{animation} – Page 3 – { feuilleton }

Oz: The Tin Woodsman’s Dream, a film by Harry Smith

Ubuweb slipped into archival stasis earlier this year, which means that everything uploaded there will remain as it is but we won’t be seeing anything new. I don’t know when this Harry Smith short was posted there but it’s one I haven’t seen before. (There’s also a copy at Rarefilmm where I evidently missed it.) Oz, The Tin Woodsman’s Dream was made in 1967, and is one of the fragments of a much longer film that would have adapted L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz using a similar cutout animation technique to that deployed by Smith for Heaven and Earth Magic. The adaptation remained unfinished after Smith’s backer died but the extant pieces (including another self-contained short, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz) show him working in widescreen 35mm for the first time.

All of Smith’s films were given opus-style numbers: Heaven and Earth Magic is no. 12, The Magic Mushroom People of Oz is no. 13, and The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is no. 16. As with the films of Len Lye and other animation pioneers, Smith’s early shorts are often given a “psychedelic” label even when they predate the popular use of the term. The Tin Woodsman’s Dream is one of those where the psychedelic quotient becomes overt, comprising a few minutes of animated play with the title character and a small dog, followed by many minutes of kaleidoscoped film footage that’s more redolent of its period than Smith’s other films. I’m happy to watch the kaleidoscopics but this is the kind of thing that any number of film-makers might easily do. The Woodsman, the dog and the other characters are inhabitants of Smith’s inner landscape, as are the fly agaric mushrooms that appear here and in his other films. It’s a shame we didn’t get to see more of them. There’s no soundtrack for this film so you can either watch the gesticulations in a Stan Brakhage silence or find 15 minutes of music to match the visuals.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Number 10: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Number 11: Mirror Animations, a film by Harry Smith
• Meeting Harry Smith by Drew Christie
• Heaven and Earth Magic by Harry Smith
• Harry Smith revisited
• The art of Harry Smith, 1923–1991

Phaeton: The Son of the Sun

The animation collection at the Internet Archive has been improving of late, with a wider variety of uploads being added to the already copious quantities of American cartoons and Japanese anime. Last week I drew attention to Jan Lenica’s Adam 2. This week it’s the turn of Phaeton: The Son of the Sun (1972), a short Russian film written and directed by Vasiliy Livanov which is a curious combination of ancient myth and science fiction. Phaeton in Greek mythology was the son of Helios the sun god, a minor deity whose demise is related in the first part of Livanov’s film. The son takes his father’s fiery chariot for a ride across the sky after being warned about the damage the chariot’s flames may cause if it strays to close to the world below or too far from it. Phaeton’s poor horsemanship provokes a spate of natural disasters until Zeus ends the ride with a fatal thunderbolt.

This tale of cosmological destruction informs the “Phaeton hypothesis”, a 17th-century theory which sought to explain the existence of the Solar System’s asteroid belt as the remains of a destroyed planet, a body which a German linguist, Johann Gottlieb Radlof, named after the doomed god. The second part of Livanov’s film concerns a group of cosmonauts being launched into the asteroids in order to investigate the theory. The film is too short to properly explore the subject but the discussion detours briefly into ancient astronaut territory; Livanov had evidently been reading one or more of Erich von Däniken’s specious books which were topping the bestseller lists in 1972. One of the “astronaut” figures seen during the explication is the same Japanese figurine that von Däniken reproduces in Chariots of the Gods?, a book whose title echoes the theme of Livanov’s film. Short as it is, Phaeton: The Son of the Sun is nicely styled, and features the voice of Nikolay Burlyaev, an actor familiar to Tarkovsky aficionados as the boy in Ivan’s Childhood.

(Note: The Internet Archive has English subtitles for this one as a separate text file. You can get these to work by saving them in a folder along with the film file then changing the subtitle extension from txt to srt. Video applications such as VLC autoload subtitles if they’re stored in the film folder with the correct extension and a name that matches that of the film file.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Crank book covers
• The Heat of a Thousand Suns by Pierre Kast

Adam 2, a film by Jan Lenica

Adam 2 is the first feature-length animated film by Polish animator and graphic designer Jan Lenica (1928–2001). The film was a German production, made in 1968 after Lenica had spent the past decade making shorter films in Poland, several of which look like rehearsals for this one.

Lenica called it “a sort of an intellectual comic strip”. A trip across ages and spaces, remindful of the biblical Paradise; a struggle for one’s individuality; a parody of Stalinism and totalitarianism. Critics emphasized the pessimism of its message. (More)

A pair of title cards at the beginning proclaim: “The strange, nightmarish, monstrous, utterly incredible yet true story of his life.” Lenica styled his intellectual comic strip with engraved backgrounds and decors similar to those he used in Labirynt, while the travails of “Adam 2” resemble the predicaments of the anonymous characters in both Labirynt and A. The minimal dialogue, presented in the form of intertitles, was written by Eugène Ionesco whose Rhinoceros Lenica had previously adapted. I’ve no idea what the number 44 represents in this scenario but it’s a prevalent fixture throughout.

In a year in which the posts here have been preoccupied with Surrealism I ought to note that Lenica’s animated films are often a lot more “Surrealist” than much of the live-action cinema that gets tagged with the S-word. But Lenica was an animator, and animation is the poor relation of the film world, persistently overlooked and under-represented. Lenica reinforced the Surrealist tenor of his work a few years later with two animated adaptations of Jarry plays, Ubu Roi and Ubu et la Grande Gidouille, the latter being another full-length feature. I’d love to see a restored collection of his films but I’m not expecting this any time soon.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Surrealism archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Rhinoceros by Jan Lenica
• Repulsion posters
• Dom by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica
• Labirynt by Jan Lenica

Weekend links 726

Verticals on Wide Avenues from The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929) by Hugh Ferriss.

• Megalopolis, the futuristic epic written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, now has a trailer and a handful of mixed reviews. I recall Coppola saying years ago that he was the kind of director who would happily make films in any genre, science fiction included. I’ve wondered ever since what a full-on Coppola SF film might look like. (Captain EO and Peggy Sue Got Married don’t count). Now it seems we’re about to find out. Given his previous missteps I remain sceptical yet curious about this one. I’ve avoided his output since Bram Stoker’s Dracula but I’m still happy to see him being so ambitious while retaining his independence.

• And RIP Roger Corman who Coppola remembered as “my first boss, task-master, teacher, mentor, and role model. There is nothing about the practical matter of making movies I didn’t learn by being his assistant.” Related: It rained on the Sunday: a career interview with Roger Corman by Matthew Thrift.

• At Retro-Forteana: Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal. A difficult subject for a such short post, as the author admits. I’m amused to see one of my Hawkwind album covers in the list although the album itself doesn’t seem very Fortean to me.

• “Did you know that, if things had gone differently, the Pompidou Centre could have been an egg?” Oliver Wainwright on architecture that might have been.

• At Cartoon Brew: A closer look at great animated title sequences. I deplore the omission of Richard Williams’ titles for The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968).

• At Public Domain Review: Love Spells and Deadly Shrieks: Illustrations of Mandrakes (ca. 650–1927).

• At Wormwoodiana: “That Strange Little Book”: Ding Dong Bell by Walter de la Mare.

• At Unquiet Things: The latest collection of Intermittent Eyeball Fodder.

• Mix of the week: DreamScenes – May 2024 by Ambientblog.

• Mandrake Root (1968) by Deep Purple | Mandrake (1975) by Gong | The Mandrake’s Hymn (2019) by Earth

Four short films by Vince Collins

The expressions “psychedelic” and “surreal” are often so casually applied that they lose any useful definition, but in the case of these early films by American animator Vince Collins “psychedelic surrealism” is an accurate description. All have somehow managed to evade my weirdness radar until now, despite being superior examples of the endlessly mutating dream-landscape which animation can do so well. The last of them, Malice in Wonderland, is a breathless run through Lewis Carroll scenarios which Collins made in collaboration with his wife, Miwako Collins. That punning title has been overused in the music world but the pair ought to be given sole ownership of it, their bad-trip film is the most grotesquely nightmarish reworking of Alice themes that I’ve seen.

Vince Collins’ YouTube channel contains many more recent works done with computer animation. The hand-drawn films are more to my taste but it’s good to see him still being active and creative.

Gilgamish (1973).

Euphoria (1974).

Fantasy (1976).

Malice in Wonderland (1982). (Or avoid YouTube’s adults-only policy by going here.)

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look