Category Archives: Animation

Len Lye Links

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From Metafilter, a dense collection of great links (including video and audio) related to the great experimental animator and sculptor:

Len Lye: New Zealander Len Lye was a restless maverick – a pioneer of films without cameras (drawing directly onto the celluloid) and kinetic art (CD available through Atoll, sound samples here and here), and he was also quite handy with poems and inks. More about his Windwand and recently installed Waterwhirler on Flickr. Coralised open directory of short Waterwhirler movies here.

Amazing Experimental Animation Classics at NWFF This Weekend

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Run, don’t walk, to the NW Film Forum this Saturday and Sunday (April 1 & 2) — 7pm only both nights — for a program of extraordinary short films dubbed Pioneers: Historic Shorts, 1930 -1950. It features very rarely shown works by some of the very best experimental animators ever; any one of these would be worth making tracks, so a whole program of this stuff is cause for lighting your butt rocket.

Visit the link above for a full listing, but there will be no less than five films by Oskar Fischinger (all but one of which I’ve never seen — and I’m a big fan), two films by the phenomenal Len Lye (including one of my personal favorites, Trade Tattoo [1937]), several films by pinscreen animators Alexander Alexeieff and Clare Parker that are pretty much literally never shown (including Sleeping Beauty [1934] and a number of their commercials from 1952-1961), and two films by Mary Ellen Bute (including her second work, Rhythm in Light [1935], for which she employed cellophane, ping-pong balls, sparklers, egg beaters, bracelets and barber poles…among other things).

See what I mean? Butt rocket, I’m tellin’ ya.

This program is part of NWFF’s annual special series ByDesign, co-presented with AIGA-Seattle, which explores “the intersection of graphic design and moving image.” It starts this Friday and runs through the weekend, and really I recommend all of the programs. But this one…say it with me now…butt rocket!

The Amazing Bruce Bickford and Monster Road – Run, Don’t Walk

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Great news! Bruce Bickford, one the most gifted and beautifully demented animators in the history of the universe, may finally get his due with the imminent DVD release of Monster Road (Bright Eye Pictures, 2004), the award winning documentary about him. You can watch a trailer for it here (embedded Quicktime, 3.3 mb), and apparently it will be playing on the Sundance Channel real soon now.

You can also listen to a September 2004 NPR interview with Bruce Bickford.

I confess, to my shame, that I missed the film when it did the festival circuit (I vaguely recall it played at SIFF…woe betide my hermitish nature!), which could explain my utter astonishment to learn that Bickford lives near Seattle. Had I known this, I would have tracked him down and camped out at a respectful distance and thrown any money I had at him, begging him to please, please please just pursue his wildest animation dreams. Hmmm…maybe it’s not too late?

Who is Bruce Bickford? Well…think Will Vinton on a heroic dose of peyote doing jigs with Schrödinger’s cat. (Who’s Will Vinton? sigh. Well, he’s best known for the California Raisons, but is far better represented by films like the justifiably Oscar-winning Closed Mondays [1974].)

Bruce Bickford is a self-taught clay animator (though he does line and paper cut-out animation as well). His first animation efforts were in 1964, but he first gained artistic focus in 1969 with what he describes as his “first attempt[s] at morphing and free form psychedelic movement.” This marked the beginning of a productive period that over the next five years resulted in 28 minutes (give or take) of animation that he’ll now own up to. During this period he worked mostly in clay, though he also dabbled in some animation with line drawings and hot wax on glass, the latter an experimental technique first used some 40 years earlier by Oskar Fischinger…but pretty much by no one else since.

Bickford is best known for work that appeared (extensively) in the Frank Zappa mostly-concert film, Baby Snakes (1979), and this is how I first came to know his brilliant work. Superlatives fail to describe the astonishing, jaw-droppingly visionary fever dream of metamorphic stream of consciousness of the animation. The feeling of raw awe only explodes upon witnessing footage of Bruce at work: the scale he was working in was absolutely miniscule, an utter paradox when compared to the scope and detail of the images unspooling before you. Zappa conducts his ensemble at the time in musical improvisations to accompany the animation, with the film periodically dissolving back and forth between the animation and the group performing in the studio.

The animation in Baby Snakes was the product of a then five-year-old relationship with Zappa, who had managed to convince Bickford to move to Los Angeles to work for him in 1974 (according to the official bio). At that time, he turned over to Zappa most of the films he produced in the early ’70s. The fate of those films is unclear to me — a question likely addressed in the Monster Road doc. No doubt they still reside somewhere in the vast Zappa archives. In any event, Zappa deserves enormous credit for fostering a brilliant but fringe talent (not unlike himself) — though I say that without knowing how Mr. Bickford himself might feel about that relationship (or the fate his early films).

In 1987, Bickford completed Prometheus Garden, a 27 minute film with a line animation intro. Circa April 2005, according to BruceBickford.com, there were “discussions with a couple people” toward releasing a DVD of Prometheus Garden and some additional newer work. The current status of that is not made clear.

In 1990, Zappa’s Honker Home Video imprint released the VHS tape, The Amazing Mr. Bickford — 60 glorious and almost overwhelming minutes devoted entirely to Bruce’s animation. Musical accompaniment included works by Zappa and company, as well as (appropriately) compositions by Pierre Boulez as performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. Oh hell yeah. It is AN UNFORGIVABLE CRIME that this has never been released on DVD. Seriously: sort it out, guys. Make it happen. Dweezil, Bruce — I’m beggin’ you. (As I write this, it occurs to me I may well be transposing some/most/all of my memories of the Bruce-working and Frank-conducting footage from The Amazing Mr. Bickford to Baby Snakes. Guess I better re-watch ‘em and figure it out — apologies if I’m in error.)

During the 1990s, Bickford managed to get some more material into circulation, primarily for MTV station IDs, a commercial or two, and a segment in a music video for a group called Carnival Arts. Hardly the sorts of things worthy for such a giant talent. Were he living and working in Europe, I suspect Bruce Bickford would be a revered household name, at least among film folk, instead of the mere “underground” (albeit still revered) figure he is here in the Da States.

In the meantime, keep an eagle eye out for the Monster Road DVD, which is currently slated to be back from the factory circa March 24. You may also want to subscribe to the official Bruce Bickford email list, which will only send announcements when Monster Road or other Bickford-related products are released.

All hail Bruce Bickford.

Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers Movie?

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A shop reel has been completed for an anticipated feature-length stop motion film adaptation of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers’ epic tale, Grass Roots (issue 5 of the comic). As you can see, a domain is being squatted in the meantime.

Ain’t It Cool News has recently posted a short blurb about it, featuring a lovely large still, following up on an earlier one. Some further Googling led me, strangely enough to the Country Cowfreaks Head Shop node on the British eBay site (hey, don’t ask me) which appears to have the most complete info I’ve found so far.

The Bolex Brothers — the demented lads best known for the fantastic stop-mo flick, The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb (1993) — are producing it (or at least trying to raise the cash for it), with Tom Thumb director Dave Borthwick at the helm, Freak Brothers creator Gilbert Shelton himself serving as artistic director, and Aardman veteran David Alex Riddett heading up the crew. Meanwhile, the Net is rife with voice casting rumors that are (as usual) probably worth about as much as the electrons used to propagate them.

The shop reel was shown at the Brighton Comic Expo back in November, with Andy Leighton, Shelton, and others on the project in attendance.

Some further Googling revealed a Variety story from May, 2005 announcing a foreign distro deal with Celluloid Dreams, which has also handled internaitonal distro for the Wallace and Gromit films, The Triplets of Belleville, Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (new sequel to Kirikou and the Sorceress), and other fine animated films. That, combined with what Variety reported to be a preliminary budget of $22.5 million (!), indicates the Freak Brothers flick is being taken seriously enough as a project.

But don’t hold your breath just yet (although…that does tend to, uh, accentuate things). The Furry ones were first optioned for film by Universal Studios back in 1979. Apparently the election of Ronald Reagan as president killed everyone’s buzz (I know mine suffered, and I was only 14), and nothing came of it. In the 25 years since, various other film options and projects have lapsed, been rumored and vanished, or otherwise slipped away with the incense, including a relatively recent animated project by Film Roman.

(A nice lid to Mike for turning me on to the story, man. Far out.)

Restoring the Original King Kong

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Courtesy of Jeff Economy, a couple great articles on the surprisingly laborious effort to restore the original King Kong (1933) for DVD release in 2005, coinciding with Peter Jackson’s remake.

In a nutshell, the problem is the original negative was lost long ago. That meant the restorationists had to scour the globe for the best surviving prints and dupe negatives, meticulously log each and every shot from every candidate copy, and then piece it all together. The situation was such that in some cases they used a shot from one print, then tacked on a handful of frames to the end from another. Only once that had all been assembled could they proceed to digital restoration which was also far more labor intensive than your usual project like this. The same had to be done with the soundtrack (just because a print’s image was best didn’t mean its soundtrack was). For that they even used material from a 16mm print.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it, and the following make for fascinating reading.

The January 2006 issue of Millimeter magazine has a rather lengthy sidebar — “Kong, the Original” — that provides a good overview of the lengths that had to be gone to, the processes used, and the decisions made along the way.

Meanwhile, an earlier piece at The Digital Bits, “King Kong: The DVD Interview,” is a transcript of an interview by the site’s editor with George Feltenstein, Senior VP Theatrical Catalog Marketing for Warner Home Video; Ned Price, VP of Mastering for Warner Brothers Technical Operations; Ronnee Sass, Executive Director of Publicity for Warner Home Video.

If I may suggest, if you’re going to spring for the DVD (and haven’t yet already), the 2-disk collector’s edition is well worth the extra few bucks. The feature-length documentary on the second disk is truly excellent and worth the price of admission on its own merits, and the other extras (including Team Jackson’s recreation of the legendary lost “Spider Pit sequence”) are tasty icing on the cake.

You should also take pains to get the DVD edition, released simultaneously, of Mighty Joe Young (1949 — NOT to be confused with that Disney crap from a few years ago), which remains an immensely entertaining film and features some jaw-droppingly advanced stop-motion animation and matte work executed by Willis O’Brien (Kong’s animation poppa) and his assistant, Ray Harryhausen, the latter day stop-mo king who made his feature debut with this film.

Finally, Son of Kong (1933) is also newly available — in fact all three of these flicks are available together as a box set — but, I dunno, is probably of purchase-interest mainly to completists. As the release date shows, it was rushed into production (on the cheap) after the blockbuster success of “daddy” Kong and, alas, it shows. Its 75 minute running time barely merits the term “feature film,” the effects are good (once they finally show up) but not quite up to snuff, and the matte work is much simpler — when stop-mo is combined with live action, it gets its own section of the frame, with none of the combining and overlaying from the original Kong. The script is an embarrassment, going for cornball and lame ethnic humor rather than, um, pretty much anything else. Finally, the DVD print includes obvious jump cuts and gaping continuity holes suggesting, at best, that whole sequences are missing or, at worst, the poor thing was butchered in the cradle by the cigar chompers at RKO. One imagines the talented Willis O’Brien cringing in embarrassment and frustration even now, from beyond the grave.