Hybrid Worlds - Where Animation and Live Action Meet

The employment of animation in live action film introduces a rupture of evident artifice to the screen. Film typically relies on a disseminated form of presentation, divulging the viewer as voyeur into an apparent reality through the perspectival boundaries of the camera lens and hidden editing of scenes. What is left for the viewer is an experience that makes invisible the creative process and crafted architecture of the work. By contrast, animation produces the opposite effect, displaying in its very appearance the constructed and imaginative character of the visual art.

The Surrealist Belgian painter, Rene Magritte, is perhaps the most famous for taking up the aesthetic thematic of the deceptive character of visual representations with his treachery of images (La trahison des images 1928-29)series. The paradigm example is the landmark painting, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (This Is Not a Pipe), which makes manifest the contradictory elements inherent in representative, visual art.



The tension engendered by juxtaposing elements of live action with animation parallels the antagonistic characteristics intrinsic to the creative capacities of the human spirit. Is there a more effective way to express the surrealism of dreams and hallucinations or the exaggerated qualities of cartoonish characters and cliched themes? How else might one exhibit a human being's ordain ability to inflict the world around us with fantastical myth or even sensible meaning? The hybrid world affirms without hesitation the artifice of art, the inherently deceptive character of visual representation that tend towards making invisible its own productive process. And the more adventurous among us might even generalize such an argument over to perception as a whole.

In the newly released music video for Kid Cudi's lonely stoner single "Day N' Nite", the director (who is it?) uses rotoscope to drape live footage over with costume-like illustration. The effect is one of herb induced hallucination partly forged by a healthy dose of city life paranoia. Broad plains of color divided into boldly outlined geometrical shapes act as transitions between each individual scene of illusion.



In another light example of this strategy, director Eric Wareheim produces a frenzied dance number for Flying Lotus' "Parisian Goldfish" off his acclaimed 2008 Los Angeles album on Warp Records. Innocent gyrating figures transform into over-sexualized cartoon porn stars on the backdrop of flashing disco lights tending towards vertigo spasms of love. Beware.




Perhaps one of the most famous instances of the hybrid world is Robert Zemeckis' direction of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1988. A fantastic dual world populates the film. Illustrated personages called "Toons" and their related ontological dimension coexist alongside the human world. The interplay of live action and animation displays the power dynamic between two conflicting ways of being (toon and human). And the phenomenal movement infused in tension, release, and synthesis of the toon / human dimension might encourage one to reflect on the capacity for the imagination, more specifically artistic creation, to take on its own life.



A year later in 1989, French auteur Alain Resnais critiqued the conventional distinction between low and high art in his controversial film, Je Veux Rentrer a la Maison (I Want to Go Home). Resnais exemplifies the beauty inherent in cartoon characters possessing a sublime quality equal to that found in great works of literature like Flaubert and Balzac. Cartoons are breathed into existence by the swiveling of simple lines, two-dimensional coloring, and geometry, gracing the silver screen with strangely agile figures that belie the laws of physics.

Ari Folman's critically acclaimed "Waltz with Bashir" exhibits the most radical use of animation informed by live footage. The imaginary war-torn hallucination of a soldier's search for his lost memory is abruptly made manifest in its ultra-sensitivity by a climactic clipping of live footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacre in Lebanon.

Hybrid worlds permit an unparalleled aesthetic strategy for drawing out antagonisms, conflicts, and imaginative artifice, guiding the viewer in a sensual experience without delusion of its means. Any other notable examples?

A Waltz into Trauma

By mistake I saw Ari Folman's animated documentary about the 1982 Lebanon War, Waltz with Bashir, back in October. Let me clarify, I was in the dreadful city of Brussels, completely exhausted from three days of sleepless travels, and had just escaped along with my companion a meddlesome Belgian--which was not too difficult considering his morning drunkenness, broken leg, and freshly slashed face--who insisted on showing me the main shopping district.


We surreptitiously ducked into a local movie theater, choosing to watch the next available screening, Waltz with Bashir. After the fat Belgian lady working at the counter finally agreed to sell us tickets (she did not think we should see an Israeli film with French and Flemish subtitles while she stupidly identified the Hebrew language film as in Arabic), we settled into our seats and enjoyed a moment's of rest before the start.

I never fell asleep. Waltz with Bashir opens suddenly with frothing yellow-eyed hounds running through nondescript Israeli streets, knocking down everything in their path, coming to a stopping point outside a lone square window where an unshaven man blankly stares into the monsters that haunt him. The nightmare begins.

Director Ari Folman tells the story of himself, a middle-aged Israeli filmmaker who lost his memory of fighting in the 1982 Lebanon war at the age of 19. The scene of the hounds, a recurring nightmare told to the aged Folman by a fellow soldier, jump starts his psychological journey to recapture his own memory of the war. The result of this journey is the creation of Waltz itself, an imaginatively construed world outside of our earthly dimension. Art director and illustrator, David Polonsky, and director of animation, Yoni Goodman, execute richly colored, chiaroscuro illustration that recalls the aesthetic quality of graphic novels.


Folman's film becomes a reflection on the dynamic nature of his fractured memory, as he investigates the reality of the blocked experiences by seeking out, and conducting interviews, with others present alongside him during the war. We witness Folman's live interviews (two dubbed over for the sake of anonymity) that take place in illustrated bars, rural homes, or a car, splicing immediately over to the recalling of dreamy sequences of escape and hipnotic meditations on horrific war scenes. The soundtrack propels this pschyedelic discplacement of experience, ranging from rhythmic drum claps mirroring the movements of a racing heart during night terrors, ironic pop music chanting about the thrills of bombing Lebanon reflecting the soldier's experience of returning from war to a land of general normalcy, and the incessant machine gun fire--chilled by the silence of death.

How does one recount the atrocities of war? What creative form might inch towards capturing the its reality, a reality that by its very natue eludes our grasp? A reality that human nature resists, repressed into the realm of myths, denied and blocked up in the subconscious. How might one detail the journey of recollecting this lost memory, divided and traumatized by its origin? Waltz thrusts the the unreal into the real, seamlessly layering hallucination with brutal fact, the construction of memory with some truth to be remembered. There might be no more exacting medium than animation to disclose such interplay between the imaginary and the real, and the complete breakdown of these categories when taking up the horrors of war.

Throughout the narrative we see repetitive sequences of the younger Folman wading in the sea outside of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps where Lebanese Phalangists massacred thousands of Palestinians in vengeance of the assassinated president-elect of Lebanon Bashir Gemayel. Folman struggles with his guilt, coming to acknowledge the fact that he, and otherIsraeli soldiers, permitted the Phalange militia men to enter the camps. They stood by a few hundred yards away, perhaps unable to believe the sure signs of the massacre right before them.

In the dreamy state Folman rises to the shores with his troupe. They dress in fatigues under dreary, yellowed sky lit by flares and walk sullenly into the dilapidated, blown out buildings of West Beirut. The sequence repeats on end throughout the narrative, reaching a corner turned where hijab adorned women scream in terror, yell, and then the whirling sound of silence. Again and again the audience witnesses this scene, anticipating the view of atrocity, dreading the moment, and again and again, the impending fact is cut off from us.


Folman faces the problem intrinsic to any documentary of atrocity; how does a director disclose such brutality without turning it into a spectacle? How might a filmmikar avoid transforming such horrors into phantasmagoria for our own entertainment, seated in cushioned theater chairs, our bodies circuited into a lit up screen that affords a vicious movement of suspense and drama.

In the final scenes of Waltz Folman transitions abruptly from the magestically powerful animated world into gritty, documented footage of the massacre. We see bodies stacked and beginning to rot, rubble and human parts indistinguishable, the spilled entrails of a ferocious massacre. And just for a moment we are taken to this time and place, thrown violently outside the bounds of the protected camera lens, enveloped within the horror.

Somehow Folman's animated, hipnotic dimension prepares us for this task, doing consistent labor on our sentiments, shaping our abilities to imagine the impossible, and fooling the body's defense mechanisms into accepting the most unreal of all realities. For a moment, the veils of the spectacle fall back, the protective cognitive system breaks down, just a moment enough to grasp the absolute terror.

Folman's final work is nothing short of a masterpiece, a compelling anti-war documentary that achieves the most exemplary of moral efforts: to disclose the genuine reality of horror and trauma, hoping to guide us to feel the obligation of working towards its demise.

The Sound Image: Quasimoto's "Come on Feet"

Despite my pathologic habit of initiating a concept series and then never following up with a single successive post, the idea of the sound-image is too irresistible. So, a second post is in order, and what better candidate than Madlib's helium voiced alter-ego, Quasimoto, represented cordially by a florescent green puppet animal--slightly resembling a hideous faced possum--in the seminal underground release "Come on Feet". Madlib, born Otis Jackson Jr., dropped the single in 2000 on the original Quas album, "The Unseen", simultaneously rejuvenating and making a cemented name for Stonesthrow Records.

Saturated thoroughly with weed smoke and toad slimed mushrooms, Los Angeles' beat konducta par excellence Madlib ventures into the astrolands of the Hiphoposphere in his psychedelic exploration of the basic anatomical apparatus that keeps us moving around; our two feet.

Before we get to the acid trip puppet show video, let's break down some of the historical elements shaping the track's spacey quality. Giving "Come On Feet" a clamoring, other worldly feel, the running hypnotic melody cut from Alain Goraguer's psych-jazz soundtrack of Laloux's La Planete Sauvage shapes a dissonant, multi-textured soundscape. That's fitting considering Fantastic Planet is an animated epic story of a revolutionary battle between sensitive human and rational alien produced in 1973 but taking place in a temporal dimension far outside of our own. Madlib reaps crackling effects of stumbling footsteps and shadowy figures to construct a nocuous sound array that threatens to stir the most guarded corners of the listener's paranoia.

The vocal edits and samplings take their influence from another film of a more local, but equally mind bending, variety. Distorted clips chopped from Melvin Van Peeble's original 1971 blaxploitation film, Sweetback's Badasssss Song, surround Quas' raps dedicated to the prowess of his running legs. "Come on feet / cruise for me / ... Come on feet / Come on run." The listener is quickly gripped by the wrenching terror that overwhelms a fugitive escaping the authorities.

Surely inspired by the cinematic coherence between La Planete Sauvage's sound and image as well as Sweetback's song and visual landscape, Madlib pieces together the spacey liftedness with the terrestrial density of the urban jungle.

The unusual puppet animation employed (by some unknown art director) for the video of "Come on Feet" synthesizes the brooding sense of unfamiliarity and estrangement--consisting in both its airy and earthy forms--that permeates the sampled films. Sound and image lock together to produce deranged effects in the audience, most likely seated or standing still, interpolating monstrous feet as they loiter.



Just entertain your feet for a couple moments. Wiggle the toes. Slip your consciousness into the outer appendages. Imagine the inner motors of your mind beamed outwards from each protruding appendage. How monstrous and unsettling are they?


Question: Does anyone know the art director for the "Come on Feet" video?

Side note: "Feet" is a standard biblical euphemism for genitalia. Take, for example, Saint Jerome's description of a prostitute as "the harlot who opens her feet to everyone who passes by".

The Defenestration Building: Part 3

Sometimes while cruising through the streets of San Francisco I stumble upon some glistening, confusing gem that calls me in. And then, I research the hell out of it.

I was lucky enough to have this experience on the north side of the old Hugo Hotel, which now boasts an RIP mural dedicated to the late Barbara Bode Falcon.



I'd say the iconic images of voluptuous women with Venus of Willendorf exaggerated femininity beckoned me in like a prostitute's protective solicitation, but then again, that probably wasn't it, since I never make it into any of the sex shops on Sixth St. So, I decided to dig a little deeper than the clothing on the skin and the paint on the walls and figure out the back story behind these notorious characters.



Barbara has been immortalized in graffiti and tattoo culture through her childhood relationship and later marriage in 1961 with the underground cartoonist Vaughn Bode. They bore a child together two years after, Mark Bode, and remained together for a roller coaster ride of ten years before their divorce in '71.

In his comic strips, Vaughn Bode constructed a fantasy world where jive talkin' lizards and a drunken wizard stroll through enchanted forests dotted with prancing, well-endowed women. The curvaceous figure and resilient spirit of Barbara Bode Falcon inspired the form of these women dressed in myriad revealing costumes. The icons were soon stamped into history with the publication of Vaughn's work, "Bode Broads."

I realize that this depiction of Barbara Bode does not have much to do with her real life. In fact, it only describes the life that Barbara took on in the setting of Vaughn's imaginary world, a world hugely obsessed with hyperbolic femininity. Such is the fate of art. Let's take a look at this world.

Vaughn Bode spent his formative years contributing to the underground Manhattan comic scene with the likes of Robert Crumb and Spain Rodriguez in the 60's. After joining the staff of the independent publication, the East Village Other, he spearheaded his own all-comics supplement to the newspaper, the Gothic Blimp Works. During this period Bode released his most famous character, Cheech Wizard, which he claimed to have concocted at age 15, 2:30 in the afternoon, many years prior. Bode published Cheech in the National Lampoon for a number of years.

Depicted as a star spangled yellow hat packed tightly over a red leotard, Cheech Wizard never reveals his face to the reader, and when he shows it to a fellow cartoon, his lovers and interpolators go blind or fall into paraplegic spasms. It remains a mystery why Cheech's identity produces such psychic deconstruction in his viewers. But we must expect an intelligible reason, since Cheech does not conjure magic but rather methodically causes it through his effortless antics.

Self-proclaimed as the cartoon messiah, Cheech often discusses metaphysical questions with his disciple, a slower minded yet insightful lizard. However, Cheech spends most of his time in more down to earth affairs. He searches out parties where he can find cold beer, potent weed, and seductively loving women. The characters speak in an urban slang that borders on the incomprehensible to the poetic. The stories often end with Cheech furiously kicking someone of the male species in the testicles.

Bode aimed to breathe a life into his characters in radical ways that extended far beyond the traditional medium of ink splotched paper. He toured a popular show featuring animated impersonations of his characters while their images were projected on a screen behind him.

Late in his career, Vaughn Bode considered his own life just as much as a piece of artwork as the fantastical world he constructed. After moving to San Francisco with Barbara and Mark, Vaughn started to publicly question his sexual identity.

No doubt influenced by the burgeoning transvestite subculture in the City as well as his ongoing exposure to a more experimental youth culture, Bode soon self defined his own gender identity as somewhere between "auto-sexual, heterosexual, omnisexual, masso-sexual, sado-sexual, trans-sexual, uni-sexual, omni-sexual."

He transformed his appearance from a self-described straightedge "Kennedy" into an androgynous glamor queen with billowing curly hair, long manicured nails, and dark eyeliner. Taking his obsession with the feminine form to the next level, Bode looked into surgical reconstruction of his body, but gave up on the idea when hormones killed his libido.

Bode presents his sexual exploration in two autobiographical works, Confessions of a Cartoon Gooroo, written in a formal essay style and Schizophrenia, published as a thoroughly animated comic strip.

On July 18, 1975 Vaughn Bode died in a tragic accident while experimenting with autoerotic asphyxian, the practice of heightening masturbatory pleasure while strangling oneself with the noose. Although he had succeeded in the practice beforehand, this time a necklace got caught in the noose, constraining it from giving out.

Despite Vaughn's unfortunate fate at the young age of 33, his work lives on. Mark Bode dedicates his life to sustaining the precious worlds that his father constructed. He recounts that Vaughn made him believe at a young age that Cheech was a real wizard, living in the urban jungle wilderness.

They would journey to visit the foul mouthed Cheech but alas, he was always fast asleep and unresponsive in some distant crevice or sewer. These experiences forever inculcated Vaughn's fantastical worlds into Mark's own imagination. Now an artist in his own right, Mark tends to channel the energy of his father's work.

The work of Vaughn Bode also touched many early graffiti writers, notably the works of Dondi and Seen who were attracted technically to the bold lines and vibrant colors.

They drew most inspiration, however, from Bode's ambitious artistic project in crafting intricately connected, self-sustaining worlds, an objective that graffiti artists themselves hoped to achieve on New York City's subway cars. Painting a Bode character now takes on the ceremonial weight of a right of passage in much of the graffiti world.



Let the characters of Bode live on!

Peep some of the comics here.

In these videos of the 1974 Comic Con in Toronto, Bode talks about his life as an artist, the comic publication industry, and the development of his character. Bode reminds us artists to stay true to themselves and always try to come up with their own style, their own worlds.