Hard Candy Christmas - Henchmen 21 and 24

Christmas is drawing nigh and therefore time for me to unleash some holiday themed wisdom upon those who stumble into my blog.

One of my favourite things about animation is when the writers leave little breadcrumbs of their personality in the script. Are they reaching out to their audience looking for likeminded souls? Or exhaustedly regurgitating every last fleck of their imagination onto the page. Either way, it makes lonely losers like me believe that on some level, I connect with these artists.

A classic example is musical preference- almost all voice actors love the sound of their own voice- therefore love singing- and therefore love music. Why else would they choose a career where they can  put headphones on and slip into a voice tracked-coma-reel of madness inside their own heads?

We all remember this exhaustingly long musical number (P.S- I still loved it)

Venture Bros is one of those awesome shows with an open appreciation for music. One example is how David Bowie, voiced by James Urbaniak, is a reoccurring as the sovereign of the Guild of Calamitous Intent. (Iggy Pop is also a member of the guild, albeit slightly less awesome). (Also there was one episode themed around Space Oddity)

Another example is this!

BAM

Possibly the single greatest cartoon musical holiday moment of all time. (I'm talking to you Schroeder, you stripe-shirted hack). (But seriously, no hard feelings.)

I thought I had seen every known episode of Venture Bros. (Save the finale of the last season).

That includes the Christmas special as well as the pilot. But for some reason, I don't remember watching this at all, and stumbled into this recording on the internet. And it's way too awesome to be fake.

Apparently at some vanished point on the timeline, Henchmen 21 and 24 went to visit The Monarch in jail. It was Christmas, there was a guitar on hand, and they all sang Dolly Parton's Hard Candy Christmas.

Nothing can explain why Dolly Parton's Hard Candy Christmas has always been one of my favourite carols, despite its lack of festiveness, its country flair and its lack of popularity in the general Christmas cannon. But every year early December, I sure as hell lock myself in my car for three or four loops of this sucker.

So let's take some time this holiday season, to remember that this happened.

Oh yeah, I guess you can enjoy the actual recording too.

The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas does a rendition too 

Communication in Animation

For everyone who doesn't know, my education is in Rhetoric and Communications. I'm a Creative Communications grad, with a major in Media Production, and my diploma is joined with a four year Communications degree from the University of Winnipeg.

Since my University courses foolishly pertain nothing to animation, I have to find sneaky ways to inject animation into the way I procure my degree.

For two of my final courses, I had such "opportunities" to cram a square animation peg into a very round rhetorical hole- or a sphere if you will (rhetoricians like spheres)- so if we put them both of the same plane of dimension, one could say that I crammed a cube, or perhaps a rectangular prism, into a sphere of equal volume...

This series of spacial mathematical fails is why I studied Rhetoric and not Geometry.

Anyway, the sneakiness breaks down as follows:

Rhetoric in the Public Sphere Class

Assignment: Write a 10 page essay of sorts about something in the public sphere.

Conflict in Communication Class

Assignment: Do a creative project/presentation about how communication occurs in basically anything.

For the former, I wrote a lengthly essay on Disney as Epideictic Performance in the Public sphere- a long winded analysis featuring mostly Hauser (a rhetorical theorist) and Hiroux (a guy who writes numerous books and papers about how Disney is evil.)

Now don't get me wrong- I very much enjoy Disney-, pretty much all of their animations are musicals, voiced by celebrities, and super gorgeous- there's a lot to like. I do however, believe that its massive influence allows it to shape the identities and desires of children,  allows it to build consumerism into the list of ideals they teach to children, and even allows it to sell the concept of childhood innocence as a product in the form of the children reared by other Disney products. (Hopefully this makes more sense in my essay than it does here, or I'm looking at a pretty steep fail)

How much of this was intentional and how much was an accident- we'll never know.

Maybe I'll do another blog post about the topic and include my lengthly and boring essay.

The latter class project however, resulted in a fun little video. I admit it's not my best work, since most of the clips are artifacty rippings from YouTube, boomed over by my too-close-to-the-mic dronings, but  I had very limited time, I still got an A, and it was fun to make. Another awesome thing about the animation, was that after I wrote a ten page Disney-diss, I still wasn't above using Disney's Fantasia, as the backbone for this video project.

So although I'm not putting it in my demo reel, I will leave it here for a little blog exclusive.
By the way- I forgot to mention this to my class, but some parts might be considered graphic.

This video also features a stolen clip from one of my all time favourite animations:
Who I am and What I Want- an awesome film by Chris Shepherd and David Shrigley.
I first encountered it taking Fine Art at the University of Manitoba.

Now keep in mind, this video is actually pretty graphic- for how super minimalist the style is, and it gets quite a bit of negative feedback from people that don't understand it. But damn is it awesome.