Igor Kovalyov, who has had an extraordinary animation career as both an independent producer of bizarre shorts and as a Klasky Csupo producer of things like ‘Rugrats’ made this very strange depiction of domestic life without any dialog. Enjoy the weirdness.
Beauty and the Beast: A Russian Animation
Here’s a 1950s Soviet animated version of the classic fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast.’
Parts 1 – 2 after the jump…
The Resurrection Movie: A Film Trailer by Michel Montecrossa
MATURE CONTENT AND NUDITY:
This is Michel Montecrossa’s peace and climate change musical. It tells a great passion story which is the love-tale of cyberrocker-astronaut Starlight and his mate Earthpower and how they change hellish mega city planet through their music into a free world. It’s full of rock & roll, motorcycles, leather jackets, keyboards, cowboy hats, sex drawings, mirror sunglasses, hip rocker women, New Age and science fiction. I don’t know who these people are, but they sure do look fun and they have some kind of wild movie going on here. It features the poetry of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Wordsworth! My general take on it is that the film is a cry for individual expression and freedom in a time of unending war and conflict managed by the forces of homogenous corporate control. Director Michel Montecrossa is described as a ‘prolific songwriter, orchestral composer, painter, writer, moviemaker, futurist architect and cyberartist.’ Wild people like this should make more films.
Elegìa: A Film by Fred. L’Epee and Dimitra Pouliopoulou
Filmmakers Fred L’Epee and Dimitra Pouliopoulou deal with the emotions of video. Their short films are visual poems in the most real sense. I like the way they flirt with the techniques of celluloid while remaining firmly anchored in video. The two things, rather than cancelling each other, work together to offer a filmmaker more tools for opening eyes and insisting that people fully observe. This kind of film dances between reality and abstraction. The ships are placed so that they traverse a line between light and dark, high and low, space and time.
Propaganda Mussolini: A Film by Massimo Balloi
Italian filmmaker Massimo Balloi has made an abstract film that attempts to explain the descent of Italy into modern fascism. The rapid turn of Western democracies toward a virulent corporate fascism does in fact resemble the ideas put forth by Mussolini in the 1930s and 40s. But his effort was to mimic the efficiencies of the corporation in government. The new effort currently underway is to replace government control with corporate control. The danger is real and it is extreme. Even in the United States we see a Supreme Court allying itself with corporations. In Italy, you have a very basic corporate buffoon running the country as if it were a criminal enterprise. In the U.S. you have completely false liberals maneuvering a corporate front man into the Presidency so that every decision is made with a seemingly logical inclination toward the interests of the large corporations. We are now fighting entire wars based solely on decisions by corporations.
The twenty first century will not be the century of war against terrorists. It will be a century of war against corporations. They will gain an upper hand initially, but this will be short-lived. I say this because once you get inside these corporate structures you can observe how shockingly weak they are. BP is your perfect example. A single broken valve can weaken the entire stack of cards. These corporate entities can only flourish while people are asleep.
So? Adventure in the Univerphone
This is an Italian animated TV series about an inventor who gets sucked into the virtual world inside his cell phone. You know… like most Americans do… while they are driving at 75 mph on the freeway and they smash into a concrete pylon, spattering their dull brains across five lanes of traffic. And most deservedly so. But this little animated preview looks inviting. I like it. The series is made by Marco Bigliazzi and Fabrizio Bondi of Toposodo Episodic Productions. The series has its own web site.