~openculture | Bookmarks (9)

Japanese animation, AKA anime, might be filled with large-eyed maidens, way cool robots, and large-eyed, way cool maiden/robot hybrids, but it often shows a level of daring, complexity and creativity not typically found in American mainstream animation. And the form has spawned some clear masterpieces from Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira to Mamoru Oishii’s Ghost in the […]

Studio Ghibli fans are still pondering the meaning of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, which came out last year. Though by some measure the studio’s most lavish feature yet — not least by the measure of it being the most expensive film yet produced in Japan — it’s also the one least amenable […]

This year has given us occasion to revisit the 1928 Disney cartoon Steamboat Willie, what with its entry — and thus, that of an early version of a certain Mickey Mouse — into the public domain. Though it may look comparatively primitive today, that eight-minute black-and-white film actually represents a great many advancements in the […]

Sergei Bondarchuk directed an 8‑hour film adaptation of War and Peace (1966–67), which ended up winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Picture. When he was in Los Angeles as a guest of honor at a party, Hollywood royalty like John Wayne, John Ford, and Billy Wilder lined up to meet the Russian filmmaker. But the […]

Of the three collaborations jazz singer Cab Calloway made with cute cartoon legend Betty Boop, this 1933 Dave Fleischer-directed “Snow White” is probably the most successful. It certainly is the most strange—more hallucinatory than the first in the series “Minnie the Moocher”, and less slapstick-driven than “The Old Man of the Mountain.” It is a […]

Stephen Malinowski is a self-described “Music Animation Machine,” with a penchant for creating animated graphical scores. Above, he does his thing with the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony 5. How does he make this magic? Malinowski writes: “There were a lot of steps; here’s a short summary. I found a recording I could license and […]

Dziga Vertov is best known for his dazzling city symphony A Man with a Movie Camera, which was ranked by Sight and Sound magazine as the 8th best movie ever made. Yet what you might not know is that Vertov also made the Soviet Union’s first ever animated movie, Soviet Toys. Consisting largely of simple […]

“Steady Pushkin, matter-of-fact Tolstoy, restrained Chekhov have all had their moments of irrational insight which simultaneously blurred the sentence and disclosed a secret meaning worth the sudden focal shift,” writes Vladimir Nabokov in his Lectures on Russian Literature. “But with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art.” When, “as in the immortal […]

We suppose it’s conceivable that a gift of a wooden Totoro figurine, hand-carved from a single block using 50 different kinds of chisels, might spark a reverence for traditional Japanese craft and nature in the next generation… Or, they may be left wishing you’d given them a vastly more huggable machine-made plushie version, especially if […]