originally posted at https://canmom.tumblr.com/post/694231...
Hi everyone! Happy square-numbered Animation Night! We won’t see another of these til Animation Night 144!
First of all, I wanna say: I watched Inu-Oh last night in the Alamo Drafthouse in LA. If you haven’t seen this movie yet, seriously you gotta - Masaaki Yuasa totally outdid himself, the choreography and flow if it is just incredible and the whole concept (a biwa hōshi and the cursed mutant son of a noh performer invent glam rock to tell the story of fallen Heike soldiers) is both so out there I struggle to imagine how they came up with it, and yet a perfect evolution of the themes Yuasa explored in his films so far.
So… I was completely spellbound the whole time, it’s one of those films that really rekindles the firey love for animation after days of drawing tiedowns lol. The ideas for movement, the creative shot choices, the solidity and weight of the animation, the visual motifs, the music behind the animation… gaahh you guys it’s such a good movie that ties together so well. So glad to finally get the chance to see it. And you can trust that the very minute it becomes available on blu-ray, or at least the very week, I’ll be screening it on Animation Night.
I also highly recommend watching Naoko Yamada’s Heike Monogatari first, a series created as a complement to the film that tells the story of the Heike incredibly beautifully. See Animation Night 91 for more on that subject!
I’ve been working stupidly hard on the final marathon project of Vann Oba’s month-long daily animation challenge, and as such I haven’t had the chance to do a lot of research tonight. Luckily I am in the house of my brilliant girlfriend @mogsk, who has had something prepared for just such an occasion~
In many ways Animation Night owes its entire existence to Liquid Television, the weekly experimental animation programming block that ran on MTV from 1991-1995, making it about as old as I am. Liquid Television gave rise to Aeon Flux, and Aeon Flux was the seed of Animation Night. But let’s expand…
MTV is an American cable channel, which was fighting for a relatively limited audience of subscribers; it began with the simple premise of screening music videos, but gradually evolved to be dominated by reality TV shows. However! There was a brief window in the early 90s where they decided it would be a good bet to to throw their money at experimental, counterculture animation. Some of this was in a music video format, such as the ‘Amp’ electronica block which, but there was also narrative animation produced for the channel such as The Maxx and Daria. We’ll dig into those another day…
Liquid Television was something different: a weekly block of experimental short films from all sorts of creators, many of them influenced by Art Spiegelman’s underground comic compilation series RAW (1980-1991). The style varied wildly, from stop motion and early CG to traditional animation like Aeon Flux. Some of the works that debuted on Liquid Television would go on to achieve wider success, like Mike Judge’s series Beavis and Butthead.
Beyond Aeon Flux, we’ve encountered a few Liquid Television staples on Animation Night! For example, Bill Plympton (Animation Night 112), or Bob Sabiston who we saw last week on Animation Night 120. But there are many others we have not yet encountered!
The problem is, due to its heavy use of licensed music, Liquid Television has almost never aired since its original run. So, while recordings are available, they’re usually in very low quality VHSrips recorded directly off the TV. This is where @mogsk heroically comes in: she created a compilation of the major recurring series on Liquid Television, searched her many resources for better quality versions of the relevant segments, and edited it all together into one video. She’s amazing, seriously.
So the plan is tonight, we’re gonna watch Mogs’s ‘Best of Liquid Television’! Followed by the brief 2014 web revival which is available on Youtube.
Sound fun? I’ll be going live in just a minute since it’s pretty damn late over in the UK, and we’ll begin the program in 20-30 minutes once people arrive, all at https://twitch.tv/canmom ! See you there~
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