Solipsist

The amazing visionary art of Andrew Thomas Huang combines puppetry, performance and CGI.

 Mesmerizing and unlike anything I've seen before.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Last night Seba and I watched this awe-inspiring documentary by the great German director Werner Herzog.

He was allowed to film in the normally inaccessible Chauvet Cave, home to an extraordinary bestiary

 of hundreds of animal wall paintings created around 35,000 years ago. These beautiful and stunning

artworks are the oldest visual representations known to have been created by man.

What an astonishing journey into the mysterious world of our collective ancestors!

Sunday Safari - Arachnophobia

 M. Dobuzinskij, D'javol from Zolotoe runo, 1907


Halloween is drawing near
time to face our wildest fear 

Odilon Redon, Smiling Spider, thanks to Japonisme

Bruno Paul, Plague in South Africa, illustration from Simplicissimus, 1901.

Many thanks to ihatemusic1943 for the info! 

 A. H. Watson, illustration from The Enchanted Blanket, 1936, thanks to ElfGoblin

 Aleksandra Waliszewska, Dom Babci

Film poster by Wojciech Fangor for Les Compagnes de la Nuit, 1956

Book cover by Rein van Looij, 1940s, thanks to 50 Watts

 Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz, Traveler at Night

Michael Sowa, Spider on the wall

Book cover by Emanuel Schongut, 1960s

Film poster by Wiktor Gorka, 1964

Film poster by Werner Klemke for The Golden Spider 

from Graphis 1959-60, thanks to Sandi Vincent

Lorenzo Mattotti, illustration from The Raven

Wild love in San Francisco

While we are on the subject of parrots, I want to recommend this lovely documentary
 about the friendship between a bohemian dropout and a flock of wild parrots.

Sweet, funny, moving, and inspirational!

Distracted by Porno

It's a crazy, scary, surreal time for Italian politics, and like many I am torn between

anger and frustration at the sad state of our democracy and hopes for a real change. 

Outraged by the shameless, vulgar, arrogant machismo of our political rulers, 

last night I consoled myself rewatching one of my favorite icons of Italian style, 

 the always lovely, classy, smart and free spirited Isabella Rossellini 

narrating and playacting the bizarre sex lives of animals.

A few years ago Isabella was encouraged by Robert Redford to create a series 

of very short films intended for the new audience of mobile Internet and You Tube. 

Being a serious animal lover, she came out with the concept for a low tech, 

irreverent, funny and sexy take on educational nature documentaries.

Rossellini then wrote, produced, directed and starred in some very unusual 

but scientifically sound videos about the mating habits of insects.

The highly successful Green Porno project won two Webby awards in 2009, 

and was followed by two more series about sea animals and a book.

Green Porno's offspring Seduce me focuses on the often bizarre rituals 

that precede mating, and features creatures ranging from salmons to snakes 

to cuttlefish. Two series have been produced, for a total of ten videos.

You can watch all of Isabella's animal shorts on Sundance Channel.

The recent Sundance festival also premiered Animals Distract Me, the new 

Rossellini film following her concern for wildlife "as she visits with Mario Batali, 

Andre Leon Talley, Charles Darwin, and a host of urban creatures in New York City". 

The feature will debut on Earth Day (April 22nd) on Discovery Channel's Planet Green.

Animals in Love

It's almost Valentine's day, and I'd like to recommend this French documentary 

that I watched a few months ago to my romantic readers. While a bit lacking 

in its storyline, the cinematography is so beautiful, and some of the animal 

activities represented are so fascinating, touching or simply amazing 

that I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. 

Happy Days & Beautiful Dreams

My best wishes for 2011 to all Animalarium readers!

I salute the new year and bid adieu to the old
with Yuri Nortein's hauntingly nostalgic Tale of Tales,
because it contains many of the things I love best:
poetry, beauty, inspiration, the innocence of childhood, 
the power of memory and imagination against history's nightmares...

and a little grey wolf as a prelude to many more to come

Soviet Sights and Sounds

When my daughters were very young we lived in a tiny Northern California town. 

There was only one shop, the General Store, which catered to all the basic 

human necessities including gas, groceries, newspapers and video rentals. 

Strangely and luckily, their movie selection included a few lovely vintage rarities 

hidden amidst the traditional Disney tapes, including George Pal's Puppetoons 

and two Soviet animated features of Andersen's classic fairy tales 

The Snow Queen and The Wild Swans. The latter, one of my girls' favorite videos, 

was directed by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and his wife Vera at Soyuzmultfilm in 1962.

Topotun and the booklet, text by Ilya Ionov, 1926

The Adventures of Tables and Chairs, text by Samuil Marshak, 1928

thanks to s-mashak.ru

Tsekhanovsky (1889-1965) was born in Leningrad and went to study art in Paris in 1908. 

In 1911 he returned to Russia, and during the Civil War worked as a poster artist and decorator. 

In the 1920s he became part of the group of children's book artists collaborating with Vladimir Lebedev

 in Leningrad. His illustrations for a series of books introducing kids to science and technology show 
a very clean, essential graphic style clearly influenced by Lebedev's innovative approach.

His 1927 Post Office, with texts by Samuil Marshak, is a classic of the early Soviet era

that was reprinted eleven times in the course of seven years. But Tsekhanovsky was

 fascinated by the potential of dynamic graphics, and after experimenting with flip books

 he abandoned illustration and with his wife became a pioneer of the new animation medium. 

In 1929, with no experience or technical knowledge, helped only by their enthusiasm 

and a couple of assistants, Mikhail and his wife translated his successful book into the animation
 Post, which won prizes at international film festivals and was shown to Walt Disney 

as a possible model for animation by Frank Lloyd Wright.

In 1930 Tsekhanovsky used a groundbreaking sound technique to produce a version 
accompanied by soundtrack. You can watch the final, enhanced 1964 re-edition of 
Post by following this link (I couldn't find the original version anywhere on the web).

In 1933, seven years before the release of Disney's Fantasia, Tsekhanovsky began work 

on a full-lenght animated satirical opera with Dimitri Shostakovich. Unfortunately
only a few fragments are left of The tale about the priest and his worker Balda, based 
on a poem by Pushkin, since the authorities did not allow the work to be completed
 and most of what had been created was destroyed by German bombing during WWII. 

With the establishment of Socialist realism, Tsekhanovsky was forced to abandon 

his innovative personal style and adopt rotoscoping (the animation of movement 

produced by tracing the projection of live action frame by frame). 

In 1943 he moved to Moscow and went on to produce a series of more traditional 
but quite beautiful and elegantly crafted animations including Frog Princess, 

The Flower with Seven Colors, The Fisherman and the Fish, and Kashtanka.

The video of The Wild Swans above was issued in the US in 1996 as part of 

the series Mikhail Baryshnikov's Stories from my Childhood.

The Other Side

Worms. What an a–mazing life. 

This animated short was directed in 1993 by Mikhail Aldashin at Pilot studio.