Some of the best animation short films I’ve seen in 2008 (and 3)

Straying Little Red Riding Hood

Pecoraped (Ikue Sugidono and Miyako Nishio). Japan, 2007.

In the fabric of folk tales, there is a sixth dimension that connects distant universes. Little Red Riding Hood has the ability to travel throught them like someone who taking a stroll in the woods.

 

The Big Store

Lars Arrhenius, Johannes Müntzing. Sweden, 2008.

On September 11, 2003, Anna Lindhn, Sweden’s foreign minister died after being attacked by an individual armed with a knife at a department store in Stockholm. This short reconstructs the facts of the event with the coldness of an autopsy.

 

Kudan

Taku Kimura. Japan, 2008.

A man receives a package that allows him to become Kudan and explore the world from an enterely different perspective. An exuberant fantasy as only alternative Japanese animation could offer us.

 

Unpredictable Behaviour

Pasha Shapiro, Ernst Weber. USA, 2007.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson reflect on the human condition based on the crimes of Jack the Ripper. An absolutely unexpected twist reveals what Doyle never explained about his famous detective.

 

The Facts in the Case of Mr. Hollow

Rodrigo Gudiño, Vincent Marcone. Canada, 2008.

A photograph from the 1930’s reveals a terrible truth through a meticulous scrutiny of each and every one if its details.

 

Some of the best animation short films I’ve seen in 2008 (2 of 3)

Glow

Jo Lawrence. UK, 2007.

Inspired by the true story of Grace Freyer, one of the “Radium Girls” who worked for the Radium Dial Company in New Jersey in the twenties painting watch faces with radioactive material.

 

La Vita Nuova 

Christophe Gautry, Arnaud Demuynck. France, 2008.

Besides being the title of Dante’s first known work, La vita nuova is a poetic palimpsest, inspired by the life and work of Gérard de Nerval, in which a poet finds inspiration in the memories that seep in through doorjambs.

 

Morana

Simon Bogojevic Narath. Croatia, 2008.

In Slavic folklore Morana is the goddess of evil, of the death, of darkness … The personification of winter. As he did in 2006 with Leviathan, Bogojevic Narath offers one of the most amazing animated films of the year.

 

Mutt

Glenn Hunwick. Australia, 2008.

All work and no fun always has devastating consequences, and even more so if you’re a lonely farmer’s in the heart of Australia.

 

Ona  koja mjeri (She Who Measures)

Veljko Popovic. Croatia, 2008.

Second example of the exceptional moment Croatian animation is living nowadays, this short film is a reflection on the narrow margins of real liberty the consumer society has to offer.

 

Switch

Jean-Julien Pous, Pierre Prinzbach. France, 2008.

Life, literally, is like a race against the clock. An example of the use of visual metaphors as an illustration of existential angst.

 

 

 

Some of the best animation short films I’ve seen in 2008 (1 of 3)

A6/A9

Johannes Schiehsl. Germany, 2007.

An everyday landscape might hide indescribable surprises. A forceful visual metaphor as horrifying as it is beautiful, taken to its utmost logical conclusion

Bolides

François-Xavier Bologna, Théophile Bondoux, Lyonel Charmette, Vincent Le Ster. France, 2008.

Adventure is found where you would least expect it. The secret life of an old people’s home is revealed in a shocking and thrilling document disguised as an action comedy.

Chainsaw

Dennis Tupicoff. Australia, 2007.

A highly poetic vision of disaffection and emotional pain. As the film itself states, there is a very dangerous beast within a chainsaw. Guest stars: Ava Garner, Frank Sinatra and Luis Miguel Dominguín.

Die Seilbahnen (The Cable Car)

Claudius Gentinetta, Frank Braun. Switzerland, 2008.

Life or death slapstick hundreds of meters up in the air, or how every precaution is not enoguh when you choose certain means of transportation.

El empleo

Santiago Bou Grasso. Argentina, 2008.

In the tradition of Central European absurdism and Latin American magic poetics, a semicircular story with deep existentialists roots.

Monsieur Cok

Franck Dion. France, 2008.

Mr Cok is the owner of a big mortar bomb factory. He is obsessed with well done job and productivity, which leads him to replace his workers with robots. But not all the workes will comply with this measure…

A naive thought about games and media

When, several months ago, I posted about the Chris Deering’s presentation in Barcelona, I pointed out that one of the most important conclusions I had extracted from the talk was that Deering stated the industry had to take seriously games as a media. A couple of days ago, at the ECGBL08, I attended a inspiring video-presentation made by Ben Sawyer, in which, among a lot of very interesting ideas, the founder of Digital Mill said that there’s little comparative media discussion in the field of video games. Sawyer said (in fact, he showed on a slide): “Do we even understand games as media?”

As an academic interested in the sociology of media, and as a player and game researcher, I feel terribly alone (even though I’m always accompanied by my colleague from UOC Daniel Aranda) when I talk with industry representatives and they turn out to be geeks absolutely convinced of its superiority over other entertainment industries, or when I talk to software engineers who deliberately and proudly ignore what sociology and cultural theory can provide to help them to make better games. On the other hand, I feel very comfortable with my friends in the community of education researchers, but I still suspect that they cherish games for what games can offer them for their innovative and ambitious curriculum designs, but they don’t have much interest in what young people do with games when they are not in class.

This note is just to remind myself that there is a lot of work to do and we can’t wait any longer to do it.

By the way, my good friend Nicola Whitton has posted about the other ECGBL keynote speaker, Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen, in her blog.

Media battlefields

Abstract from the article “Tactics and strategies in the new battlefields of communication. Changes in the use, production and consumption of information in the network society”

Imma Tubella, Jordi Sánchez-Navarro & Carlos Tabernero
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) – Open University of Catalonia (UOC)

In the network society, our lives are arranged, more than ever, around communication. In the industrial society, those who controlled information, that is, mass communication media, were in power. So are they nowadays, but not so much, for information and communication technologies (ICT) have opened the door to citizens’ direct participation. The rules under which mass communication has been run to date have taken a new turn as ICT, particularly the Internet as well as the explosion of global mobile communication, have brought about a new framework which specially affects traditional media. In this context, we analyze transformation trends in consumption and use of all sorts of content and media. These changes arise from the interactions between content, media and audiences, which may work either jointly or in direct opposition. We also explore the potentialities of the emergence of a new form of collaborative culture as regards the consumption, use and production of information and knowledge, which takes place when consumers rebuild their relationship with media by remaking the latter’s content for the benefit of their own personal and communal interests.

Published in Tripodos, No 23 (2008)

Download (pdf) (in catalan)

The young and the Internet: Revolution at Home

Abstract from the article “The young and the Internet: Revolution at Home. When the household becomes the foundation of socio-cultural change”

Carlos Tabernero, Jordi Sánchez-Navarro & Imma Tubella
Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) – Open University of Catalonia (UOC)

This study aims to understand current patterns of transformation in communication practices owing to the ever-increasing incorporation of the Internet in people’s everyday lives. By surveying a group of mostly experienced and intensive Internet users in a setting of intermediate Internet diffusion such as Catalonia, our study focuses on the processes of integration of habitual Internet operation into daily individual practices, and particularly on its impact on media usage and consumption. Considering the Internet a powerful multimodal means of communication, the study probes it as a constitutive technology and no longer a novelty for the younger generations. In this sense, we test to what extent and in which manner the young, through the personalized and specialized use of the Internet, and above all within their home settings, are conducive of socio-cultural change through the introduction and gradual adjustment of their ever-renewing practices with their elders’ established communication habits.

Published in Observatorio (OBS*), Vol 2, No 3 (2008)

Download (pdf)

Chris Deering on New Challenges for the Interactive Gaming Industry

The presentation that Chris Deering did last week at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona was more than interesting. It was quite enlightening. Although he did not reveal any magical key on the future trends in digital interactive entertainment, he offered several clues of what’s going on right now, with clear and valuable data and a bunch of ideas that, in fact, are already being discussed in academic and industry forums.

It is always a pleasure to listen to a high profile professional in the context of an academic activity, and Deering’s is more than a high profile. A graduate of Boston College and Harvard Business School, Deering’s career in videogame area began as Vice President – International Marketing at Atari in 1983. In 1985, he moved to Sony’s Columbia Pictures Home Video. He departed Columbia after a decade, moving in 1995 to London to establish Sony Computer Entertainment Europe. As CEO Deering was responsible for the London-based Sony PlayStation Division for EMEA and Australasia, and is widely regarded as the “father of the European PlayStation”. Retiring from Sony in 2005, he has been awarded the Computer Games Industry Achievement Award from BAFTA, the ‘Hall of Fame’ from ELSPA and is also the Chairman of the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival.

In his presentation, Deering enfasized some differences between what he called the “PS2 Generation” and the “New Generation”.

According to him, in PS2 Generation, people were PC literate; they used mobile phone in order to make calls; the trade was 90% retail; there was an online teamplay niche; and a one million MMORPG niche; and last but not least, it was the generation of the product placement and the static InGame Ads.

On the other hand, in New Generation, people are blog and MySpace literate; they use mobile phones for SMS and photography; people are playlist obsessive; they use YouTube and Facebook; there is a 15 million MMORPG sector; and, lastly, it is the generation of dynamic InGame Ads and transactions.

Some interesting conclusions of Deering’s presentation: There are few sure bets. In an era of growing budgets, few games do well. Expenses can kill companies while they learn to adapt. So, every new development must have “religious buy-in” from all selling groups. A last interesting conclusion was that Interactive Entertainment should be taught as a career path in Universities.

What the industry could do better? Firstly, rethink the balance of development and marketing. Secondly, rethink how games are developed. Furthermore, industry has to invent new revenues using the power of syndication, search and recommendation, and take the game seriously as a media.

A sage: Alexey Pajitnov

Last thursday, Alexey Pajitnov, creator of the exhilarating, addictive and classic game Tetris gave a lecture at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Pajitnov revealed himself a person as fun and thought-provoking as Tetris, and gave the audience some clues about the creation process of the cult game. He started the lecture presenting himself as a young hacker at the Soviet Academy of Sciences, first interested in computer science and later in Artificial Intelligence. At that time, Tetris wasn’t obviously his main job. In fact, it was an experiment: he wanted to adapt the classic wooden board puzzle Pentominos to the computer screen. According to Pajitnov, Pentominos was a very popular puzzle in Russia, a game that could be found in almost every toy store in the Soviet Union, but it was a bit difficult. In order to simplify the original puzzle, he transformed the five-part modules into four-part pieces (and that’s why the name of the game is Tetris) and added the major idea of the game: the fall of ramdom-generated pieces. Another important idea was that every completed line had to vanish in order to make room for new falling pieces. The rest is game culture history: if the player was good enough, the game became virtually endless. Tetris is, thus, an incredibly smart example of game design. With no more than three minor innovations from the original puzzle, Pajitnov created a complete new game experience.

The genius Pajitnov is now a gamer more than a game creator. He explained that he’s still doing some research and game design, but he would like to think that his main occupation is playing Civilization, World of Warcraft and the most difficult Rubik’s Cubs. He didn’t say a thing about making new games, but some of us can’t help hoping he could find some time to new experiments, since, according to him, there is still a board game that needs a good computer conversion: the classic Japanese game Go.

In a couple of weeks I will have the opportunity to chat with him in a panel at FNAC Forum. I would like to ask him an obvious but still necessary question: Which are the characteristics of a good puzzle game?

Curtis Harrington: Danse Macabre (6 of 6)

The sixth (and last) installment of the summary of my book Curtis Harrington: Danse Macabre.

6. Images of proud decadence

The last TV movie directed by Harrington before devoting himself entirely to television series for four years was The Dead Don’t Die (1975), also written by Robert Bloch from his novella published in 1953. The history of The Dead Don’t Die starts at Illinois State Penitentiary, where Ralph Drake (Jerry Douglas) is about to be executed for murdering his wife. The convict’s brother, Don (George Hamilton), undertakes an investigation to clear his brother’s name and uncover the real murderer. The inquiries led him into a nightmare in which a sinister character, Valek, plans to conquer the world by using zombies.

After finishing this production, Harrington embarked on The Legend of Lizzy Borden project, but he was expelled before starting shooting. The director attributes its flop to the likelihood that the leading actress, Elizabeth Montgomery, was the right to elect a director of her own choosing built into her contract.

Since then, Harrington alternated long periods of dedication to television with the odd big screen features like Ruby (1977) and Mata Hari (1985). Getting to watch a full version of Ruby has become an impossible odyssey. The only original version is the one that was released at cinemas at the time, but this was soon replaced by a version that had been tampered with. Even the name of Harrington was expunged, leading to speculation that the director had been fired, which wasn’t the case at all, as he shot the entire footage of the final cut. Ruby was released in theaters by Dimension Films and was the most successful independent horror film until John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) came out. This success was precisely its curse. Producer Steve Krantz reached an agreement with CBS to show the film on television with the condition that the most violent scenes were cut. The problem was that with these cuts the film was not long enough to be broadcast. Krantz then hired a new director, who shot additional scenes and who was credited as Alan Smithee when the film was broadcast on television and distributed on home video. Neither was Mata Hari without its problems. Produced by Menahem Golan and featuring the star of erotic cinema Sylvia Kristel, the film passed almost unnoticed.

Given his trajectory, it comes as no surprise that Harrington closed his film career with comments on the decadence of the profession, as he did with the underestimated Ruby. In the shape of an exploitation Carrie (1976) –we have already noted that this is the deceptive and yet privileged format used time and time again by the director- he puts together a curious meditation on artistic decadence and on cinema as a medium, in setting the story in a run-down drive-in, an icon of the existence of a flyblown cinema and of a bygone age. Harrington thus entered his own decadence, which he carried with dignity after retiring in the wake of the Mata Hari fiasco and reflecting upon his own status, his sexuality, and his capacity of representation with the mid-lenght Usher (2002). The filmmaker’s last Grand Guignol was again and adaptation of Poe’s world for personal reading on the nature of the profession of narrator and creator of artifice.

Harrington’s last works can be re-read in fringe terms as a chronicle of the decadence of the representation art par excellence, the cinema, and, at the same time, a chronicle of Harrington’s dredging of sediments of oblivion, alienation and fable. His own dedication to the television medium in TV movies and the making of episodes of successful series certifies his pessimistic vision of Hollywood, and his own nature as an outsider collaborating in the creation of a fictional universe that is as perverse as it is artificial —as opposite to naturalistic— and powerfully symbolic.

Curtis Harrington: Danse Macabre (5 of 6)

The fifth installment of the summary of my book Curtis Harrington: Danse Macabre

5. Harrington and television

In the wake of this central corpus of films where Harrington hit the occasional heights ans small troughts of filmaking, the director sought refuge in the TV medium. In 1970, before handing over What’s the Matter with Helen? and Whoever Slew Auntie Roo?, Harrington had directed the TV movie How Awful About Alan, which brought the director face to face with the certainties of restrictive production. As himself recalled: “The basic difference between the two media is that in a feature film, if you need more money to improve it, there is a certain psychological justification. If we make it better, probably it will be more successful; more people will go to see it and it’ll make more money. But there is no reason to lenghthen the schedule or spend more money on a film for television, because the amount of money is yightly controled (…) Of course, you can try it and say: If we only had an extra day we could do it much better, but they will just say: And who cares if it’s made better or not? That’s the biggest limitation”. How Awful about Alan was the first one-off movie that Harrington made for the small screen, and that’s probably why the result left him feeling slightly dissatisfied. “There wasn’t much a script. I was really nervous before starting because I knew that the schedule was criminal, and Tony Perkins had just come from making Catch-22 and had never made a film for television. Tony and I went for a stroll, talked about the old RKO and I told him about my doubts; he said: ‘Curtis, don’t toy worry about a thing’. From that moment, he was always on time, he knew all his lines and he never caused the slightest problem”. How Awful About Alan is the story of a man (Anthony Perkins) who suffers from a psychologically induced hysterical blindness. Thanks to the professionalism of Perkins, who really did act blind —using opaque contact lenses—, Harrington got down to the iron schedule of ten days for shooting and managed to fit numerous explorations in his visual style intop the staging.

Afterwards, he made the now-forgotten TV movie The Cat Creature (1973), written by Robert Bloch, and, one year later, Killer Bees (1974), where he returned to the universe of his films made for cinema. Killer Bees —starring Gloria Swanson—, is the study of an hereditary matriarchy in which the a priori obvious metaphor of the beehive turns into a nightmare about a decadent, contagious family power, set in a kind of haunted house where the disturbing element doesn’t consist of supernatural menaces but of the lyfestyle of people whose behaviour impregnates every nook and cranny of the mansion where their lives are spent.

Before sttling down for several years in the TV market, for which he made episodes for Baretta, Wonder Woman, Charlie’s Angels, Tales of the Unexpected and Logan’s Run, Harrington directed The Killing Kind (1973). This was a difficult experience, produced by two Texan inestors who had been successfully producing ads, but had no previous experience in fiction film production. Their ignorance of the medium meant that the movie had a scant distribution and would go virtually unseen at cinemas. The rought and frecuently nasty look of the film —that, on the other hand, fitted for a story of a psychokiller (John Savage) and his disturbing mother (Ann Sothern)— didn’t help to the commercial succes of the film.