Animation Snob Thread (no Disney, no Pixar, no mainstream anime, mention Family Guy and you get kicked out a window), puppet films are allowed

Again, I think my elaboration shows that I don't at all mean to completely dismiss major animation houses, America or Japan. But I don't think it's totally crazy to say that a lot of their output is very poor and that there might be legitimate things in them to object to. A lot of Japanese animators are totally scathing about the general animated output of their country.

I'm guilty as charged that I made a sensational title to get attention and I probably shouldn't have because it is a rampant problem on the internet that I'm not proud to take part in but again, I thought there was enough in the first post to backpedal from the oppositional element.

The oppositional gut feelings come easy when you're bombarded by something that you think has significant or even major problems while so many great things are marginalized. Particularly when it comes to comics. I'm sure most people here have called things "total shit" that in a fairer, more constructive mood they would admit to having some good qualities. Ideally I'd like to criticize everything as if I were talking to the creators face to face in the most constructive, bluntly honest but encouraging way I could.
I'll often say I hate Friends, Big Bang Theory and Family Guy but a quarter of the jokes do make me laugh and some other things work occasionally.
I often get angered by superhero comics and movies but I have genuinely enjoyed them on occasion.

I like to try and be reasonable as possible but then I remember the time I tried to talk about wonderful animation and its potential, with people responding "no I don't like Family Guy, Pixar, Avatar or anime", RAAAAAAAAAGE!
I don't like snobbery and elitism because I think it is anti-intellectual in the way those things make people oversimplify, when the fact is that almost nothing can really be reasonably summed up as trash or shit. But if you really seriously care about culture, have starry eyed dreams about people believing in aspiring to greatness and raising standards, you'll know how easy it is to fall into dismissively oversimplifying things.

I assumed flagging posts was reserved for serious transgressions like horrendous racism, sexism, violent threats and legal boundaries being crossed. Not passionate disagreements about culture.

aaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh nvm

Zachlyon says "bigger studios have more freedom and currency to experiment on a big stage"

Examples? Fantasia is the only time I can think of a major studio being really experimental. But there is loads and loads of low budget avant garde animation. A lot of people decide to avoid or leave big animation studios because lack of freedom. The big companies have the resources but how could they compare in this way with Piotr Kamler and Gyorgy Kovasznai?

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you.

Forgot to mention Watership Down and Plague Dogs. They are quite special to me.

^^^these are incredible and their making is also p incredible, michael rosen was a true one-off. watership down also one of my favourite films ever

am cool with this thread coz RAG seems to have a not dissimilar taste to me, lol

MARTIN rosen, even. michael rosen's the shitty kids' poet

Thanks for the link to the other thread Daniel Esq 2, I had forgotten Starewicz too until reading that thread.

There is a Japanese short piece that floats around on YouTube a lot called Mr Ando Of The Forest. It's quite funny and strange. When that thread came up about humanism being looked down upon, I think of that animation and the funny way a fish says "humanism".

anyone ever see lullaby to the big sleep (nido to mezamenu komori uta)? totally wild and amazing short from harada hiroshi. deals with bullying, the construction of an airport, lefty anti-govt views, and other stuff I'm probably forgetting. this is one ANGRY movie. greeeeeeeat soundtrack too.

possibly drawn by one person? is that even possible? I read it was intense labor of love (hate?) but I never really found concrete info on it, so don't take my word for it.

hiroshi also did an adaptation of suehiro maruo's midori freak show manga. he's the guy zorn used for all the naked city art. haven't worked myself up to watch that one yet, sounds brutal.

Robert the flag post is sort of for serious transgressions and sort of - because the system means nobody ever really suffers for it - a way for inveterate drunks like myself to let off steam when I violently disagree with a premise, or because somebody likes something terrible, or because i have a toothache. so it's kind of a joke really and i look forward to reading all the posi contributions to yr thread as long as i can ignore the specious "art vs vulgar commerce" distinctions

peace

oh and i flagged imago while i'm on for dissing Michael Rosen

I've no beef with this thread really but it's funny that we've just had a period of particularly thoughtful & intelligent threads about mainstream animation and suddenly BUN DISNEY pops up in new answers

I've been enjoying the Disney threads, I should have thought how this might have seemed like a reaction against them. I'll go over and apologize.
Sorry to Noodle Vague for my dismissive oversimplifications.

flag posted everyone on this thread for experimental reasons.

i watched Street of Crocodiles yesterday for the first time and loved it! its atmosphere is similar to Eraserhead and especially David Lynch's earlier shorts, like The Grandmother.

Robert no worries, to be clear my tongue was halfway in my cheek thru-out

Did RAG contribute to the ilx animation poll? If not, maybe check out the discussion/results threads:

Animated Creatures: ilx animation poll nomination thread (closes June 10th!)
Animated Creatures: ilx animated film voting thread (polls close TUESDAY JULY 3RD, 8 PM EDT)
Animated Creatures: ILX's top 100 animated films (results thread)

I will say that if you realise your premise is specious and then spend most of your first post giving loopholes to things that don't fit, perhaps you should just do away with the inflammatory premise before hitting submit?

tbf the thread title is p funny

And most long thread titles can do one imo so there is that

I'm supposed to be getting ready for the second half of an all-day exam but felt I should pop in to stick up for Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk (together and separately) and (depending on whether you consider him an animator) early Zbigniew Rybczyński. Boro's "Jeux des Anges" is one of the most eerily beautiful things ever.

Also nthing the praise for Yuasa- Mind Game, Kaiba, Cat Soup, etc. I'm excited as hell about the AT episode, but the Ping Pong anime is welcome news to me- Yuasa adapting Taiyo Matsumoto!

Speaking of Matsumoto, Michael Arias' film of Tekkonkinkreet is well worth your time. It suffers from the Akira problem, albeit not *quite* as acutely (it's easier to condense a single giant brick of manga int a feature film than a long-running serial that hadn't, IIRC, even concluded yet at the time it was adapted) and it can be quite sentimental but for sheer visual impact almost nothing can match it. And the sentimentality works well in places- the B-plot about the low-level yakuza working for the alien theme park mogul almost comes across like one of Miike's less gonzo gangster narratives.

I found this mentioned in the experimental film thread and really love it, so here's a youtube of Tusalava for the animation snobs: Tusalava

Thanks for those threads Emily, hopefully soon internet will be fixed and I can watch YouTube videos easier. I can only really be very picky because there is so much stuff and so little time.

These links had quite a few of the things I was aiming for with this thread. First is a video of all the animators and second is a recommended listing with images.
http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/video-100-masters-of-animated-short-films
http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/100-masters-of-animated-short-films-part-one-disney-barta-cohl-and-22-others

I've seen clips of Mind Game, I thought there might be an English subtitled DVD by now but I've heard something is preventing that from happening.

I partially made the thread to talk up these guys, so here I go. I was watching a lot of this last summer on YouTube binges and it made me feel really damn good, the way you'd hope a piece of creativity should make you feel.

GYORGY KOVASZNAI
Most of his short films use a technique where he gradually layers up globs of thick colourful paint. I'm really in awe of his best work. Apparently he was extremely different from the surrounding art scenes of the time. He did a bizarre hour long musical romantic comedy that didn't use much paint layering but did use other odd techniques, I watched it without subtitles and still enjoyed it a lot.

KEITA KUROSAKA
Easiest thing to find is his video for Dir En Grey's "Agitated Sceams Of Maggots". There is an uncut version that has somehow stayed on YouTube, featuring graphic content that many may find really disturbing, but his gorgeous soft rendering style makes it all a lot more palatable for many people (he talked about this in an interview).
He had a full length film out a while ago called Midori-ko (not to be confused with the Maruo adaptation) that looks really amazing, took him something like a decade to draw it. I think you might be able to import it from his site. Frustratingly, it hasn't had very wide showings.

NIKOLAI SEREBRYAKOV
I got my first taste of his work at school seeing his Macbeth episode of Shakespeare Animated (a BBC project full of Russian animators, you can get in on DVD but it's all on YouTube too, some really good stuff), it really blew me away with the weird unsteady shifting visuals. There used to be a really amazing cubist/surrealist short film on YouTube by him that looked like kind of a philosophical outpouring, I'd really love to see it again.
There is an easy to find stop-motion short about a wooly creature that changes the fortunes of its new owner.

IDEYA GARANINA
My favourite by her is called something like "Poor Lisa", a really gorgeous sepia blurred piece with sad looking models, it got taken down from video sites along with hundreds of other Russian stuff because a company called something like Funtik owns them , but they seemingly offer no alternate ways to view this stuff, so fans and creators were angered and have been reuploading more cautiously.
There is a full length version of Kipling's Cat Who Walked By Itself, it goes through loads of animation techniques, extremely impressive.

ALLISON SCHULNIK
A brilliant painter who uses very thickly layered paint but claymation for short films. Mostly pale mucky yet beautiful looking people, clowns and creatures. She did official Grizzly Bear videos, an unofficial Scott Walker and a couple of other things. I think she's a fucking genius, one of many underexposed great artists today.

Anyone know what Quay brothers have been doing in recent years?

http://www.awn.com/news/qa-director-michal-socha-discusses-new-simpsons-couch-gag

one of the Ping Pong animators has been tweeting his rough sketches, i'm always fascinated by this kind of stuff http://twitter.com/bahijd

http://abload.de/img/c218a_genga-akebx.gif

There is supposed to be an option to buy Kovasznai's films on a collection here but I can't find it.
http://www.kovasznaigyorgy.hu/

From the thread about DVD availability...

Just found that L'Ange/The Angel is available at this store, along with a short film collection for the same animator.
http://britishanimationawards.com/

Midori-Ko can be found at the official site with English subtitle options but I don't feel confident about buying from a Japanese language site.
http://www.midori-ko.com

after loving space dandy + his adventure time ep i'm really interested in checking out more masaaki yuasa. what should i see next?

mindgame!!

ping pong the animation is also GREAT

didn't realize he's working on space dandy now. cool! still haven't watched it since I heard s1 was so/so

is his adventure time ep streaming somewhere?

here?

ah, thanks, have been on the lookout for that.

and doubling down on my mind game recommendation. p sure you'll dig it going by that adventure time ep. character designs and the look in general took me some getting used to but it's really fluid, lots of extreme camera movement, w/lots of drastic stylistic shifts. just a joy to watch once I got acclimated.

mind game (mindgame?) is one of the best films i've ever seen in any medium

Is "A Cat in Paris" (currently on netflix) worth watching?

it's ok.

Ha, I was a big fan of the live action Ping Pong movie, haven't seen the manga/anime, definitely wanna check that out

Ping Pong anime is excellent, easily best of the year so far.
If you want Yuasa at his weirdest watch Kaiba, that show is nuts.

I really loved how the wild animation amped up the intensity of ping pong matches (!) to a ridiculous degree. great stuff.

Just watched short piece Madame Tutli-Putli on YouTube. The film itself is fine but the technique they used for the Madame is incredible, a lot of the other figures looked amazing but the woman has what seems to be a combination of stop motion figure and a real woman's eyes filmed and stuck onto the figure. It looks beautiful and incredible, I've never seen anything like it.

i watched all of Over the Garden Wall last week and i really loved it - reminded me of Miyazaki in some places (and bizarrely the art style kept reminding me of Professor Layton). def worth checking out imho.

worth checking out is an ongoing series of 30 short films called Animator Expo, overseen by Hideaki Anno (Neon Genesis Evangelion)
a new one is being posted every week, up to 7 at the moment
http://animatorexpo.com/titlelist/ (click EN in the top right hand corner)

highlight so far (at least in terms of animation) has been the highly NSFW ME!ME!ME! http://animatorexpo.com/mememe/
they're all worth watching though, from a collection of Gundam key frames to a cycling short starring Bradley Wiggins(!)

i hope yuri norstein finishes 'the overcoat' before he dies. the parts of it that he's released look incredible.

i recently snarked over on twitter about "animation rockists" and stood up for hanna-barbera because of its awesome sound-effect library, but i'm really glad to see this thread because most contemporary mainstream animation is awful awful awful.

Anyone ever saw the Shinya Ohira interactive animation level of Asura's Wrath? It's pretty amazing, way more beautiful than you'd expect from an action game like that. So good that a lot of the fans of the game inevitably didn't like it. Pure excess in his super wonky style.

I overestimated how active this thread would be, I didn't want any embedded videos because I though there would be too many and lots of people wouldn't be able to load the page. So might as well start adding videos now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-rhQ8AKs7A

dammit, i should open that game.

I think that part is downloadable content, but I'm not sure.

forgot who recommended A Letter to Momo on this board, but that was a really sweet, beautiful film

yeah, i liked it

rewatched mind game 3 years on recently, discovered that it was in fact a bit shit :/

half liked a letter to momo, but couldn't help comparing it in my mind to studio ghibli's better work, the contrast doing the film no favors. also found her ghost friends annoying as often as comical. pretty ok overall, though.

mind game IS a bit shit, but it's still a fun watch - fast moving, nicely animated, visually inventive.

looking forward to song of the sea atm. from the writer/director of the secret of kells, which i love beyond all reason. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1865505/reference

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x27btal_08-ideya-garanina-1981-cabaret_shortfilms

Another virtuoso animation by Ideya Garanina. 20minutes.
I thought virtually all this era of Russian animation was aimed at children but there's a bit of sexual content in this one. There's another recenty uploaded Garanina one about a Japanese Crane fairy tale.

There's a guy who uploaded most of this stuff and I think his account was deleted off youtube because of the copyright holders (who for years have offered no alternate way to see this stuff) but he's got this account on Dailymotion, but his channel is clogged to fuck with adverts, so it becomes obnoxious to watch what he has for very long, shame because there's so much I'd like to see there.

Norstein's student Petrov did a 20-minute adaption of The Old Man & The Sea in OIL PAINT.

Clips from a few Petrov pieces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHFlnwXKhsM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oldmansea_petrov.jpg

Piotr Kamler's claymation masterpiece Chronopolis is sort of like a dreary Fantastic Planet, minus the plot.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IkfdzD8PeI

Strings... a self-aware marionette world... very well done.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHa1BqcNYQc

And an old tragic classic: Canada's Ryan Larkin -

Walking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwKMYYfWHHo

Early 80s Hungarian film Son Of The White Mare is one of the most psychedelic things I've ever seen.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtzy_RJQ7G0

Ah, meant those to be links, not embedded. Sorry.

Today at the ICA:

https://www.ica.art/films/jirtdan

Animation seems like the most depressing creative industry there is. From all the behind the scenes talk I've heard, japanese industry is almost always exploitive or people are working on something they don't care for at all.

― Robert Adam Gilmour

i was just watching some videos about minky momo, there are people who say that the episode where she becomes an animator is the bleakest episode in the series, which is impressive given that there's an earlier episode where she gets HIT BY A TRUCK AND KILLED.

i'm increasingly into mirai mizue. "dreamland" is the closest representation i've seen to what the world looks like to me as an autistic/adhd person.

https://vimeo.com/273493052

also, have the little nemo pilot films from the '80s been posted here? amazing stuff.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51iTj6Jbgt8

This survivor's reign series is frustratingly both cheap and expensive-looking; really great and uncanny visuals sabotaged by spoken dialogue that conjures voice actors cycling through multiple takes emoting in a booth (though to be fair that's true of most "adult" animation):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWQH8cMpWTU

Pinchliffe Grand Prix apparently still holds the record for highest box office of all time in Norway; it is shown every Christmas Day. Available via Apple in the UK. All I can say is: Wes Anderson could never.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUuQwPOfQ1M

insisting that yorkshire television made the only good TV ever would be a solid and possibly a sustainable bit (bit tougher with kids TV maybe)

― mark s, Tuesday, 9 January 2024 20:39 (thirteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yorkshire Television produced Doris (created by Hilary Hayton, who also made Hilary Hayton), someone has recently uploaded several episodes to youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4lf7vJTQnYo