Tuesday, April 20th, 2021

Time	Event
8:00a	How Pixar’s Movement Animation Became So Realistic: The Technological Breakthroughs Behind the Animation More than a quarter-century ago, Toy Story made Pixar Animation Studios into a household name. Nobody had ever seen a computer-animated feature of such high quality before — indeed, nobody had ever seen a computer-animated feature at all. Though the movie succeeded on many more levels than as a proof of technological concept, it also showed great ingenuity in finding narrative materials suited to the capabilities of CGI at the time, which could render figures of plastic and cloth (or, as other studios had demonstrated slightly earlier, dinosaurs and liquid-metal cyborgs) much more realistically than human beings. Ever since, Pixar has been a byword for the state of the art in computer-animated cinema. An enormous and ever-growing fan base around the world shows up for each of Pixar’s movies, one of two of which now appear per year, with great expectations. They want to see not just a story solidly told, but the limits of the underlying technology pushed as well. “How Pixar’s Movement Animation Became So Realistic,” the Movies Insider video above, works its way through the studio’s films, comparing the then-groundbreaking visual intricacy of its earlier releases like Toy Story and Finding Nemo to much more complex pictures like Coco and Soul. Not only do these recent projects feature human characters — not action figures or monsters or fish or cars, but human beings — they feature human characters engaging in such quintessentially human actions as playing music. What’s more, they portray it with a level of realism that will shock anyone who hasn’t made it out to a Pixar film since the 1990s. Achieving this has necessitated such efforts as equipping Soul‘s piano-playing main character with 584 separate control parameters in his hands alone, about as many as Toy Story‘s cowboy-doll star had in his entire body. But though ever-more-realistic visuals will presumably always remain a goal at Pixar, the magic lies in the accompanying dose of unrealism: mythological visions, trips to the spirit world, and superhuman acts (or attempts at them) also count among Pixar fans’ demands. Ambitious animators push their tools to the limit in pursuit of reality, but truly ambitious animators push them past the limit in pursuit of imagination. Related Content: Take a Free Online Course on Making Animations from Pixar & Khan Academy Pixar & Khan Academy Offer a Free Online Course on Storytelling A Free Short Course on How Pixar Uses Physics to Make Its Effects Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling A Rare Look Inside Pixar Studios The Beauty of Pixar Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. How Pixar’s Movement Animation Became So Realistic: The Technological Breakthroughs Behind the Animation is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
11:00a	Watch 4 Music Videos for Songs from Leonard Cohen’s Final Album, Thanks for the Dance Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker is a bleak masterpiece. Released just 19 days before his death, the album sounds like a warning from beyond, one Cohen seemed to know we’d never heed. His sympathy for human failure reached its denouement in the posthumous Thanks for the Dance, a project “much less apocalyptic” in tone than its predecessor, writes Thomas Hobbs at NME. Unlike many a posthumous album, “this point of difference more than justifies the record’s release,” even if the material can “sound a little scrappy” at times. The posthumous album’s existence is also justified by the fact that Cohen wanted it released. He turned that responsibility over to his son, Adam, who also produced You Want It Darker and who recruited Beck, Feist, Bryce Dessner of the National, Damien Rice, Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire, and “long-time Cohen collaborators Javier Mas and Jennifer Warner” to finish Thanks for the Dance. Many of the songs began as strained vocal readings Adam recorded, then later crafted arrangements around, as he tells NPR. I begged him, often “Just record this lyric. Let me sketch something and based on your reaction, we’ll adapt.” I was very, very lucky to get him to have these readings. Sometimes they were readings with no metronomic signatures, it was just a reading of poetry. Unfortunately, on a few occasions, that’s all I was left with — just bare musical sketches. But they were also so laden with instruction. Cohen was a literary perfectionist. “He’s sort of the opposite of Dylan, who had this from the hip [songwriting process],” says his son. “My father was much more methodical, he had a chisel… there were big, big pieces at which he’d been at work for years.” That Cohen would leave work behind for others to finish, however, is fully in keeping with his biggest themes: nothing is ever perfect. In my opinion, there’s something about the thesis of this man’s work, which is about brokenness. One of the main points of interest was this idea of “the broken hallelujah,” or “the crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I think I’m not transgressing by saying one of the positions of what “Happens to the Heart” is bleak, that it breaks. But it’s how one sees one’s own heart breaking: if you see it as everyone’s heart breaking, it recontextualizes it.  “Happens to the Heart” is also the first posthumous film in a “new series of artistic responses to Leonard Cohen’s posthumous album,” curated by Nowness who “invited a global roster of filmmakers and artists to present visual interpretations of Leonard Cohen’s life and lyrics.” Four of those short films are available on YouTube, and you can watch them here. In addition to “Happens to the Heart,” they include “Moving On,” “Thanks for the Dance,” and “The Hills.” They do not include “The Goal,” but you can stream three different versions on the Nowness site. One of these uses “footage from NOWNESS’s extensive film archive” in a “visual elaboration on the album’s sixth track,” the site notes, “which evolved from a 1998 Cohen poem of the same name” — a quintessential Cohen lyric filled with wry, morbid humor and compassion for universal human suffering. I can’t leave my house Or answer the phone I’m going down again But I’m not alone Settling at last Accounts of the soul This for the trash That paid in full As for the fall, it began long ago Can’t stop the rain Can’t stop the snow I sit in my chair I look at the street The neighbor returns My smile of defeat I move with the leaves I shine with the chrome I’m almost alive I’m almost at home No one to follow And nothing to teach Except that the goal Falls short of the reach Related Content:  Leonard Cohen’s Last Work, The Flame Gets Published: Discover His Final Poems, Drawings, Lyrics & More How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums New Animation Brings to Life a Lost 1974 Interview with Leonard Cohen, and Cohen Reading His Poem “Two Slept Together” Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Watch 4 Music Videos for Songs from Leonard Cohen’s Final Album, Thanks for the Dance is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)
2:00p	The Beautiful, Innovative & Sometimes Dark World of Animated Soviet Propaganda (1925-1984) Growing up, we assembled our worldview from several different sources: parents, siblings, classmates. But for most of us, wherever and whenever we passed our formative years, nothing shaped our early perceptions of life as vividly, and as thoroughly, as cartoons — and this is just as Lenin knew it would be. “With the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922,” writes New York Times film critic Dave Kehr, “Lenin proclaimed the cinema the most important of all the arts, presumably for its ability to communicate directly with the oppressed and widely illiterate masses.” Lenin certainly didn’t exclude animation, which assumed its role in the Soviet propaganda machine right away: Soviet Toys, the first U.S.S.R.-made cartoon, premiered just two years later. It was directed by Dziga Vertov, the innovative filmmaker best known for 1929’s A Man with a Movie Camera, a thrilling articulation of the artistic possibilities of documentary. Vertov stands as perhaps the most representative figure of Soviet cinema’s early years, in which tight political confines nevertheless permitted a freedom of  artistic experimentation limited only by the filmmaker’s skill and imagination. This changed with the times: the 1940s saw the elevation of skilled but West-imitative animators like Ivan Ivanov-Vano, whom Kehr calls the “Soviet Disney.” That label is suitable enough, since an Ivanov-Vano short like Someone Else’s Voice from 1949 “could easily pass for a Disney ‘Silly Symphony,'” if not for its un-Disneylike “threatening undertone.” (Not that Disney couldn’t get darkly propagandistic themselves.) With its magpie who “returns from a flight abroad and dares to warble some of the jazz music she has heard on her travels” only to have “the hearty peasant birds of the forest swoop down and rip her feathers out,” Someone Else’s Voice tells a more allegorical story than those in most of the shorts gathered in this Soviet propaganda animation playlist. The playlist’s selections come from the collection Animated Soviet Propaganda: From the October Revolution to Perestroika; “workers are strong-chinned, noble, and generic,” writes the A.V. Club’s Tasha Robinson. “Capitalists are fat, piggish cigar-chompers, and foreigners are ugly caricatures similar to those seen in American World War II propaganda.” With their strong “anti-American, anti-German, anti-British, anti-Japanese, anti-Capitalist, anti-Imperialist, and pro-Communist slant,” as Kehr puts it, they would require an impressionable audience indeed to do any convincing outside Soviet territory. But they send an unmistakable message to viewers back in the U.S.S.R.: you don’t know how lucky you are. Related Content: Watch Dziga Vertov’s Unsettling Soviet Toys: The First Soviet Animated Movie Ever (1924) Watch Interplanetary Revolution (1924): The Most Bizarre Soviet Animated Propaganda Film You’ll Ever See Watch the Surrealist Glass Harmonica, the Only Animated Film Ever Banned by Soviet Censors (1968) When Soviet Artists Turned Textiles (Scarves, Tablecloths & Curtains) into Beautiful Propaganda in the 1920s & 1930s Animated Films Made During the Cold War Explain Why America is Exceptionally Exceptional The Red Menace: A Striking Gallery of Anti-Communist Posters, Ads, Comic Books, Magazines & Films Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Beautiful, Innovative & Sometimes Dark World of Animated Soviet Propaganda (1925-1984) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. (Comment on this)

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