~ Animation ~
Bibliophobia by Rob Walker
http://vimeo.com/7872488
A father-son collaboration between Rob Walker, a South Australian writer and poet, and his son Ben, who blogged:
Bibliophobia is an animation I did to a poem by my father that recently won the Newcastle Poetry New Media Prize. It’s not often that you get to work on a project like this with your dad, so it was nice for it to be recognised.
Jason Nelson writes in the accompanying publication ‘The Night Road’;
“Rarely does a digital poem arrive so polished and aesthetically compelling. Using rich layering of textural and graphical imagery ‘Bibliophobia’ explores the strange place between ‘ancient’ paper and the contemporary world’s new digital story/poetic environments. Indeed the work itself seems to be directed towards the brief and portable devices, a trailer of ideas for iPhones and email sharing. Initially I was disheartened by the abrupt and all-too-soon end. But isn’t that what’s expected of media, to attract with style and mystery and ideation, then leave before interest wanes.
And like electronic candy I found myself watching this work again and again, wanting more. Perhaps what’s needed is a pause button, so readers can soak in the organic, near ‘steampunk’ visuals and archaic and experimental poetics”
The Country by Billy Collins
Another in the popular series of animated Billy Collins poems produced by JWT-NY. This one’s by Brady Baltezore. Purely as a cartoon, I think it might be the most satisfying of the lot.
For Poetry, this by Tony Curtis
Irish poet Tony Curtis reads his poem about the death of Delmore Schwartz in this animation by Tim Phelan.
Song to Belong by Nathan Jones
An innovative video by the Liverpool-based arts collective Mercy for a poem by their creative director, Nathan Jones.
Shiver & You Have Weather by Matthea Harvey
A piece by Matthea Harvey, delightfully illustrated by Joseph Kraemer for the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series.
The Genius of the Crowd by Charles Bukowski
I’m not a big Charles Bukowski fan, but this is a well-done animation and deserves to be included. It was evidently a collaborative effort: Stefano Internullo, Lorenzo Miglietta, Emanuele Roccucci, Enrico Tanno, and Giacomo Tessitore are the names given in the credits, and they are all evidently from a Rome- and London-based design firm called Digital Bathroom. About this film, they say:
The concept was to make the same feeling of dirt, disullusione and inevitability of events in a short film. The pencil was chosen to give an intimate tone in the project.The video was made in a week, from concept to dvd, and the illustrations have this inherent urgency that makes the tract nervous.
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Simpsons read “The Raven” (with help from James Earl Jones) in the third episode of the show’s second season (1990), “Treehouse of Horror I.”
The Dead by Billy Collins
Billy Collins reads his poem “The Dead” with animation by Juan Delcan of Spontaneous.
Advertisement by Wislawa Szymborska
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak; the animation here is by Nicholas Lawrence.
Cartoon Physics, part 1 by Nick Flynn
Animation by Siobhan McAlpin of a poem by Nick Flynn. Part of the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere series, but uploaded to Vimeo by the co-producers of the series: docUWM, “a documentary media center based in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Film Department that provides students the opportunity to work on professional productions and learn the art, craft and business of making media.” For poetry fans, this means that higher-quality versions of the Poetry Everywhere videopoem series than those at YouTube are now available for embedding.
The Stolen Child by William Butler Yeats
A William Butler Yeats animation that manages not to be cheesy — and done in Second Life, yet! This is by far the most sophisticated and beautiful SL videopoem I’ve seen. The animator, Lainy Voom, adds, “I’ve had requests from people to visit the Sim where this movie was filmed, unfortunately it does not exist in virtual space – the sets were only set up to create this poem, then they were torn down again.” Thanks to Linebreak blog for bringing this to my attention.
One hates to complain about such a technically accomplished production, but I do think the reading could have been a little louder and livelier. Here’s the text of the poem, which is in the public domain.
The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats
Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.
