Music

Bold Decisions that defined Film Animation

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Background note: This whole post was inspired by a comment by probrown1896, “Wall-E’s first dialogue-less 40 minutes are the finest 40 minutes in film animation, ever.”

walle

This got me thinking “Was it?… I know it’s up there in the finest moments of film animation, but finest “ever”?… I racked my thoughts to see if I could think of a better sequence. Like probrown stated,  I could “come up with dope scenes/sequences but I can’t think of 40 straight minutes.”

Then late last night it hit me what was wrong with my thinking. It was the “40 straight minutes” line  that got me tripped up. I was trying to come up with ONLY 40 minutes, and I believe that its not fair to judge films on snippets and sequences. For example, even though Wall-E‘s first half was SPECTACULAR, honestly the 2nd half was less than inspiring, the movie was still great mind you, but still I had to take into account the film as whole. Compared to say Nausicaa, which didn’t have the long awe-inspiring sequence, but was a little bit stronger and more consistent as whole. But all this is subjective (like all the reviews we do), so I tried to flip the script and make this objective. Here’s my attempt:

I went back and re-watched the sequence from Wall-E, still good as ever btw. Looking back though, it really  wasn’t “40 straight minutes.” There were more moments that stuck out more than the all-out 40 minutes. And apparently, even though, animation wise, it was still technically good, crisp, and posed well, Kung-Fu Panda was even more crisp, more fluid, and more well thought out in terms of animation (according to some animation students and teachers I asked) hence the reason why KFP won all the Annie Awards and Wall-E got nothing. 

So what made those first 40 minutes of Wall-E so memorable and one of the finest moments in film animation? Continue reading →

The Notorious B.I.G. Inspiration…

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On March 9, 1997, Christopher Wallace aka Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls, was gunned down in LA. Arguably the greatest lyricist of all time, he has inspired not only myself, but countless other visual artists, especially in the street art form that is graffiti. Looking at the images below, I don’t think it’s a stretch to state that cartoons and animation had a little bit of influence as well.

 

daily-dos-life-after-death1biggiegraf1biggiegraf3biggiegraf4biggiegraf2

I know there are differing thoughts on the role of graffiti in society, so I’ll leave that heavy issue for another post, but I will say this: Your tagger name and/or initials scribbled on a wall does NOT mean it is art! Have some inspiration or meaning behind anything you put up for goodness sakes. Plus, everybody’s scribbled their name on a wall at some point, be original please.

RIP Biggie Smalls

Love

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I hope Valentine’s Day went well for most. Everyone has posted this video to death, so I think I’ll join in as well. It makes sense for Love Day, plus Bambu is in it…

Love – Greyboy feat Nino Moschella/ dir. Patricio Ginelsa/ 2009

Hit the jump to see the video:

Continue reading →

Kanye West: Heartless (Music Video)

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It might be just me, but I never see music videos anymore. Ever since MTV took the music out, it seems to me that the art of music videos is on serious life support. I could be wrong though, since I just mentioned that I don’t see them anymore (Let me know if there are some videos I should see). Lucky for me, I stumbled on Kanye’s “Heartless” music video last night. To my surprise and enjoyment, the video was all animation. Check out the music video here:

“Heartless”/ Kanye West/ dir. Hype Williams

Immediately I was impressed by the art style and animation that Hype Williams went for. He used a rotoscope style of animation which is basically filming in live action, then having animators draw over the film after. The best example of rotoscoping is in the Star Wars movies during the lightsaber battles (Darth and Luke actually have fake sabers during the filming, but in post-production animators go back and draw over the fake sabers to create the lightsaber effect). In “Heartless”, they just drew over everything.

I also had a sense that the video was an homage to something I had seen before. And after checking Kanye’s blog, it was true, the video was inspired by Ralph Bakashi’s American Pop, which was an animated movie back in the 80’s (I will rewatch it and give my take later) and some of the scenes and backgrounds in that movie were used as inspiration for this music video. This made me appreciate the music video even more.

And lastly, I did appreciate the Jetsons portraits in the backgrounds near the end.

Now I dig Kanye’s work as a producer, his work as an MC is hit and miss (he can be good in one song, then sound like the worst MC of all time in the next), I could be without the Kanye “celebrity” personality, but in terms of his choices in art direction, they have always been sound choices to me (esp. the Graduation album cover by Takashi Murakami). 

PS: I love his new album 808s & Heartbreak, but please Kanye, you have to realize you can’t do any of those songs live. Your performance on SNL proves it.