{animation} – Page 42 – { feuilleton }

Ubu

One last film post for a very busy week. Ubu is a highly-stylised animated adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi. This was a British production directed in 1978 by Geoff Dunbar who employs an ink-spattered style reminiscent of Ralph Steadman’s drawings; in place of vocal dramatisation Pa and Ma Ubu shriek horribly and occasionally spit out speech balloons. As a condensation of the play, and a taste of Jarry’s grotesquery, this feels a lot closer to its source than Jean-Christophe Averty’s 1965 film which seems polite by comparison. Ubu took a long time to arrive on YouTube so watch it while you can, it may well vanish again.

• Ubu pt. 1 | Ubu pt. 2

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bring Me the Head of Ubu Roi

Emak-Bakia

Posts this week will tend towards the brief since I’m spending all my time finishing Reverbstorm.

I thought I’d already posted something about Emak-Bakia, a 16-minute “cinépoème” by Man Ray from 1926, but it seems not. This is another of those short experimental films that proliferated between the wars, and a particularly inventive one with Man Ray throwing together every camera trick he could manage; he even throws the camera in the air at one point, having earlier driven over it. There’s also bits of animation, many shots of revolving sculptures and the artist’s customary emphasis on attractive women. Watch it at Vimeo or download it from Ubuweb.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Un Chien Andalou
• Ballet Mécanique
• Dreams That Money Can Buy
• La femme 100 têtes by Eric Duvivier
• Entr’acte by René Clair

Yuri Norstein animations

Hedgehog in the Fog (1975).

One more animation post before I move onto other things. Since the 1970s Russian animator Yuri Norstein has been regarded as one of the greatest living practitioners of the medium despite having only made a handful of films. Hedgehog in the Fog is a 10-minute piece with a self-explanatory title: a hedgehog sets out one evening to visit his friend, the bear, but before he can reach the bear’s house he has to cross a fog-filled field. Norstein’s animation style involves the skillful manipulation of hand-drawn paper shapes which in this film and the later Tale of Tales achieve a remarkable sense of depth and solidity. The fog effects in Hedgehog are especially striking, created using layers of translucent paper.

Tale of Tales (1979).

The 29-minute Tale of Tales takes the same technique but lifts the animation into a different league, an elusive and (for want of a better term) poetic meditation on life and memory whose central figure is a small grey wolf borrowed from the Russian lullaby sung in the opening scene. The film’s Wikipedia note compares Tale of Tales to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1975), and for once the hyperbole feels justified. There’s the same concentration on natural elements such as fire, wind and water, while the recurrent wordless tableaux of a family whose members comprise a poet, a bull with a skipping-rope, and a talking cat might be compared with Tarkovsky’s dream sequences. If meaning here seems reluctant to disclose itself (and why does everything have to mean something anyway?) then that’s all the more reason to watch it again.

Since 1979 Norstein has been working sporadically on a feature-length adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat, work on which has been endlessly delayed due to lack of resources and the animator’s painstaking production methods. A few clips can be found on YouTube if you hunt around. Here’s hoping we get to see the finished film soon.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Barta’s Golem

Metachaos

Animation of a more contemporary kind (do you detect a theme?), Metachaos is a frenetic 8-minute apocalypse by Alessandro Bavari whose Photoshop collages I recall being impressed by some years ago. His video uses computer rendering but with a lot more grit than the usual CGI. The soundtrack is the kind of quasi-Industrial thing you’d expect for the imagery but you can always mute the sound and play something else. Thanks to Paul at Dressing the Air for the tip!

Gerald Scarfe’s Long Drawn-Out Trip

Yet more animation. Long Drawn-Out Trip was Gerald Scarfe‘s first foray into the medium, produced in 1972 at the request of the BBC who sent the artist to Los Angeles to try out the new De Joux animation system. The process needed only six or eight drawings per second of film thus reducing the usual amount of labour. Scarfe says in the first book collection of his work, Gerald Scarfe (1982), that the 16-minute film was still very labour intensive.

The subject of Long Drawn-Out Trip is Los Angeles and America itself, the concerns being the same ones that Ralph Steadman was depicting the same year in his illustrations for Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72: venality, violence, vulgarity and the omnipresent spectre of Richard Nixon, a president who had the good fortune to be drawn many times by two of Britain’s greatest living satirists although he wouldn’t have thanked them for it. In Scarfe’s film we also find Mickey Mouse being reduced to his constituent lines and colours after smoking a joint. In the 1980s Scarfe regularly drew Ronald Reagan wearing the famous mouse ears, something that nearly got him fired from his post at the Sunday Times after Rupert Murdoch saw one of the cartoons. Long Drawn-Out Trip had a more favourable effect when it was seen by Roger Waters who asked Scarfe to create some animations for Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here tour. The animated sequences for The Wall have their origin in this short film. Watch it here.