Art and screen captures – Page 2

Monet meets Roger Dean

Here’s a curiosity: Iblard Jikan. It’s a Studio Ghibli project based on the paintings of Naohisa Inoue of the imaginary world Iblard. There’s no story; instead, it’s thirty minutes of looking at surrealistic paintings. It’s not as dull as it sounds. The paintings are enhanced with discreet animation: rivers sparkle, waves roll up beaches, trams glide on tracks, girls fly. There’s no dialogue, just instrumental music (mostly bland, but a few of the pieces are listenable). If you pay attention to the backgrounds when you watch animated features, you might find Iblard Jikan worthwhile. There are more screen captures below the fold.

Those who enjoy jigsaw puzzles will want to visit this page.

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Princesses and knights

I’ve been studying yet another treatise on father-daughter dynamics, Petite Princess Yucie. Steven liked it and it sounded promising, so I ordered it last week, along with Magic Knight Rayearth TV (which Jonathan Tappan reviewed positively). I’ve watched four of the five discs in the thinpak and will probably finish tonight or tomorrow evening. It is pretty good — it already has the distinction of being the first Gainax series that I watched more than the first disc of — and if it ends well, it will be a show I can recommend to almost everyone.

The primary pleasure is in the characters and their interactions, but there is much else to enjoy, such as the utterly terrifying Demon world.

Update: Finished it: thumbs up. I may write more later, but I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days.

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Traveler from Tortalia

Some time back Wabi Sabi mentioned The Diary of Tortov Roddle. I recently came across a torrent. It’s an odd little series, consisting of nine short episodes. Seven concern Tortov Roddle, an etiolated traveler with a stovepipe hat exploring the northern plains. These are brief, surrealistic stores told without dialogue. In the first episode, for instance, Roddle sees a town on a hill and hopes to find an inn there. However, it turns out that the town is on the back of a gigantic frog, which leaves the hill for a lake populated by other frogs with towns on their backs. The penultimate episode, “Fantasy,” is a collection of brief vignettes too slight to summarize. The last is “The Apple Incident,” in which giant apples fall from the sky.

Rather than try to explicate the imagery, I’ll just post some screen captures below the fold.

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Mononoke 4

Nobody’s favorite guitarist.

Mononoke 3

The passengers.

Mononoke 2

On the deck of the boat in the Dragon’s Triangle (like the Bermuda Triangle, but more garish).

Mononoke 1

I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days. While I’m gone, I’ll post a few screen captures from Mononoke, a series perhaps of more visual than narrative interest. This is the medicine seller, the central character of the stories, who functions somewhat like a free-lance exorcist. Usually his fingers aren’t dissolving away.

Karakuri plus

We’ve had pocket calculators, televisions, helicopters and worse so far in the 1840’s Japan of Oh! Edo Rocket, so why not a giant wooden mecha?

Ducks in anime, part XVII

Oh! Edo Rocket #5

Bears, too.

La Theatricule Stoique

Yep.

Haibane Coil …

… or Denno Renmei?

(It occurs to me that there are significant parallels between the two Yukos, and Rakka and Reki.)

Form, truth and regret

I will withhold comments on the merits of Mononoke until I’ve watched a few more episodes and have seen whether the payoff of the horror story is worth the buildup. Instead, here are some screen captures illustrating the novelties of this moving wood-block print. Note the off-center and unbalanced compositions, eccentric angles and busy detail contrasting with empty space.

Update: Wabi Sabi has a weblog devoted to Mononoke. (Beware of spoilers.)

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Neko musume

A different kind of cat girl, from Ge Ge Ge no Kitaro 2007. (None of the many versions of Kitaro has ever made it across the Pacific. If what I’ve seen is representative, it’s no great loss.)

Fireworks for the Fourth

From Oh! Edo Rocket #2.

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Really?

From episode one of Sola.

Here’s the view from my front porch this week:

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

(If the rain doesn’t stop soon, my hair is going to be green with moss and algae. This is supposed to be Kansas.)

Show time

As I expected, the story has gotten darker as it nears the climax, but Shingu is still a great deal of fun.

German cameras. ((There are two different brands alluded to here, Contax, obviously, but also the M-series Leica (though the latter were rangefinder cameras, not SLRs like Futaba’s camera).)) So they still shoot film in 2070?

Embarrassing music

Boy or girl?

Bonus link: Ubu on what didn’t happen.