when you feel a bit off, let's propose a new term: they're check-in days. As per my wise roommate, who introduced this term to me, it's when you've had a bit of time to think and to self-evaluate and you abruptly question your sense of purpose with a 'Whoops, what am I actually doing?'. She doesn't mean like when you stop in the middle of a task, like erasing an old hard drive, because you forgot how to perform it. In a grander sense, it's about at which point you find yourself in your life. And if you're wondering why I'm leading off a post with this: oh yes, today was one of those days for me. It's ok, though, don't fret, because this thing (ennui, maybe? Help me out, French existentialists) passes pretty quickly. Sometimes all you need to do is to pick up copies of Evelyn Waugh booksor walk past a park full of exuberant kids skating on Family Day and know that despite the odd stab of melancholy on an otherwise radiantly sunny day, things are perfectly fine.
For everyone's benefit, however, I will now helpfully provide a list of Things That Don't Assuage Melancholic Stabs of Sadness:
vacantly wandering the ADD wilderness of Tumblr and staring at GIFs of the Real Housewives until they stop making sense and you question the validity of your own existence
re-watching The Notebook for the first time since 2004 (Things that improve with time: Ryan Gosling. Things that don't: my threshold for old-people sadness)
anything to do with Lana Del Rey
anything to do with Whitney Houston (RIP)
(surprisingly) Bon Iver, or at least his latest album. I thought homeboy understood me, and maybe he does, but darn it if "Calgary" makes me want to weep and then give up on making creative things because he's a genius.
BONUS: Things That Do Help Assuage Melancholic Stabs of Sadness:
I've been researching 2D animation over the past week or so for an upcoming project, trying to get a sense of what's out there and who's acting as its gatekeepers. Result: it's alive, vibrant and still massively innovative. There's much, much more than just Disney out there.
I think many of us remain fascinated by traditional animation and its sense of built-in magic. Its intuitive hand-drawn-ness counteracts the hyperreality of on-screen CGI worlds that often exist just to be destroyed (preach it to me, Transformers), and rescues the emotional from being too well-recreated. Even the best-received CGI films of the past few years, like Up (2009), Toy Story 3 (2010) or Tangled (2010), have been lauded for their warmth and artistry rather than just for their outstanding graphics. Tangled is especially noted for its reverence for traditional art, as its creators made it their goal to render the film as a "three-dimensional painting": they cite the Romantic artist Fragonard as their main inspiration, lush Snow White-like backgrounds abound, and Rapunzel, the main character, expresses herself by painting large-scale artwork on the ceiling of her tower.
Examples of 2D animation are everywhere, but there were a few that blew
me away. Check out the extraordinary work of Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment (Australia, 2011):
How beautiful is that? A whole world in three minutes.
This dreamy emotional intensity has made its way into the gaming world as well, where projects like Limbo (Denmark, 2010) exist in a disturbingly dark and foggy space:
And to keep with the theme of silent film-like ethereality (is that a word? If not, consider it coined), here's a handmade light-and-shadows show by Davy and Kristin McGuire (Germany, 2011) that I found along my YouTube travels. It can take a lot to find something so simple yet so astonishing these days, but these artists capture your imagination with the most basic tools in an animator's handbook: scissors, a camera, and light.
These projects may not seem too warm or fuzzy, but they're just three examples of the innovative work being done in the field. Now that major studios have seemingly switched to CGI more or less full time, it's fascinating to see the tradition flourishing in the online era.
And OK, one more... Tomm Moore's Oscar-nominated feature film The Secret of Kells (2009), mesmerizing to watch and completely in tune with the history of art and storytelling:
Don't you wish you'd paid better attention in art class? I sure do.
