Clearly, the colors that Peter Burr uses are alarming. Perhaps it’s because they’re warning you about the difficulty of extracting the razor-sharp hooks of Burr’s mesmerizing art out of your delicate retina. Whether he’s animating, puffy painting, collaging, or music-making in his cell phone grunge group Hooliganship, Burr goes all out, producing work so violently chromatic and beautifully blatant, it loops all the way back around to the realm of the the exquisitely subtle.
Check out some of Burr’s animated work on either excellent volume of the Cartune Xprez DVDs.
Tom DesLonchamp is the filmmaker, RISD graduate, video game developer and swashbuckling daredevil who’s most recently responsible for an almost overwhelmingly endearing animated Jookabox music video. But that’s not all. DesLongchamp is a multi-disciplinary whiz kid. He’s generated a wide gamut of rapturously kinetic artwork, from the childhood cartoon pastiche of his short film Kid Show to a bizarre counter-documentary study of domesticated cats entitled About Dogs.
Browsing through his website is almost exhilarating, as you stumble onto unexpected creative endeavors like a visual Facebook diary and an informative animation about dental hygiene. Regardless of the medium or the subject, DesLongchamp seems to take an effervescent, fearless approach to life. While his devil may care attitude may have landed him in the hospital once or twice (due to tarping-related injuries), it’s also taken him to excitingly fresh creative ground. Check out our interview with Tom below.
How did you end up making the video for “You Cried Me”? What got you into Jookabox, and where did the concept for the video come from?
Last year I was introduced to Michael Kaufmann, who does A&R/Development for Asthmatic Kitty Records. He gave me Jookabox’s album Ropechain to listen to for game or music video ideas. I listened to the album a lot and became very familiar with its themes. I ended up creating a flash video game for the track “Girl Ain’t Preggers.” Almost a year later, Michael contacted me about doing something new for Jookabox’s new album, Dead Zone Boys. I listened to it and “You Cried Me” struck me with its energy. The song automatically conjured gestures of movement in my mind–not entirely specific to characters or images. The essence was something like a “let’s get the hell out of here” kind of feeling. I just held onto that emotion and started drawing ghosts. It was exciting to dive into a spooky theme, since it contrasted so much with my last animation, Kid Show.
The Seafarers is a fun little online series that Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock have been animating together. Elevating simple tales of the sea with deliciously rendered illustration an unexpected humor, The Seafarers is the type of irreverent, bizarre, and yet somehow tender entertainment that kids could use more of these days. I was alerted to the existence of this awesome cartoon by Michelle at Giant Robot, who notes: “Kelly & Ferris are busy new parents and still managing to find the time and energy to develop their work, be in the studio, and strengthen their ties with family, friends and colleagues.” Hey, let’s all be inspired by that example and make even more awesome stuff to share with the world! Yeah!
Director/animator Stefan Nadelman evokes a grippingly eerie, antiquated tone in this dark video for Menomena frontman Brent Knopf’s solo project, Ramona Falls. As a general rule, vast quarries of emotion may be mined from olde thyme linocuts, as evidenced by the invariably funny misappropriations of web comic Married to the Sea.
Leaping lizards! There are so many rad artists– luminaries, really– involved in the latest gallery show at L.A.’s primo promenade, Space 15 Twenty, I don’t even know where to start. Curated by Family founder David Kramer, Main Street is an exhibition of fresh video and animation from Miranda July, Jacob Ciocci, and Andrew Jeffrey Wright, to name just three. The exhibition, which opens Saturday, October 24th at 7pm, will also be released as a DVD designed by Grammy nominee Brian Roettinger. Always a perfectionist, Kramer tells us how he plans to transcend the confines of a gallery screening: “We’re building a giant box/cinema in the middle of the gallery with benches for viewing!”
The videos range from the psychedelically patterned color abstractions of Andrew Jeffrey Wright and Kris Moyes, to the documentary-style mountain biking travelogue of Andrew Sutherland. Miranda July’s meditation on tribal drumming, and Peter Sutherland’s re-enactment of a dream where teenagers wreak havoc on NYC, their minds controlled by a diabolical, smoking stone. Jacob Ciocci of Paper Rad defaces youtube videos of bedroom freak dancers with his brightly distinctive animations, while Melanie Bonajo records a deadpan conversation between two women with household items tied to their every limb. Lori D.’s cartoons focus on leering men, while Lucky Dragons focus on flower gardens.
Opening night features: Dunes (Live show)
DJs: Rob Barber (High Places) and Brian Roettinger
Check it out this weekend if you’re in L.A., and keep your eyes peeled for more info on the DVD!
Getting a project past the gatekeepers of Hollywood tends to hinge on amalgamating several tried and true money-making formulas, distilled into a catchy logline like: “It’s Harry Potter meets Twilight in the post-apocalyptic year of 2013!” or “Picture Transformers 2 but with all the drama and twice the awards potential of Crash!” Pitching a movie that’s basically The Battle of Algiers meets Snow White would never fly. Luckily for us, that didn’t stop Nickelodeon animator Nick Cross from creating just such an insane hybrid in his spare time, and the result is the brilliant film below, Yellow Cake.
…The idea for the film came to me in 2003, around the time of the build-up to the war in Iraq. There was a lot of talk about ‘yellow cake’ uranium being sold in ominous tones, but I always thought of yellow cake as being a delicious dessert treat. I thought that the contrast was really funny and that got my creative juices flowing. I always enjoy the idea of blending cute things with something horrible; it’s just such an extreme contrast that I can’t resist going back to that well over-and-over again.
Jules Feiffer has had an impressively diverse career. He’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, playwright, and children’s book artist. He’s a screenwriter who’s penned films for brilliant filmmakers Robert Altman, Mike Nichols, and Alain Resnais. He apprenticed under legendary comic book artist Will Eisner. And he illustrated a young adult novel that you just might have heard of– The Phantom Tollbooth. I could go on, but, you know– that’s what Wikipedia is for. Bottom Line: Jules Feiffer is the bomb.
So what do you get when someone as rad as Feiffer collaborates with the cartoon wizard responsible for those awesome animated adaptations of Where the Wild Things Are and In The Night Kitchen? You get Gene Deitch’s Munro, an Oscar-winning 1960 cartoon based on a sharply satirical tale from Feiffer’s collection Passionella and Other Stories:
Mark Portillo’s sassy grayscale GIFs are nostalgically dithered and faded, recalling endless pilgrimages through The Oregon Trail on so many early Macintoshes. On his blog, Drop Me Off In Harlem, Portillo sketches celebrities, animals, and everyday objects for his very brief animated GIFs, usually comprised of fewer than 10 frames. Who doesn’t love a good GIF? Especially when it’s a Freaks and Geeks homage:
Nathalie Djurberg is a Swedish artist who specializes in entrancing (and occasionally freaky-deaky) short videos of handmade puppets shot in stop-motion. As befits someone who was awarded the Silver Lion For a Promising Young Artist at the Venice Biennale in 2009, Djurberg is a provocateur, producing videos that are thoroughly in bad taste.
This isn’t a bad thing. It’s not easy to make demented art that avoids being shmaltzy and calculatedly shocking. New York art critic Jerry Saltz–a familiar champion of good bad art–describe Djurberg’s work as “magnificently raucous but charming”, and conjuring “a place where the center does not hold and things fall apart.” It may not be for the faint of heart, but really–these days, what is?
I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that Maurice Sendak wrote and designed this awesome early Sesame Street skit. Who else could seamlessly weave together nine alcoholic pigs, a deceitful rascal named Bumble, and a stern mother who works 29 minutes a day over the course of a whirlwind animated segment? But the best part is hearing Jim Henson’s voice come out of young Bumble at the end! How lovely it is to see the brief convergence of two great artists who were clearly on the same wavelength.
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