We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Not sure what’s cooler, the verisimillitude of tallulahblue’s cake or the fact that it’s designated for a youngster named Atticus. As if the legacy of that name weren’t enough to guarantee success, the birthday boy even resembles Max! Some people are born lucky.

Who wants some more dessert? First up, an extremely accurate and blue-colored cake from Sweet Tooth Fairy.

Second, a bi-layer masterpiece with leafy foliage from Samirah.

Third, a yummy vanilla cake layered with milk chocolate ganache and decorated with fondant by the best mom ever. How joyful is that kid?!

Keep it up, gang!

Max Records cut his acting teeth on a pair of alt-rock music videos. After dipping his toes in the water with the warm and fuzzy sing along of Cake’s “Guitar Man,” (directed by the lovely Cat Solen), Max’s second role, in a Death Cab for Cutie video, strongly foreshadowed the young thespian’s capability to take on meditative, emotionally challenging roles with a natural grace. Shot in a tin shed on a shoestring budget, Max manages to convey a sense of loneliness and loss in this wordless performance that echoes throughout the atmosphere of the entire video.

Director Aaron Stewart-Anh contributes to Giant Robot and has helmed videos for bands like The Decemberists, The Album Leaf, and Asobi Seksu. He shot the somber, Silent Running-esque “Stable Song” for Directions, an ambitious project in which the filmmaker enlisted 11 directors to create long-form videos based around each track on Death Cab for Cutie’s 2005 album, Plans. Contradicting the conventions of the music video medium, Stewart-Anh’s project permitted the directors an unusual amount of creative freedom—the songs became scores for a series of short stories and visual experiments, rather than products being marketed by throw-away visuals. Originally released in weekly installments through the band’s website, Directions was almost a prelude to the plethora of indie rock experiments in video that would soon be fostered by the explosion of YouTube.

Lance Bangs, who contributed to Directions in the form of a bizarre and hilarious first-person live concert video, asked Stewart-Anh if he knew any kids capable of playing Max, and the rest is history.

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.

Check out this interview with Cross over at Slow Decade:

…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.

I’ve never been to Coco Cake Boutique in Vancouver but I like the fact that they have an entire blog devoted to cupcakes. Victory for the internet.

Check out the Wild Things Cake in full delicious-looking detail.