In the fine tradition of this here link blog, I’m going to point you elsewhere on the internets so that you may spend 5 minutes with a quality piece of animation. Please enjoy Jake Armstrong’s student project (created at the School of Visual Arts): “The Terrible Thing of Alpha-9″.
The source post on Cartoon Brew has a good accompanying text by Armstrong, explaining his influences and interpretations of the characters. I don’t want to spoil anything and am no authority on ‘toons, but here are the notes I made while watching:
– several of the motions, particularly the Spaceman getting dressed in the beginning, reminded me of the excellent Adventure Time with which you are hopefully familiar if we are friends;
– my first reading of the character designs, their weight and especially their limbs, screamed Octopus Pie, though Armstrong’s own list of influences for the ‘comic book feel’ very much does not include a webcomic;
– that said, I find the piece very fresh, and a fine example of the form… and my heart breaks around the 4:30 mark.
I have a confession to make: I’ve never been all that into Patrick Wolf. Among my friends, there are die-hard worshipers, those who hold him in general disdain, and plenty who just like it when he pops up on iTunes DJ.
(Total aside: why was that renamed? Party Mix was a perfectly informative title for that function. Is it all that enhanced by pretending iTunes now has agency in selecting the order? Isn’t that was Genius is for?)
For my part, I’ve always been something of a poseur. I liked a couple of his tracks well enough, but I couldn’t make it all the way through many, many tracks. But whenever he came up in conversation with other indiephiles, I was the fawning fanboy. After all, it was a story that I could certainly get behind: Wolf as some gay, self-taught street kid musical prodigy, who did whatever the hell he felt like in service to his art. I wanted to get behind that, I wanted to obsess over his albums. I certainly wore out a few tracks…To The Lighthouse and A Boy Like Me on Lycanthropy and then…well I didn’t really listen to anything else until The Magic Position, which was really the only song I listened to on that whole album.
I think a large part of it is, for all of my teenage angst in high school, I’ve never really been a fan of emo music. It was a wildly underrepresented genre in my mp3 collection and I wasn’t even clued in to Wolf until college. For all the interesting things that he does musically, his genius productions and – adventurous – fashions, I can’t really connect to his themes. “The Magic Position” was very different compared to the rest of his body of work, and I completely wore the track out. But after its fantastic eponymous opening, everything went back to brooding on that album, if I recall correctly (and please correct me if you disagree!).
All this to say: I haven’t listened to Patrick Wolf in a while and I didn’t listen all that closely at the time. But I want to show you a music video that I’m very excited about – it’s for a newer song called “Hard Times”:
It’s directed by Ace Norton who has worked with a number of other indie darlings, and to whom Wolf refers, “[he is] the Michel Gondry of my generation.” I’m definitely going to be keeping my eye out for him, if only because I’m in love with the visuals above.
Because, really, I’m not feeling clued in to the link between song message and video. What is it that ties together working hard through tough economic times and sometimes being a wildly fluorescing drum player (or paint thrower)? Then again, who cares? It looks damn cool.
And, for what it’s worth, I am hopelessly in love with Wolf’s friend and sometime concertmate Owen Pallet, also known as Final Fantasy.
There are very few stop motion films that I won’t watch all the way through, even if I’m not enjoying them. I always feel that I owe it to the creators for all the meticulous work they’ve done. I also enjoy animation, of course, but there’s something much more endearing about the chunkiness resulting from making minute changes to the configuration of the same few objects.
In that regard, be sure to watch through the credits, which features a time-lapse ‘making of’ sequence that I find astounding.
