Experimental & Underground · Reviews
A Boy and His Atom: The Smallest Movie Ever Made
IBM releases a movie starring actual atoms, on a screen you can’t even see with an ordinary microscope.
Tagged: animation
Fantasia (1940): The Varieties of Religious Experience
Walt Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia, may seem at first like a random collection of animated shorts whose only common factor is that each was inspired by a well-known piece of classical[…]
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Gene Deitch in L.A.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PgniqcgdFo] Great news for animation buffs! Minimalist animation genius, Gene Deitch, creator of Tom Terrific, The Juggler of Our Lady, Munroe, Sick Sick Sidney, and many others will appear for[…]
New Film from “Triplets” Director
Hand-drawn animation, once the mainstay of Disney and other studios that created “cartoons” for popular consumption, is becoming something of a lost art. Audiences seem to prefer Pixar-style CGI. Disney[…]
Eastern European Animation Dept. – Renaissance (Walerian Borowczyk, 1963)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAirHKywhSc] I think this is one of the greatest short films ever made. Containing not a word of spoken dialogue. Not only is the stop motion animation exquisite and amusing,[…]
Not Enraptured by Performance Capture?
The Avatar hype continues. There was a front-page piece in the L.A. Times today, whining – for lack of a better word – about how “unlike the great majority of best[…]
Art Clokey (1921-2010)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXdHTP7omZk] Shed a tear for the creator of gentle Gumby. Art Clokey was a disciple of avant-garde film theorist, Slavko Vorkapich, under whose mentorship Clokey filmed Gumbasia (above) and other[…]
An Atheist’s Guide to “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer. – Stevie Wonder * * * In 1949 Walt Disney Studios produced the last, and arguably the best, of their[…]
The Gumbinator – Robot Rumpus (Art Clokey 1956)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S02HI-nzAyo] Long before Terminators 1, 2, 3, and 4, a revolt of the machines was successfully quelled by the Great Green Hope otherwise known as Gumby, aided by his four-legged[…]
Women in Wonderland, Part 5 – Coraline (Henry Selick 2009)
Every one of Henry Selick’s four feature films to date has dealt with alternate realities. In the Tim Burton-produced The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), the ghoulish Jack Skellington finds a[…]
Actors & Personalities · Directors
Jerry Lewis in the News
According to the Los Angeles Times and the The Huffington Post: “[Comedian] Jerry Lewis made an anti-gay slur on Australian television similar to one he apologized for using on his[…]
Two Films About the Middle East – Body of Lies/Persepolis
There are three basic types of spy stories: 1) the one about the ultra-skilled professional spy who is almost always successful, e.g., James Bond; 2) the one about the civilian[…]
Classics of Modernist Animation – Flebus (Ernest Pintoff 1957)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdlMIE9egpE] In celebration of having just received via mail a copy of Amid Amidi’s marvelously illustrated book, Cartoon Modern, I am posting one of the defining classics of modernist animation,[…]
Thomas M. Disch (1940-2008)
Thomas M. Disch, who took leave of this world on July 4th, was one of our finest writers, an American Borges (for lack of a better comparison). What did he[…]
AFI’s 10 Top 10 Genre Omissions
Last week, the American Film Institute announced its list of “America’s 10 Greatest Films in 10 Classic Genres” – Animation, Romantic Comedies, Western, Sports, Mystery, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Gangster, Courtroom Drama,[…]
Zemeckis’s Fabulous Femmes Fatales
The CGI performance-capture version of Angelina Jolie as “Grendel’s Mother” (the only name ever used to refer to her) in Robert Zemeckis’s 3-D Beowulf is just the latest in a[…]
Spatialism, Part 1 – The ORIGINAL 3-D “Monster House”
Like Alan Vanneman (below), I thoroughly enjoyed Monster House, a better-than-average computer-animated horror film for kids, with absolutely spectacular 3-D effects – if you’re fortunate enough to see it in[…]
A SCANNER DARKLY – Linklater Gets PKD Right
If almost any director or screenwriter other than Richard Linklater had been given the opportunity to make Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly into a movie, I think their immediate[…]
