Monday, March 10, 2014

Other Worldy Toons



If you watch this short toon by Andreas Hykade et al, I recommend clicking through to Youtube and getting it high def on a big screen, as I did, if at all possible.

If you recall Disney's Fantasia, this is every bit as visually and musically interesting as one of those, but a tad more demented, in a way that recalls a cartooning style that Disney defines itself against, as cuter, less demented.

You can see links to Cubism, Picasso, and of course Dali and surrealism, in this genre, as well as in this very toon.  So iconograpic.  So language.  So Wittgenstein therefore (these are "words with use" too, these signifying "heads", so familiar).

In calling it the Videogrammatron a long time ago, when still with McGraw-Hill, my proto Youtube-like database for STEM.math-teaching via TV's CTW, I was dreaming of clips like this one, off the wall yet compelling, engaging.

They're other-worldy in a way, as in "Other World": not merely imaginative an the "idle fantasy" sense.  Like The Lego Movie, they partake of the daimonic as Patrick Harpur uses the term.

These blogs go in layers and if you dig back you'll find the Portland Knowledge Lab (PKL) working to keep Portland weird by underlining its underground comic identity as ToonTown, could be one of many.  We love our manga and anime.

I realize now the Cabalistic Tetragrammaton was influential at least in providing the word (Videogrammatron -- with tron more from Tron and elecTronics); but also in the sense of "combinations and permutations" ala Sesame Street, with each episode a mix of old and new material, lots of repetition.

This is also a Hypertoon a sorts, an idea also defined in these web pages.