and James Mason. Mason did the reading (above) as a narration for a 1953 animated short The Tell-Tale Heart, adapting Poe’s 1843 story of the same name, which drew both an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short Film and — perhaps more in line with the Poe sensibility — a rating of “X” from the British Board of Film Censors.
WFMU managed to dig up even more Poe as read by Mason, three tracks of which they posted to their blog one Halloween, all with “creepy and dramatic organ stylings by Buddy Cole, who no doubt wore an Inverness cape for the occasion.” They come from a 1958 release from Decca Records, featuring Mason’s readings of not just “The Tell-Tale Heart” [MP3] but Poe’s cryptic fable “Silence” [MP3—below] and haunting final poem “Annabel Lee” [MP3—bottom]. (The flip side of the album offers something completely different, in the form of Agnes Moorehead “and a supporting cast” performing Lucille Fletcher’s radio play “Sorry, Wrong Number.”)
Opinions on who reads Poe most effectively will differ from listener to listener, but if you’d like to make a partial but direct comparison for yourself, simply line up Mason’s rendition of “The Tell-Tale Heart” on a playlist with the ones we’ve previously posted by Christopher Lee, Basil Rathbone — and of course, Iggy Pop. It may have become Poe’s best-known story in the first place by having retained its impact over all these 172 years, but having such a range of performative personalities interpret it can’t hurt in keeping it as eerie as ever.
Earlier this week, we featured pioneering German animator Lotte Reiniger’s animated silhouette films, for which she adapted old European stories like “Cinderella,” “Thumbelina,” and “Hansel and Gretel” into a striking visual style — striking now, and even more striking in the 1920s — similar to traditional Indonesian shadow puppet theater. Her work draws plenty of material from folktales, but not just those from in and around her homeland (Germany). For her most ambitious work, for instance, Reiniger looked all the way to Arabia, adapting stories from no less venerable a source than One Thousand and One Nights. The 65-minute result, 1926’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed, stands as the earliest animated feature film. (See a nice clip above. The complete film lives on DVD/Blu Ray.)
“For centuries Prince Achmed on his magic horse had lived a comfortable life as a well-loved fairy tale figure of the Arabian nights and was well contented with that,” Reiniger writes in her introduction to the picture. “But one day he was thrown out of his peaceful existence by a film company which wanted to employ him and many other characters of the same stories for an animated film.” And so, in 1923, it fell to her and a select group of collaborators to make that film. They labored for the better part of three years, not just because of the requirements of shooting each and every frame by hand but because of the experimental nature of animation itself. “We had to experiment and try out all sorts of inventions to make the story come alive. The more the shooting of Prince Achmed advanced the more ambitious he became.”
At that time, The Adventures of Prince Achmed did not, of course, even faintly resemble any feature yet made. “No theatre dared show it,” Reiniger writes, “for ‘it was not done.’ ” And so they did it themselves, screening the film just outside Berlin, which led to a show in Paris, then one in Berlin proper, by which point Prince Achmed and his magic horse were well on their way to a place in the animation history books. They nearly lost that place due to the 1945 battle of Berlin, when the film’s negative was lost amid the destruction, but the British Film Institute had made a negative of their own for a London screening, which eventually became the material for a restoration and revival. “The revival was done by the son of the banker who sponsored the film in 1923,” notes Reiniger. “He had assisted in its creation as a small boy. So it was granted to old Prince Achmed to have a happy resurrection after almost half a century” — and he continues to win new fans today.
As an unapologetic member of the “Millennial” generation, allow me to tell you how to win over a great many of us at a stroke: just appeal to our long-instilled affinity for Japanese animation and classic video games. Raised, like many of my peers born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, on a steady diet of those art forms — not that everyone knew to acknowledge them as art forms back then — I respond instinctively to either of them, and as for their intersection, well, how could I resist?
I certainly can’t resist the sterling example of anime-meets-retrogaming in action just above: an 8‑Bit Cinema double-feature, offering David and Henry Dutton’s pixelated renditions of hugely respected Japanese animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s films Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke. In just under eight minutes, the video tellsboth stories — the former of a young girl transported into not just the spirit realm but into employment at one of its bathhouses; the latter of the unending struggle between humans and forest gods in 15th-century Japan — as traditional side-scrolling, platform-jumping video games.
Clearly labors of love by true classic gamers, these transformations get not just the graphics (which actually look better than real games of the era, in keeping with Miyazaki’s artistry) but the sound, music, and even gameplay conventions just right. I’d love to play real versions of these games, especially since, apart from an unloved adaptation of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Miyazaki’s movies haven’t plunged into the video-game realm.
And if you respond better to the aesthetic of classic gaming than to that of Japanese animation, do have a look at 8‑Bit Cinema’s other work, much of which you can sample in their show reel with clips from their versions of pictures like The Shining, Kill Bill, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. I remember many childhood conversations about how video games would eventually look just like our favorite movies, animated or otherwise; little did we know that, one day, our favorite movies would also look just like video games.
You can’t talk about the origin of the modern animated film without talking about the work of Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981), the German creator of some 40 animated films between the 1910s and the 70s. And you can hardly talk about Reiniger’s work without talking about the enchanting art of shadow puppetry, which we mostly associate with traditional cultures like that of Indonesia, but which also inspired her early 20th-century innovations in animation.
This may sound quite obscure, especially when put up against the Disney and Pixar extravaganzas in theaters today, but all these forms of entertainment draw, in a sense, from a common well: the fairy tale.
The creators of today’s mega-budget animated films know full well the enduring value of fairy tales, and so continue to adapt their basic story material, layering on both the latest visual effects and smirking gags with up-to-the-minute references in order to keep the obvious entertainment value high. But Indonesian shadow puppet theater has been doing the same thing for centuries and centuries, converting ancient folktales into an evening’s (albeit often a long evening’s) musical entertainment for audiences of era after new era. And Reiniger, in her day, revived the oldest European stories with technology once as striking and cinematically cutting-edge as today’s most advanced CGI.
You can watch Reiniger’s 1922 adaptation of Cinderella at the top of the post. “Nobody else has defined a form of animation as authoritatively as she did,” writes Dan North of Spectacular Attractions, “and the opening section, where scissors make the first cuts into the main character, conjuring her out of simple raw materials, displays the means by which the story is fabricated and marks it out as a product of her labour.” Below that, we have a later work, 1955’s Hansel and Gretel, an example of her further developed technique, and just above you’ll find that same year’s Däumelinchen, also known as Thumbelina.
To get a clearer sense of exactly what went into these shorts (or into 1926’sThe Adventures of Prince Achmed, her only feature-length film, and first fully animated feature in the history of cinema), watch the seventeen-minute documentary “The Art of Lotte Reiniger” just above. “No one else has taken a specific animation technique and made it so utterly her own,” writes the British Film Institute’s Philip Kemp, “to date she has no rivals, and for all practical purposes the history of silhouette animation begins and ends with Reiniger” — but the way she breathed life into her material lives on.
Vinton himself resisted the rating, not wanting to be lumped in with more regular kiddie fare. It performed disappointingly at the box office despite great critical response from such lofty realms as The New Republic.
Is it really so surprising that families flocking to the Care Bears Movie steered clear of one featuring a shape-shifting, free-floating mask, who terrorizes the children in the film (and presumably, the audience) by conjuring an enchanting little clay kingdom only to rain misfortune upon it. We’re talking smashed coffins, grief-stricken clay mothers wailing over the bodies of their young, helpless victims being swallowed up by cracks that appear in the earth.
“… it was just such a bizarre character, to start with. In fact, I haven’t seen a character quite like that in almost anything else – someone who has this power but no feeling one way or another and just sort-of tells it like it is regarding the future of humanity. We wanted it to be about metamorphosis, visually, and make that a big part of sequence. He transforms and grows up and down from the earth and appears out of nothingness. The design of the character came from an early drawing that Barry Bruce did, where a jester was holding his face on a stick. I thought it was a really interesting way to play it. I ended up doing the voice of the Stranger with a female performer. We wanted it to be almost androgynous, so she and I did it together and made a point of not trying to hide it, even.”
I’m not sure the person or persons responsible for the theatrical trailer, below, got the memo…
Jared Diamond is a true polymath. He got his start researching how the gall bladder absorbed salt and then moved on to other fields of study – ornithology, anthropology, linguistics. His wildly diverse interests have given him a unique perspective of how and why our species evolved. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book Germs, Guns and Steel makes a pretty convincing argument about why Europe — and not China or South America — ended up dominating the world. The answer, it turns not, has everything to do with geography and little to do with any kind of cultural superiority.
Back in 2013, Diamond spoke at The Royal Institution about how we think of risk in the first world versus those who live in remote New Guinea. The RI has taken a portion of that hour and a half talk and set it to some glorious animation. You can watch it above.
Early in Diamond’s career, he was in the jungle with his New Guinean guides. He found what he thought was a perfect spot to pitch camp – under a massive dead tree. His guides refused to sleep there, fearing that the tree might fall in the middle of the night. He thought that they were being overly paranoid until he started seeing things from their perspective.
Every night you’re in New Guinea sleeping in a forest, you hear a tree fall somewhere and then you go do the numbers. Suppose the risk of that tree falling on me tonight is 1 in 1000. If I sleep under dead trees for 1000 nights, in three years I’m going to be dead. … The New Guinea attitude is sensitive to the risks of things you are going to do regularly. Each time they carry a low risk but if you are not cautious it will catch up with you.
Diamond then extrapolated this realization to modern life. He notes that he is 76 years old and will statistically speaking probably live another 15 or so years. Yet if the risk of taking a fall in the shower is roughly the same as getting brained by a dead tree in the jungles of New Guinea (1 in 1000), then Diamond figures he could kill himself 5 ½ times over his the course of those 15 years.
“And so I’m careful about showers,” he says in the full video of the talk. “I’m careful about sidewalks. I’m careful about stepladders. It drives many of my American friends crazy but I will survive and they won’t.”
People in the first world are terrified by the wrong things, Diamond argues. The real danger isn’t terrorism, serial killers or sharks, which kill a very, very small percentage of people annually. The real risks are those things that we do daily that carry a low risk but that eventually catch up with you – driving, taking stairs, using step ladders.
You can watch the full interview, which is fascinating, below.
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
How can a modern educator go about getting a student to connect to poetry?
Forget the emo kid pouring his heart out into a spiral journal.
Ditto the youthful slam poetess, wielding pronunciation like a cudgel.
Think of someone truly hard to reach, a reluctant reader perhaps, or maybe just someone (doesn’t have to be a kid) who’s convinced all poetry sucks.
Animation, like poetry, is often a matter of taste, and Moore’s lesson hedges its bets by enlisting not one, but three animator-narrator teams to interpret Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider.”
Originally published as part of the poem “Whispers of Heavenly Death,” and included in the 1891 “deathbed edition” of Leaves of Grass, the poem equates the soul’s desperate struggle to connect with something or someone with that of a spider, seeking to build a web in a less than ideal location.
Two of the animators, Jeremiah Dickey and Lisa LaBracio launch themselves straight toward the “filament, filament, filament.” Seems like a solid plan. An industrious spider industriously squirting threads out of its nether region creates a cool visual that echoes both Charlotte’s Web and the repetition within the poem.
Mahogany Browne’s narration of Dickey’s painting on glass mines the stridency of slam. Narrator Rives gives a more low key performance with LaBracio’s scratchboard interpretation.
In-between is Joanna Hoffman’s spiderless experimental video, voiced with a wee bit of vocal fry by Joanna Hoffman. Were I to pick the one least likely to capture a student’s imagination…
Once the student has watched all three animations, it’s worth asking what the poem means. If no answer is forthcoming, Moore supplies some questions that might help stuck wheels start turning. Question number five strikes me as particularly germane, knowing the ruinous effect the teenage tendency to gloss over unfamiliar vocabulary has on comprehension.
Ultimately, I prefer the below interpretation of Kristin Sirek, who uses her YouTube channel to read poetry, including her own, out loud, without any bells or whistles whatsoever.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
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makes a pretty convincing argument about why Europe — and not China or South America — ended up dominating the world. The answer, it turns not, has everything to do with geography and little to do with any kind of cultural superiority.
and the repetition within the poem.
