Poetry in animation

About three years ago, our beloved Pic a Flic closed forever, and sold off a lot of its ecletic collection. We were able to secure a number of our favourites, about 30 DVDs. 

Younger daughter got to work in their animation section, and chose, among other things, a couple of National Film Board of Canada collections. I think she finds them soothing, like a cocktail before dinner.

It occurred to me, while she was re-watching them recently, that I pay precious little attention to the soundtrack of animated shorts, the images are too distracting, I guess. 

In the 1993 Academy-Award-winning Bob's Birthday, for example, there are several arresting images. And I should warn you, this cartoon got censored in the United States. (Nothing enough to get it censored in Canada, but you'll see what I mean.) It was only when younger daughter had this on a few weeks ago, that I realised that Bob recites excerpts of two poems.  You hear him murmur "There is a garden in her face" (written by Thomas Campion and published in 1617), as he gazes out at his dental assistant, who is losing the war against aphids. 

At the very end, blissfully unaware of the social havoc he has wrought, he recites the final three lines from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's sonnet "The Poets", while waiting for his wife in their car.

All of which seems to indicate the importance of revisiting books, movies, poems, and animated shorts, if you want to catch the details you missed.  Or am I just as oblivious as Bob?

I'm dreaming - oh gawd, I'm dreaming...

 Struggled awake from one of my "failure dreams" in which I've failed to prepare for something, my injured arm aching dully.

I don't need an analyst for dream interpretation.  I'm terrified and frozen, as Christmas bears down on me like a bright SUV -- or a horde of cyclists.  I'm healing, slowly and steadily, from my fall two and a half weeks ago, but I tire easily, and find myself slow to attempt even the least labour-intensive tasks.

Elder daughter arrives in two days; American Cousin arrives in a week.  I'd so hoped to have everything prepared by then.  I haven't even finished the damn online shopping.

Among the things I have been doing is uploading my favourite Christmas videos on to the Resident Fan Boy's YouTube channel, so we can watch them on the large screen television.  In doing so, we've discovered that the RFB really needs to sign into his YouTube account, rather than just watching without doing so.  Apparently, if you don't, the algorithms decide what might appeal to you, and put them into your "Watch Later" file.  The RFB was horrified.  I had to show him how to delete stuff. I'll spare you.

Most of my favourite Christmas offerings have shown up on my blog at some point, but I don't think this one has, probably because it's usually viral during the holidays, and is customarily shared without giving credit to the animator.  Mind you, it's not that easy to give credit where credit is due, because there is surprisingly little information about Joshua Held online.  I gather that he is an animator, film-maker, and writer.  He was born in 1967 in Tuscany.

I leave you with this, as I've got a lot more procrastinating to do.  (I'm sure you've already seen this anyway.)

Animated dad humour

Tired. I'll leave you with this animated music video from the 1980s, that used to get a lot of play on MuchMusic.

Lost and found

I do this every damn year. 

I start buying Christmas presents and stocking stuffers in September and October -- which is a good idea. 

I hide them promptly -- which isn't such a good idea, although it is a good impetus for cleaning out closets and drawers. 

I spent a chunk of today shifting summer clothes out of the way, and was relieved to find four presents. 

After I re-hid them in a more obvious place, it occurred to me that some stocking stuffers I got months ago are still missing. I guess I'm still not off the hook for the drawers in the highboy. 

Back in the heady days when I wasn't responsible for Christmas -- i.e. being Santa's liasion officer, not the giving birth to a deity -- my mother would take me for pre-Christmas outings: pantomimes, ballets, and one memorable afternoon, a clutch of Christmas cartoons by the National Film Board of Canada. 

 This was one of my favourites.

(The gag about the dancer and the pianist hasn't aged well.)

Animated graveyards -- shudder

I like family history. 

I also rather like Hallowe'en. 

What do the two have in common? 

Graveyards. 

This is a charming animated chronicle of cemeteries, which may be a shade oxymoronic. It even had some things that I didn't know, e.g. that burial wasn't always an honourable treatment of the dead.

There appear to be links to other related features, possibly by the same creators. I'll have to check them out, when I have some copious free time, which may take a while.

Packing tips

One of the few (very few) things I miss about Hades is the opportunity to view the Academy-nominated short films, live or animated. The following is a nominated animated short from 2017 that I missed. It's deceptively simple, and devastating.

Heart-heart-heart, gotcha daddy

Oh my goodness, I've been looking for this for years! This is Lily Tomlin and the All-Nurse Band in the sixth show of the very first season of Saturday Night Live, which aired November 22nd, 1975.

I've never quite heard "St James Infirmary" sung this way anywhere. (That's a ridiculously young Paul Schaffer, born in Thunder Bay, and relatively fresh from Toronto, playing the piano.)

st. james infirmary blues from jednooki jack on Vimeo.

For a more traditional (and infinitely weirder) take on "St James Infirmary", take a look at this clip of a beautifully restored 1933 Betty Boop cartoon by Max Fleischer, featuring the singing of Cab Calloway.

But I can stand a little pain

 CBC Radio "Mornings" has introduced a "Question of the Week".  This week, because everyone is pushing for summer (but how loud will they complain when it gets here?), they're after candidates for the quintessential Canadian summer song.

Their two top contenders are "Summer of '69" and "Call Me Maybe".

Here's my choice:

Well it's hot and it's sticky, 
Think I'll get myself a micky
I'm so parched and dry...

Yep.  I can wait for summer...

Concluding with cartoons

March Break is ending. Younger daughter is unhappy and volatile, yet I know I will only make things worse if I interfere. From the sounds of things, the Resident Fan Boy is handling the situation - he has been younger daughter's favoured parent for some time - but he will drained as he heads to bed.

I stay downstairs and think of today's outing to the Bytowne Cinema to see a collection of the animated shorts nominated for the Oscar this year. The winner, of course, was Feast, a charming if formulaic Disney number, about an adorable dog who lives for delicious people food, yet remains healthy and trim. It was younger daughter's favourite, of course.

I can't say if I had a favourite this year, but I was never bored. I rather like this one, a Danish/Canadian collaboration. I doubt it will be up on YouTube for long.

The last hour of the last day of April

I'm suffering from another bad stretch of deer-in-the-headlights, with a list of things to do which should be, on the whole, quite pleasurable. One of them was writing a post for April. Sigh. This is pretty neat; it's a series of surreal animated clips based on the question: "What if animals were round?" They're the work of animators Kyra Buschor and Constantin Paeplow: who created them at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg in 2012. There are four of them in this clip; be sure to not be put off by the credits at the end of each:

Brought to you by Coca-Cola

Like millions of kids in North America, I grew up with A Charlie Brown Christmas being an indispensable part of December. It became equally integral to the Christmases of both daughters, not only repeated required viewings, but the CD also being the first requested for tree-decoration or present-opening.

When I saw the poster for a concert featuring the music from this ancient television special on a telephone pole in downtown Hades back in October, I knew we had to take younger daughter. Christmas? Jazz? Peanuts? Animation? It's everything she adores rolled into one. I figured it would be relatively painless for me, even after years of exposure, and besides, it was a fundraiser for the Ottawa International Children's Festival. I ordered tickets quite promptly.

Good thing, too. When the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I turned up at the Ottawa Little Theatre shortly after noon today, the sign outside informed us that both performances had sold out. In the Ottawa tradition of festival seating, arriving half an hour ahead of time got us seats more than halfway back in the auditorium. We were surrounded by large family groups of very young children, but we had expected that.

The concert was being put on by the Jerry Granelli Trio, with the support of two local children's choirs, one for each performance. Jerry Granelli was the drummer in the Vince Guaraldi Trio in the mid-1960s, and now he's pretty well the sole surviving member of the entire creative team that put A Charlie Brown Christmas together back in 1965. As is usual in the creation of a classic, the television executives at CBS nearly vetoed the show for several reasons, two of which were: Linus' recital of the passage from St Luke in response to Charlie Brown's anguished "Isn't there anyone who knows what Christmas is all about??"; and the jazz music, which I guess wasn't considered accessible enough. It was the executives at Coca-Cola (of all people)who insisted that the special be broadcast. They had, after all, sponsored the thing and darn it, it was going to go on the air. The response, that evening of December 9th, 1965, was overwhelmingly positive.

After the Goulbourn Junior Jubilee Singers sang the opening "Christmastime is Here", the three jazz musicians (drummer Granelli, bassist Simon Fisk, and pianist Chris Gestrin) launched into the well-worn instrumentals. To my astonishment, I got goose-pimples and a lump in my throat. Part of this was, no doubt, from the emotions attached to these pieces, chunks of my own childhood and that of my children, but the other factor was the sheer musicianship. We weren't getting note-for-note replications of the original recordings; we were getting some proper jazz improvisation.

I think some of the tinier kids were getting a bit restless, but to the rest of the audience, hearing and seeing this music played live was a revelation. I noticed a kind of quiver on the front of Fisk's base with a bow in it and realized as they finally began the classic "Linus and Lucy", that part of the magic comes from the bowed bass during the familiar recurring theme. Listen for it:

(This evening, while looking up the music for this post, I listened to Vince Guaraldi's first big hit from 1963 and realized the bass is also bowed for parts of "Cast Your Fate to the Wind: )

Heck, I even got choked up when a young choir-member named Jacob recited the lines from the King James Bible that almost got A Charlie Brown Christmas yanked in the first place.

Never thought I'd be grateful to Coca-Cola for anything.

Can't resist slipping this interpretation in. It's become somewhat of a classic itself, at least on YouTube.

Yet another blogger nattering on about the Oscars...

This will have to be quick, as elder daughter will soon rouse herself from her Saturday slumber and turf me off the computer, supposedly for scholarly reasons...

I should mention, in case it has passed unnoticed, that I am participating in my third NaBloPoMo. After accepting its challenge to blog every day of the months of February and September 2009, I am tackling my longest month to date. Wish me luck.

We are already plotting the purchase of fatty snack foods to accompany our viewing of the 82nd Academy Awards. Okay, let's face it; the Oscars get less surprising each year -- we don't even get the delicious fashion disasters of old because all the stars consult with experts beforehand.

Yet, each year, I feel somehow compelled to view a least some of the nominees. I think it helps me to judge the appropriate moment to hurl said fatty snacks at the screen when a less worthy candidate gets handed the gold naked guy.

In brief, Sandra Bullock will win for best actress. This is because, for all the hyperbole, these awards are like a high school popularity contest and everybody likes her. For the record, I think Meryl Streep should win, based unscientifically and unfairly on the three Best Actress performances I've actually seen (also saw Carey Milligan in An Education and Helen Mirren in The Last Station). I managed to see Streep in Julie and Julia, and she was bloody amazing. Yes, I know she gets nominated nearly every year, but I think she's only actually won once.

Jeff Bridges will win for best actor. Again, I've managed to see two of the performances in this category, that of Colin Firth in A Single Man, and George Clooney in Up in the Air . Clooney was very good (as basically himself, as far as I can tell) and Firth, damn it, should get it. He won't.

The Academy, in its desire to reel in more television viewers and commercial revenue, has nominated 10 films this year, including some more popular ones. I have seen four of them, and have no desire whatsoever to see the rest: An Education is well-made, but not particularly memorable; A Serious Man is memorable and as weird as all blazes (in a good way); Up is an instant classic and should win the Animated Film category (a category in which, of course, given younger daughter, we have seen four out the five nominations). The film I keep thinking about and which I'd really like to win is Up in the Air: strong performances, strong writing. It won't. It's a head-to-head between The Hurt Locker and (gawd help us) Avatar.

I've managed to see one blessed Foreign Film nomination this year (which is one better than last year). If The White Ribbon wins, however, I'll be mightily pleased. It was remarkable, and another film that haunted me for a long time after viewing.

For me, the most exciting category this year will be Best Animated Short Film. This is because (sound the trumpets) I have actually seen all five nominations! Younger and I saw A Matter of Loaf and Death (the latest Wallace and Gromit outing) last autumn at the Ottawa Animation Festival, and The Flick Filosopher (gawd love 'er) has posted links to the other four nominees at her always controversial and entertaining blog. Hurry on over there and have a look. We adore and worship Wallace and Gromit at this house, but I'm rooting for Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty, a twisted offering from Ireland which combines beautifully detailed computer animation with more traditional animation. The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte) (from Spain) will probably win; it's produced by Antonio Banderas, for gawd's sake, and as I've said, Oscar Night is nothing if not a popularity contest. (Actually, I'm fine with La Dame winning, too; it's very well done.)

Gotta go; our Norton Update is acting up -- it may be time for our weekly computer virus attack...

Tasty, with a chance of social satire

It's raining in New York City. We know this because we have been cyberstalking elder daughter again, looking longingly at the drenched steps leading to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she spent this morning. After lunch and last-minute shopping, she'll be bussed back here by late evening. She's seeing Central Park and Little Italy, Billy Elliot and West Side Story. We saw....Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs....

And you know what? It wasn't so bad. In fact, it was rather good.

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a rarity in that it's one of the few children's picture books that I haven't read. I've shelved it often enough while volunteering in school libraries over the past nine years, but have never actually opened it. The movie takes a germ of an idea for a jumping-off point into a wild and wacky tale about an inventor whose inventions are marvelous, miraculous, but all seem to have a fatal flaw. Or several.

Our hero is a large-eyed, tousled-haired fellow in a long coat who can fix problems through mad improvisations with every-day items and is a wee bit out-of-it in recognizing romantic cues from women. Remind you of anyone? Okay, make the big blue eyes big brown ones and a imagine a slightly dodgy London accent. So that's part of the charm right there, but the film is full of sly blink-and-you'll-miss-it jokes that made the adults in the audience roar. (And quite a few adults showed up at this matinee without kids.)

My favourite bit was when the hero finds the heroine attractive when she puts her glasses on. There's a tiny bit of scatological humour, but younger daughter loved the idea of a town being blanketed with food (particularly ice cream) and the Resident Fan Boy and I enjoyed the digs at American news-reporting.

Younger daughter's verdict after the film? "It was tasty!"

Yeah, it is. Have a light snack before you go see it.

A Clockwork Grapefruit

These are the signs of the approach of spring in Hades:

1. Dust and the taste of salt in your mouth. With neither snow nor glaciers to hold them down, the gravel, sand, and salt rise unimpeded into the air. This heralds...

2. The unbelievably loud roar of street cleaners mowing up and down the streets between midnight and 3 am. Even our double-glazed, airtight casement windows fail to hold out the din.


3. Chunky rivers dotted with motorboats of ice wranglers. We have special machines that roll out on the ice to begin breaking it up, but I missed them this year.

4. Cars, trucks, and buses brushing by pedestrians in frighteningly close proximity. After six months of being shielded from the road by glacial trenches and palisades of snow, one feels positively naked and exposed to traffic. Rear-view mirrors appear to whistle past one's ears.

5. Cardinals.


6. In a related development, a bird feeder that now needs refilling again after hanging unnibbled for more than a month. I don't know if the birds that were here in January found somewhere warm to hang out for February or simply got frozen to the trees. Either they or some new birds are now busily ripping through my seed supply.

7. The schoolyard is a vast expanse of glossy steel-coloured ice. On warmer days, this is very slick, and on even warmer days, it's a hazardous swamp with a lubricious and perilous bottom. Watch the ankle-biters sink shrieking from view.

8. The glaciers and piles of filthy discarded snow, resembling frozen tsunamis and other bad choices for surfing, are retreating centimetre by centimetre revealing perfectly preserved dog droppings and other delights.

9. Native Ottawans are now insisting on wearing open-toed shoes and sandals, despite - 11 Celsius temperatures. Because it's spring, dammit.

10. Blood-curdling screams from the bathroom to summon The Resident Fan Boy who has been doing his morning puttering in the kitchen.
 No, wait. That's not a sign of impending spring; that was me yesterday morning.

 This is because I glanced in the mirror while wrestling with my contact lenses and saw something like this:Since brain injury has been a bit of a theme at this house for the past six months, my immediate thoughts were: Omigod-omigod-omigod, I've having a stroke; there's cranial bleeding; my brain is leaking away; I don't want to spend the whole bloody day in emergency.... However, it seemed too much of a coincidence that I had just been to the ophthalmologist the day before and had those pupil-dilating eye drops. A quick google revealed a host of horrible things that could be happening to me, but also mentioned that anisocoria (a pretty name for the condition that makes you look somewhat like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange) is also a fairly common reaction to eyedrops. Mind you, I've never had this reaction before after many many years of taking my nearsighted eyeballs for a checkup, but I decided to hold off the panicked phone call until I'd taken younger daughter to school. If I'd really had my wits about me, I'd have only made up one eye to creep out the Rockcliffe mums, but my sense of humour was somewhat diminished that morning. When I got home, my pupils were nearly the same size and after an hour they were back to normal and I decided not to bother the doctor.

So the evening found me relatively panic-free, surveying a television schedule with little to offer. Thank God for the Turner Classic Movie channel. In between movies, they showed a delightful documentary of Chuck Jones remembering his childhood, illustrated with animated version of his rough drawings.

This got me to thinking of some of my favourite animated shorts. In my pre-mum days, I used to attend animation festivals regularly. I only had a faint recollection of one of my very favourites, in which two married animators took a soundtrack of their daughters talking and playing and transformed it into a luminous cartoon. And I found it! Here's "Windy Day" by John and Faith Hubley:
Another one I loved is one that seems to have vanished, a cartoon fantasy set to a 1930's recording of Fred Astaire singing "Puttin' on the Ritz" which is turned into a flight of fantasy with quite a bit of eroticism. I think it's from the early '80s. Let me know if you recognize it.

Finally, a delightful cartoon from then largely unknown Tim Burton:And yes, that is the glorious and classy Vincent Price himself narrating.

Now that my pupils are the same size, I don't feel quite like I would fit in perfectly with that last item. Now, if you'll excuse me, it's time to go out and get grazed by passing cars again...

Hello my baby frog

Yesterday's thaw melted layers of snow away and like an archeological dig took our front yard back in five weeks back in time. The needles left from the Christmas tree that waited forlornly for the chipper after Epiphany are now resting on top of the snow as if the beaten balsam was hauled away only yesterday, and a paper coffee cup that someone apparently tossed by our porch sometime before Christmas slowly emerged from the snow bank throughout the day. Today, the temperatures have plummeted back to -12 Celsius, and the streams of water leaking from underneath the drifts have frozen into hazardous C-shaped patches of ice across the sidewalks.

I've been traveling back in time too. Despite the pain of reliving past Februarys, (that's why they call it "nostalgia" - νόστος nostos "returning home", and άλγος algos "pain" ), I have been unable to resist following February from about 1989 to now. Some events I remember, some I have forgotten but the entries bring them back, and there are things I don't remember even though I made a note of them at the time, a shame because they are happy memories that I wrote down to preserve. One was of watching the Resident Fan Boy standing in a beam of afternoon sun streaming into our bedroom. I was sick, and he had taken elder daughter to the park and was enthusiastically regaling me with their adventures. Another was of returning home down the boulevard from a Shrove Tuesday dinner at Christchurch Cathedral in Victoria on a clear night under a sky brimming with stars. Elder daughter, about three or four at the time, was balancing along the walls and singing "Twinkle, twinkle, little star". Little gems of life that have been pushed completely from my mind, but they must have happened; I wrote them down. I watch myself moving sightlessly through the past towards my present. I can't help but feel compassion for her, my hopeful, clueless past self. She won't know what hit her.

Here's a memory I hadn't lost. To understand it, you may need to see this classic Warner Brothers cartoon from the 1950s:

It's a cold February afternoon without the slightest hint of melting, our first winter in Ottawa (I don't recall a Winterlude thaw that year). Younger daughter is four, and I'm still raw and wounded from the result of a team assessment by the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario the previous month. February means phone calls, forms, slipping into the basement to cover my weeping under the hum of the washing machine. And consultations. On this particular afternoon, the consultant is a Speech Language Pathologist, making a home visit to observe younger daughter. She turns up during lunch, and younger daughter is doing what she does best --- under-performing. One of the aches of having a special needs child is being forced to see the little person under your care through others' eyes, particularly professional, assessing eyes. Every beloved quirk becomes a symptom, every endearing idiosyncrasy becomes a note on a pad and later, a line in a report. My heart sinks as I hear younger daughter murmuring to herself in unintelligible syllables. At one point during lunch, the SLP remarks brightly, "That sounded like noodles!"

"She can say 'chicken noodle soup', I say as lightly as I can manage. But I know I'm Just-a-Mother-in-Denial. After lunch, the consultant pulls out her bag of tricks, and tries to guide younger daughter through some matching games involving animals and numbers. She also attempts to get younger daughter to join in the various verses of "Old McDonald's Farm". Finally, she packs up, smiles encouragingly at me and leaves with a few supportive comments and suggestions.

"May I have some chicken noodle soup?" asks younger daughter. That evening, she will inform her father that she "played wit' an'mals an' money", and, sitting on the stairs after an outing, launches into several verses of "Old McDonald's Farm" with all the animal noises. I shovel the walkway, singing under my breath: "Send me a kiss by wi-yah; Babee my heart's on fi-yaaaah..."

("Ribbet," says younger daughter. Everywhere a-ribbet, ribbet?)