drive by

An animated gif -- or cinemagraph -- by Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg. Via Gawker »

to the vector belongs the spoils

Video: The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics

Via aesthetic interlude »

some like it hot

He was more dangerous. He did things to Minnie that were not nice. I think what happened was that he became so popular – this is my own theory – they gave his cruelty and his toughness to Donald Duck. And they made Mickey a fat nothing. He's too important for products. They want him to be placid and nice and adorable. He turned into a schmaltzer. I despised him after a point.

Where the Wild Things Are author Maurice Sendak commenting on the changes that came to Mickey Mouse over time in Tuesday's Guardian.

In the article, when he's not telling "parents worried by Wild Things to 'go to hell'", he's recounting how the monsters in his classic children's book were based on relatives who came to his house when he was a child. Immigrants who spoke little English:

They grabbed you and twisted your face, and they thought that was an affectionate thing to do. And I knew that my mother's cooking was pretty terrible, and it also took forever, and there was every possibility that they would eat me, or my sister or my brother. We really had a wicked fantasy that they were capable of that. We couldn't taste any worse than what she was preparing. So that's who the Wild Things are. They're foreigners, lost in America, without a language. And children who are petrified of them, and don't understand that these gestures, these twistings of flesh, are meant to be affectionate.

It's a brief crotchety frightfully endearing piece -- especially the part about how he and his editor battled over whether or not to say that Max's dinner was "still hot" -- as opposed to "warm" -- and less likely to burn a little boy. He won the battle by conveying: "how dopey 'warm' sounded. Unemotional. Undramatic. Everything about that book is 'hot'."

Mr. Sendak, I adore you.

verisimilitude

We finally used the cheapest store brand we could get because it popped more realistically. We didn't want all these big, fluffy kernels.

Art Director Tom Proost in the January 2009 issue of Metropolis referring to the popcorn that he and his team used to create apple blossoms for the stop-motion animated movie Coraline.

The filmmakers used old school stop motion animation techniques to produce Coraline, going against the grain of today's much more economically produced computer generated graphics.

The movie is based on the book which I've never read, but just well may, given all the enthusiastic titter about it on Twitter.

Plus, it's been a while since we had a John Hodgman fangirl moment on this blog, and Hodgman plays Coraline's dad.

I'm in.

you must remember this

Video Trailer: Waltz with Bashir

Animation functions on the border between reality and the subconscious.

Director Ari Folman, cited in Rolling Stone, on why he animated his documentary Waltz with Bashir.

Peter Travers' synopsis of the movie:

Folman, a former Israeli soldier who served during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war, has repressed his memories of the invasion of Beirut — more specifically, the massacre of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Though the killings were committed by the Christian Phalangist militia as payback for the murder of their leader, Bashir, the Israeli army stood by and reportedly sent up flares to aid the slaughter of men, women and children. In the years since, Folman cut off ties to the men he served with. The movie is his attempt to make some kind of sense of what happened by interviewing those involved.

Here's A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times »

Waltz with Bashir is in theaters now. Catch it post-protest.

something else, also quite lovely.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

if star wars were titled by saul bass

Title Sequence: Star Wars vs. Saul Bass

(If this makes you giddy happy then baby, we were made for each other.)

Actual title sequences by Saul Bass:
• The Man with the Golden Arm
• Anatomy of a Murder
• Psycho

speaking of movies

AbeBooks dropped by this afternoon to tell me that The Cat in the Hat is 50 years old.

That movie really freaked me out as a kid.

I don't like messes in movies. I don't like car chases that crash through fruit stands. I don't like it when two men are carrying a large pane of glass across the street and a large vehicle invariably crashes through it. Okay: I liked the Blues Brothers and the whole shopping mall thing -- but honestly, all I can think of when one of those scenes plays out is the pain, and the injury, and the property damage.

And don't try to tell me that everything was okay in the end with the Cat in his Hat and those innocent children because they put it all back together again before Mom in her sexy stilettos made it home: it was all a big LIE.

The kids knew it. The goldfish knew it. The cat knew it.

Mom suspected it.

And everything had changed.

Everything.


p.s. A First Edition copy is available for only $17,129.12 »

p.p.s. Green Eggs and Ham I can do. And Horton rocks the Whos.