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Animation
Posts about Animation
READIN
READIN started out as a place for me
to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly)
how to design a web site.
There has been some mission drift
here and there, but in general that's still what it is. Some of
the main things I write about here are
reading books,
listening to (and playing) music, and
watching the movies. Also I write about the
work I do with my hands and with my head; and of course about bringing up Sylvia.
The site is a bit of a work in progress. New features will come on-line now and then; and you will occasionally get error messages in place of the blog, for the forseeable future. Cut me some slack, I'm just doing it for fun! And if you see an error message you think I should know about, please drop me a line. READIN source code is PHP and CSS, and available on request, in case you want to see how it works.
See my reading list for what I'm interested in this year.
READIN has been visited approximately 236,737 times since October, 2007.
Thanks to Alvy Singer for pointing out a new list of top-fifty animated films from Time Out, with some commentary by Terry Gilliam! I'm glad to see they gave Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs a place on the list, even though it's so new and unproven. I am as convinced as they are that "this maddeningly ingenious and wildly original smart kidsâ?? adventure will one day take its rightful place in the animated pantheon. " Most of the Miyazaki masterpieces make the list, with My Neighbor Totoro taking top ranking as is well and good. The list is a little biased toward feature films -- it seems like the shorts by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery deserve pride of place. Jones has "The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Movie" from 1979 at number 3, but that was decades after his finest work.
More animation from Alexeïeff and Parker! I found a compilation of all their pinboard cartoons. The listing:
0:00 Night on bald mountain (1933) -- Just extraordinary. 7 years ahead of Walt Disney. Look at the metamorphosis about 1:40 in...
8:22 Parade des Sools (1936) -- Hats! and lots of 'em. (IMDB oddly has this piece listed as "Parade des Chapeaux" -- this accurately describes the piece but it is not the title.) Possibly Chapeaux Sools is a hat company, and this an advertisement for them?
9:38 Etoiles Nouvelles (1937) -- commercial for Davros Nouvelle Egyptian size cigarettes
At A Journey Round My Skull (which looks in general to be a fantastic source for trippy imagery -- thanks for linking to it, badger!), Will posts several illustrations from Russian Fairy Tales (1945), drawn by Alexandre Alexeïeff; also, a link to the pinscreen animation work of Alexeïeff and his wife and partner Claire Parker. The Nose, adapted from Gogol:
My grandfather had a big collection of books of comic strips -- Pogo, Katzenjammer Kids, Li'l Abner, Gasoline Alley -- that I would read whenever I went over to his house. One of them was a collection of Fox Fontaine's Toonerville Trolley -- Sylvia has gotten into the video game Toontown lately, so I suggested we take a look at Toonerville -- thinking its name had the same source*. I never knew it had been made into a cartoon! Here are the three episodes -- Nicely done!
(Another find from the same search: The Electric Prunes performing Toonerville Trolley on the Mike Douglas Show in 1967 -- not The Prunes' finest moment, which if you're interested in seeing their finest moment take a look at this footage.)
* Looks like I was wrong about this. Image searching for "Toonerville Trolley" brings up some pictures of an actual trolley in Louisville in the early 20th Century, when Fontaine was working as a reporter in Louisville...
Saramago has made his entry into animation! Juan Pablo Etcheverry animated "A flor máis grande do mundo" based on Saramago's book A maior flor do mundo, which doesn't seem to be in translation -- I had never heard of it before I saw Saramago's post about the cartoon just now. It is his only children's book, written in the 70's -- oops; not reading closely. The idea is from the 70's but the book was not written until 2000.
Thanks for linking this video, Dad! "Mind Wall", by Towa Tei.
Note: if you click the little square icon in the bottom right, you can view this video on your full screen, recommended. Also, there is higher-quality video available; for some reason you can only request it after you have started playing the video -- click on the up-arrow icon in the bottom right, one of the options that comes up will be "HQ".
4th Estate celebrates 25 years of publishing books with a beautiful video presentation. The resolution is high enough to watch it full screen, I very much recommend doing so.
In comments at The Great Whatsit, Rogan posts a link to a truly mind-blowing animation, by Run Wrake of Sclah Films (and based on the art of children's book illustrator Geoffrey Higham). It's got insects, jewels, words, idolatry, mindless brutality -- it takes my breath away:
At Center for the Art of TransÂlation, Natasha Wimmer disÂcusses transÂlating Bolaño, and reads from her transÂlations of 2666 and a forthÂcoming book of Bolaño's essays, Between Parentheses.
History comes to life! At It is time for history, Teozar takes on the amazing story of The War of Jenkins' Ear. (see also Mason & Dixon, where the ear plays a key role.)
A new issue of The Quarterly Conversation hits the stands today, including a very interesting write-up of NYC author Eugene Marten's Waste, which Scott Wilson recommends for those who can "deal with a shocking amount of physical and psychological trauma distilled down into sharp, tight sentences."
has made his entry into animation! 
At Center for the Art of TransÂlation, Natasha Wimmer 