Bacon popcorn! I recommend it!

S příchutí slaniny!

I remember I didn’t think too highly of anime (or animation in general) when I was younger, a period which was probably coincident with the early-teen years I quit drawing. That, however, came to an abrupt halt when I went to see Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke in a local theater. Going in, I remember thinking that it was going to be really lame (and I was probably hoping nobody I knew would see me there), but that movie basically ripped my face off, along with my too-good-for-anime pretenses. It was brilliant, and still ranks very highly among my favorite films.¹

As N8 and I were watching Spirited Away, I was once again stunned—it had been a long time since I’d seen it or any of Miyazaki’s other films—and I was particularly taken aback by the inventiveness, detail, and richness of the world, characters, and story. But it also reminded me of an animation course I took a year or so ago which involved screening and discussing various student films and contemporary American animation. A lot of what I saw there—and continue to see on the Internet—were animated fight scenes, generally between any combination of the following:

• Ninjas
• Pirates
• Zombies
• Aliens
• Monkeys
• Robots

And this might go without saying, but that is really fucking boring. That concept was probably done best by James Kochalka Superstar, what? 10 years ago? And it’s all gone downhill from there. So as I was watching Spirited Away, I thought of all those new aspiring cartoonists that were taking the same tired archetypes, pretending that they qualify as characters, forgoing a story altogether, and just making poorly-animated fight scene after fight scene. The other major recurring theme I saw was shock value: lots of sex, gore, and grotesquery, entirely for its own sake. Which, y’know, after growing up with the Internet, ends up being pretty tame anyway.

To be fair, there are plenty of animators and animation students producing brilliant, wonderful stuff, but, as always, they’re in the minority.² So what I felt like doing right then, watching Spirited Away, was taking all of those guys and girls making ultraviolent zombie-ninjas fighting pirate-monkeys clips, show them a few Miyazaki films back-to-back, and then ask them if what they’re doing is really worthwhile…

Foolish Creatures! is a very personal project that I’ve invested a good chunk of myself in, and in which I reveal a good amount about myself, but watching Spirited Away seriously made me question my resolve in continuing it. I will, though; I have too strong a tendency to compare things that don’t need comparing, and perhaps I am being unfair in lambasting the zombie-ninja kids. This is a precursor to bigger and better projects, and perhaps many of these boring animations are as well. I’m trying to embrace what I love and not let the rest worry me or drag me down. Onward!

And so! On an entirely different note, here are some great cellists I’ve been listening to! Zoë Keating is contemporary and makes extremely powerful, textured tracks with basically a cello and a looping pedal! Arthur Russell was insanely prolific and created mountains of haunting, personal songs, though he is apparently best known for his disco stuff? I only know about him because I caught the premiere of Wild Combination, the documentary about him, at this year’s Berlinale. His last.fm page only has samples, but there are some videos with full songs in them.

See you on Monday!

1. One of my favorite things about Miyazaki’s films is that they so often end with beginnings, if that makes sense. [↩]
2. Also, I don’t want to completely discredit zombie/pirate/robot/etc. animators, as there’s arguably a lot to be said about revising old tropes, or injecting new life into them or whatever, but there’s a hell of a lot more to be said for actually making something new for once. Replace the above “animation” with “comics” and “zombie-pirate-ninja-monkeys” with “underwear perverts” and you get a Warren Ellis rant:

   Fuck superheroes, frankly. The notion that these things dominate an entire genre is absurd. It’s like every bookstore in the planet having ninety percent of its shelves filled by nurse novels. Imagine that. You want a new novel, but you have to wade through three hundred new books about romances in the wards before you can get at any other genre. A medium where the relationship of fiction about nurses outweighs mainstream literary fiction by a ratio of one hundred to one. Superhero comics are like bloody creeping fungus, and they smother everything else.

   It’s been the hip and trendy thing to do, recently, to say that superheroes are, you know, all right. And, if they’re well done, I agree with you. There’s room for any kind of good work, no matter what genre it’s in.

   But that doesn’t excuse you from going out and burning out all the bad work at the fucking root with torches. It doesn’t excuse all the nameless toss that DC and Marvel and Image and all the others slop out every month. If you want to read three hundred superhero comics a month then you are sick and you need medical help.

   [↩]

Tags: ballpoint, chihiro, eeen, haku, index card, n8, pen, watercolor

This entry was posted on Friday, September 12th, 2008 at 12:00 and is filed under Comic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.