This Week You Will Toy with Ideas About:

• stop-motion/CGI
• adapted/unadaptable
• successful/irrelevant
• industry/industrial music
• rock/rock!

Thanks to scb0212, Casper, and Miller for playing this week! Send articles throughout the next week to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post articles from the past week below for discussion, and Have a Happy Friday!

The new issue of Sense of Cinema arrived this week, including its extensive World Poll entries for 2022 and pieces on the art of capturing motion in animation, including an interview with Kris Theorin, an animator of LEGO on applying his knowledge of stop-motion to computer-generated animations:

We come to it with a bit of an advantage because we did it for years and know the details that go into stop motion. One big thing is the stylized proportions. Whenever we’re trying to do a cabinet, for example, we’re trying to emulate what a doll-furniture cabinet might look like as opposed to modeling it based on a real cabinet that won’t look like a stop motion set. It’ll just look like you took a real cabinet and put it in this otherwise normal room. Another example would be fuzzy pajamas. If you’re trying to emulate what real life looks like, you wouldn’t see the little fibers on it. But with stop motion, like Coraline, all the fibers are super big or super fuzzy, and kind of long, because it’s a miniature and we’re close up on it. And then there’s adding that whimsical, art-directed look to the whole set by slanting corners, making things not perfectly rigid, making furniture taper to give it that cartoony look that you find in stop-motion where there’s an artist making every piece of furniture. 

At Vox, Alex Abad-Santos investigates the contradiction of Avatar: The Way of Water as a box office smash and cultural non-entity:

“So much of genre entertainment has evolved to be better suited for fans. But with Avatar, the strange thing is that it isn’t really built for fandom, and that fandom doesn’t really have much to go on beyond the movies,” [culture writer Ryan Broderick] added. Measuring Avatar against these benchmarks of what we’ve been trained to see as impact fuels the narrative that Avatar has no cultural impact. The fact that we’re puzzled points to how difficult it is for our brains to cleave away financial triumph from cultural significance. Things that are financially successful must be culturally powerful, right? But what if cultural saturation never was Cameron’s goal? And what if — forgive my galaxy brain — the idea of “cultural impact” is merely a capitalist illusion that studios peddle to ensure their survival?

The Atlantic‘s Ian Bogost writes on The Last of Us and how television inherits the pitfalls of video game narratives:

But the expectation of movement and collision also limits the capacity of games, especially games that want to tell stories. In the game’s prologue, the player, controlling Joel’s daughter, wanders around a whole house, getting their bearings, exploring rooms, reading a note on the fridge, opening drawers, and learning the game’s verbs. It’s a preposterous waste of time narratively, and one that the TV show not only doesn’t need but cannot support. Instead, Sarah wakes up in a gently lit suburban bedroom, and set dressing, cinematography, framing, and editing show us her situation quickly and efficiently. Setting and character development happen rapidly, allowing the viewer to focus on dialogue and relationships rather than where the door is and how to open it. TV makes use of the trappings of life to shine a light on life itself. It does that by capturing the world through the lens. But games do not share this capacity. Everything must be constructed from whole cloth. In The Last of Us Part II, the video-game sequel, the development team went to enormous lengths to make rope physics convincing—you know, throwing a cord or cable. If you want to throw a rope on TV, you give someone a rope and point a camera at them.

At Belt Magazine Casey Taylor talks about Trent Reznor’s origins in the rust belt and what is work does (and doesn’t) say about his family’s long legacy there:

Trent Reznor’s work as Nine Inch Nails stands out amongst other industrial metal acts–a genre that fused the UK’s Industrial scene with the hissing screeches of machines reminiscent of an assembly line sped up to the point of combustion. Nine Inch Nails work was remarkably personal compared to the other innovative industrial music echoing from the hollowed-out livelihoods of the Rust Belt. The rest of the genre was far more subversive; Reznor found a way to break through on the radio, but bands like Ministry had already been creating audio and visual art meant to shock the proletariat who engaged with it. Industrial music for an industrial civilization; a tongue-in-cheek dare to its listeners to face their complicity in fascism. Reznor’s work does that as well, but requires a level of self-awareness to spot it: the narrator is you, and the resonance comes from the fact that every urge he sings about, no matter how perverse, is recognizable.

David Roth remembers Tom Verlaine and muses on the unknowability of his music for Defector:

You can tell when a songwriter or a band has been influenced by Television, and weirdly it’s not because their work sounds like Television but because Television sounds like them, before them. A lot of art works like this—if you read widely and write long enough, your writing will sound enough like the writers you care about that people will start mistaking all those voices for your own. Also there are things that it’s foolish to try to imitate, because that imitation will only serve to highlight the distance between what you want to be and your capacity to reach it. Better, I think, to … take what you can from it, realize what of it isn’t something you can keep, and then try to do something with the gratitude.

And for Interludedocs, Vadim Rizov recalls songs on lost mix CDs and those that didn’t make the cut:

My mistake, then, was choosing an elegiac, quite lovely deep cut over the “too obvious” selection, i.e., the album’s lead single “If I Am a Thing.” That was a beautiful song, one I can hear in my head even a decade-plus later—but that’s probably the only way I’ll ever rehear and distort it. Wherever Emily Scott is now (and I hope she’s well and at peace with whatever music she has, intentionally or not, thrown into the digital void), that song feels lost to time.

And Finally: An unattended fish broadcast his owner’s credit card number and added charges on his Nintendo Switch account. Aquaman brought in for questioning.