Teh Ghey!

Quiz stolen from ataramos

( Behind a cut for B(.)(.)bies )

Not quite the results I would have imagined. My 'Crunchy Granola Dyke' score has fallen quite a bit. *weep*

Vivisection and yodeling

Yup, I've been watching 'Treasured Memories' (Former USSR states) animation again!

There's been no rest for the wicked at my house. I've not worked on any projects, just cleaning, cleaning, and more cleaning (and skant little visible progress. :/ ) Anyhow, a year or so ago, I found forty dollars blowing around at the flea market and no obvious owner. Stacey promptly used it to buy a huge pile of 'kwality' animation. Most of it is very low frame-rate and badly translated. Mother Goose, Brothers Grimm, and the other odd occassional fairy tales from Eastern Europe. Seemed like just the thing to watch.

Anyhow, on the ones I watched last night, some of the drawings were so strangely modeled that, despite the low frame rate, they were just oddly fun to look at. Wolves that look like weasels with long skinny necks, for instace. It's the kind of stuff I really ought to try drawing. They bore no resemblence to the animal they were called and yet somehow it sort of worked. The artstyle also was interestingly random. Some things were cel painted, others weird watercolour, gouache, and coloured pencil.

Several of the stories last night were Grimm, so of course, in them, children get eaten and wolves get disembowled on a fairly regular basis. Most of the time though, the wolf gets stuffed with something else and sewn back up, but sometimes they still end up falling down a well and drowning. Also, the Impala the tortoise was hot for was indeed very cute even if she looked nothing like an Impala and more like a Miyazaki creature. But I'm rambling and there are two things about last night's films I really did want to talk about.

1) The Three Little Pigs. Okay, I know, every animator and their dog has done a take on 3LP. It's probably the most commonly animated story of all time, I've seen at least a dozen different versions of it. So why one more? This one, though it stuck to the story, gave me a different way of thinking about the story and I'm tempted to animate it as a retelling of the story so that the results are different. See, in this version, the piggies all worked on their houses, yes, but the first two pigs were done rather quickly while the last pig worked all year and through the winter to build his stone house... Now what about that? The wolf didn't get hungry in the winter and come to prey on the pigs? He waited until their houses were complete? And what about the little pig? Wasn't he cold without a roof over his head all winter? There's a real problem with the story of the 3 little pigs that I'd never considered before. Time. Wolves don't come once a year, they aren't predictable.
The brick house was no more 'secure' than the other houses in a lot of ways. Sure, the wolf couldn't simply topple it over or easily burn them out of it, but castle walls were often breeched, and one can always dig under a wall. It makes an interesting parallel to terrorism and 'homeland security'. What if the wolf came before the stone house was finished, and all the pigs got eaten? The real story here could be about 'foolproof' plans, and division versus unity. I like this doubly because it takes a story that's well known and 'safe' and shows that it's flawed and that these 'simple moral plays' that bubble up into irrational mainstream thinking are really fundamentally flawed. It transforms it from a known nursery rhyme to making people think about different paths the parable could take.

2) The Dingaling Brothers. What you say? What is this? I have no freakin' idea! It's reportedly a Ukranian animated show and... It was weird and the title music is filled with this strange yodeling. The story seems to be entirely narrated by a british translator and, though awful, it had a strange charm to it, and some of the events were pleasantly surreal. Towards the end, it got a bit redundant with a bit too many reused clips but on the whole, it was fun.

So, that's it. I watched so many 'Treasured Memories' last night that I hardly remember most of them and while most of it would be described easily as 'filler', there were the few rare moments of brilliance in them.

Also watched last night, the LaserDisc version of Twice Upon A Time Yeah, I did end up buying it. :) What can I say. I then bought a laser disc player too. Sadly, this is the 1991 edition and it is edited. :/ On the other hand, the transfer quality is beautiful! So, I'll frankenstein it with my VHS copy and make a full-edition version that occassionally has reduced quality for a shot or two and then I'll dump it to DVD for personal use. *sigh* A little more research as uncovered that the rights to it are now held by the Carlyle group (partially owned by the Bush family) so it's very unlikely the 'adult' version of it will ever be released. :/ I hate how certain types of people try to 'sanitize' the past for their own agenda. :/ You can bet that most of the Grimm wouldn't be 'kid safe' today either. And then they turn around and complain about 'Political Correctness'. *sigh* Ohwell. I'm ranting. Done now.