viz.

Image source: Thatgamecompany.

Probably all illustrations, and certainly the animated images I’ve discussed in Frozen and Lilo and Stitch, come freighted with a vast history of associations. Striking images can literally provide worldviews—complex perspectives from which to view matters ranging from gender roles to cultural identities to ideal body types. Frozen’s visual aesthetic offers a triumphantalist account of traditional images put to new uses, while Lilo and Stitch offers a harder-edged criticism of our lazy, self-indulgent ways of looking at the world, for instance. Yet both deliberately and meaningfully comment upon the mediating power of their own iconography. Both films are, in short, particularly focused on understanding how images have worked in the past, and how they can be made to work differently in the future.

Journey is a video game whose cartoon-like visual aesthetic draws strongly from the same animated tradition as the first two films, yet its aims are quite different. In both its gameplay and its visual design, I will argue, Journey is not focused on what it means, but rather on the raw experiences it can provide. The game reminds us, in short, that while images have deep and rich rhetorical histories, they are also something more than mere arguments.

"Mulberry Fields" by Lucille Clifton Image Credit: Poetry Foundation

Some treats for your Monday! Because we all need a little poetry in our lives…

If you haven’t yet heard about Sita Sings the Blues, then I’ll let Roger Ebert introduce you to it:

It hardly ever happens this way. I get a DVD in the mail. I'm told it's an animated film directed by "a girl from Urbana." That's my home town. It is titled "Sita Sings the Blues." I know nothing about it, and the plot description on IMDb is not exactly a barn-burner: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Uh, huh. I carefully file it with other movies I will watch when they introduce the 8-day week.

After Ebert decides to watch it he writes:

I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920's jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens. I obtain Nina Paley's e-mail address and invite the film to my film festival in April 2009 at the University of Illinois, which by perfect synchronicity is in our home town.

To get any film made is a miracle. To conceive of a film like this is a greater miracle. How did Paley's mind work? She begins with the story of Ramayana, which is known to every school child in India but not to me. It tells the story of a brave, noble woman who was made to suffer because of the perfidy of a spineless husband and his mother. This is a story known to every school child in America. They learn it at their mother's knee. Paley depicts the story with exuberant drawings in bright colors. It is about a prince named Rama who treated Sita shamefully, although she loved him and was faithful to him.

Despite rave reviews like this one,--and winning a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival--Paley’s film has remained unavailable to most people because she was unable to clear the rights to the songs she used in the film, and the cost securing those rights scared off most distributors. Fortunately, some of these issues have been resolved, and the film is now being released to a wider audience.

If you live in New York, WNET/NY will be airing Sita on Saturday, March 7 at 10:45 (thereby atoning for this). In the meantime, you can watch the entire film online via WNET’s streaming player or download the film to watch at your leisure.

Update: here's the trailer from YouTube:

Here is an amusing/horrifying animation of the history of human conflicts (WWII to the present day), which uses the foods typically associated with the various countries involved to act out the conflicts. It’s called “Food Fight.”

If you are interested in animation art, you’ll probably enjoy Animation Backgrounds, a blog dedicated to the backgrounds from classic animated films and shorts.

via Boing Boing