Cat and Fiddle

Well, keeping going with the theme for now. I may diverge into Japanese Shakespeare shortly, given the strange stuff I’ve been finding, though.

This next song, Cat and the Fiddle, I first heard on one of Heather Alexanders albums called Life’s Flame. I’m assuming it’s on the album Cat and the Fiddle, too, but I could be wrong.

It’s just a nice, light-hearted, fun song.

Dance all day with the cat and the fiddle; come and lay with the heather on the hill…

7-30-09 Cutethulhu

Damn, we’ve gone from kawaii to cosmic horror in just a day. It’s not such a stretch, though. I mean, both induce mind-numbing, soul-shattering horror in me, so why not?

The question, though, is who would win if those two went head to head. I hate to say it, but…

more about “Cutethulhu“, posted with vodpod

 

 

I mainly posted this for the quality of the animation. There’s a lot of spliced-together AMVs out there, but few are the anime fans who go crazy and make original anime… especially of this length and quality.

Or maybe they all do, and I’m blowing it out my ass. Either way, I like this.

This film was made by Shawn the Touched, with voices by Kate Peterson as Sarah and Kara Dennison as Jeanette and music by Louie Ambriz and Brendan Becker. Shawn the Touched sez:

This is my first all-Flash anime short, and first submission to Newgrounds. This short assumes familiarity with H.P. Lovecraft and his works referenced within. Most of his works are public domain and available for download.

Us? Familiar with Lovecraft? Nah. But to continue…

I don’t intend to make a series involving the same characters or situation…this was just a one-shot. You may see the character designs resurface in later works, though not as the same characters. Sarah’s design, for instance, is very similar to one of the girls in The Evil at Tentacle High, although of course in Cutethulhu she’s much younger. Think of it as the same actor, playing a different role. ^_^

7-28-09 Happy Tree Friends – Flippin’ Burgers

Well, I know what  I do when the kawaii gets too thick and the cuteness so toxic it can eat through an I-beam in 15 seconds.

That’s right! I send in Flippy, my favorite Happy Tree Friend with deep-seated emotional problems!

This is MondoMedia’s Flippin’ Burgers.

7-27-09 Hot Crossed Bunnies

Well, if we’re going to have animated bunnies, then we ought to add this little confection from Elizabeth Ito, who made it as her sophomore film at CalArts. It’s Hot Crossed Bunnies, and it tears away the so-called “civilized facade” with which we fool ourselves to reveal the cutthroat, murderous of stuffed bunny dolls.

Courtesy of cartooncatbus.

7-19-09 Kolobok

Shanoah’s still out in California, hunting down the wily snipe (and if I know him, he’ll manage to bag one).

Anyway, continuting the Russian animation train, here’s another one translated by Niffiwan. It’s Kolobok (credits here), based on an Eastern European fairy tale similar to the Gingerbread Man. I recommend reading this English translation the original fairy tale, with some nifty illustrations, here, before you see what the animators did with the story.

By the way, if you can’t see the closed captions (especially Part 2), click on that little triangle in the lower right corner of the viewer and turn them on.

Part 1

Part 2

7-18-09 Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson

Well, Shanoah, I don’t feel like doing synth-pop anymore, but I also don’t feel like posting hemophiliac Finns again, either.

So I’m going combine two of my passions – Sherlock Holmes and freaky East European animation – in one post, with this Russian retelling of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It won Best Writing honors and came in third at the 2006 Open Russian Festival of Animated Film, if that means anything.

Posted and subtitled by Niffiwan, who’s also done The Cat Who Walked By Herself and The Golem.

Part 1

Part 2

Heres Johnnnny!

Nope, no Barry Manilow-induced themes here today.

Don’t know if you heard, but Ed McMahan died yesterday. Cause of death hasn’t been specified, but he’s known to have, as I recall, a broken neck, cancer, and pneumonia. So it was probably one of those.

And the moment I heard that news, I knew exactly what song I was playing today. This song is from Weird Al’s Polka Party cd, and is entitled Here’s Johnny!. Catchy song, actually, from one of these Weird Al cds you rarely here about (though I own it, of course).

6-17-09 Zombie Jesus!

I didn’t say we were Christians, Shanoah. I didn’t even say we were Christian Scientists. I said we were Christian Mad Scientists.

“Lessee here, take some of the less odious parts of the Bible, add a little apocrypha, a little Buddhism, a little gnosticism, a little discordianism, some fertility rites, some of the hotter goddesses, the Osiris-Horus myth without the creepy incest and necrophilia and stone phalluses, a piece of Lovecraft, a smidge of Douglas Adams and a couple nine-volt batteries… Voila! JESUS-STEIN! It’s alive! ALIVE! But only after three days!”

Or, if you prefer, Zombie Jesus.

Courtesy of pigeonfilm. Movie site here.

In other words, we’re pagan heathens who are going to burn burn burn.

5-26-09 My Favorite Movie: Star Trek/Wars

We interrupt this John Lennon train (yet again) for this brief semi-coherent message.

Okay, I just saw Star Trek (you know, the one that, according to the Onion, Trekkies hate because it’s fun and watchable?). So what does this particular Trekkie think of it? Let me put it this way:

The Enterprise has transporters. Said transporters can apparently pluck two people falling at terminal velocity out of the air. I saw them pull off this handy little trick myself.

But ask them, just five minutes later, to beam up five people standing stock still on solid rock, and suddenly they’re not up to the task. Suddenly beaming up with said transporters is slower than molasses in Reykjavik… slow enough, in fact, to kill off the mother of one of the main characters.

This is not Trekkie tech nitpicking. This is a big fucking plot hole. It’s also manipulative and, if you catch it, pisses you the hell off, like it did me.

Need I add that the whole movie is full of shit like this?

Star Trek, it turns out, is just like a rollercoaster – fun while you’re on it, kind of dumb on reflection. And that’s what this latest incarnation of Star Trek is: just another dumb summer movie. It’s got big special effects that you’ve probably seen before, loud music and characters and plot that, really, could have been lifted from a hundred other Hollywood movies. Even the Enterprise is characterless: the bridge looks like one of Bill Gates’ wet dreams, and the rest of the ship looks like a municipal water treatment plant.

But, really, this YouTube movie, courtesy of FernandaGollo, says it so much better than I could. So, aside from asking Hollywood to please please please put down and step away from their copies of The Hero With a Thousand Faces, I give the floor to My Favorite Movie.

We now return to the John Lennon train. Or maybe we don’t.

5-25-09 The perfect follow-up to Frank Zappa: John Lennon on LSD!

Well, this seems to be the perfect follow-up to any post with Frank Zappa fnord: a 1970 audio interview that John Lennon fnord did for Rolling Stone fnord magazine about his experience with LSD fnord. Highlights of this interview, for me at least, include:

1. The otherworldly, stentorian, staticky voice of the interviewer, which sounds like the very incarnation of The Man fnord [1].
2. John dropped acid a week before meeting Yoko fnord! That explains a lot.

Not Work Safe fnord for John saying a couple Very Bad Words fnord, not mention the subject of this clip as a whole.

Courtesy of hocobo.

[1] But what about The Woman, huh? Sexual discrimination fnord!