Opening night, 5th San Francisco International Animation Festival

Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized
Peter Sluszka, Julia Pott, Guilherme Marcondes, Santa Maria (USA/England 2009)



An indie rock album provided with elaborate visuals

This hour-long animation "visualizes" the 2009 "The Hazards of Love" album rock opera or song cycle of the Portland, Oregon indie band The Decembrists, a set of songs inspired by English Sixities folk rock. The title is the name of a 1966 EP album by the English singer Anne Briggs. The Decembrists' album, a Wikipedia article explains, 'tells the tale of a woman named Margaret; her shape-shifting lover, William; his fey forest queen mother; and a cold-blooded, lascivious rake, who recounts with spine-tingling ease how he came "to be living so easy and free" in "The Rake's Song". Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden deliver the lead vocals for the female characters, while My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Robyn Hitchcock and The Spinanes’ Rebecca Gates appear in supporting roles. The range of sounds reflects the characters' arcs, from the accordion’s singsong lilt in "Isn’t it a Lovely Night?" to the heavy metal thunder of "The Queen’s Rebuke/The Crossing."'

The film is a floating visual voyage that begins with gently descending seed pods and exploding puff-balls and morphs into imaginary landscapes and animated constellations in deep, rich colors, all very much in the acid trip vein of psychedelic Sixties extravaganzas. But this is more like looking into a kaleidoscope than following a dream narrative in the vein of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine or, to move well into the Seventies, the immortal The Wall of Pink Floyd, who also seem to be a musical influence. It's very pretty but also can seem rather aimless and vapid unless you happen to be a big fan of The Decembrists or folk rock and acutely responsive to the music's changing moods. I didn't personally find that the various songs were very strikingly illustrated in the animated visualizations. As a matter of fact, watching Pink Floyd performing "Time" live at Earls Court on YouTube seemed to me a more exciting visual experience -- as a dramatic accompaniment of rock music -- than this film, and the sound is richer too. There's a limit to how psychedelic folk rock can be. The soaring echo chambers and wailing electric guitars of a psychedelic band like Pink Floyd move the mind more intensely into trippy-ness than the gentle strains. And it's not a bad idea when visualizing music to visualize the performers. Remember how Mickey Mouse meets Maestro Stokowski in Fantasia? Nonetheless Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized does have some spectacular passages, especially at the beginning and the end.

On the other hand, Billboard wrote of this film that "the visuals function as impressionistic landscapes and atmospheres evocative of the unfolding drama like a richly imagined liquid lightshow." I am merely showing my ignorance. Or is it simply that you had to be there, had to be a fan of The Decenbrists' (in fact highly acclaimed) EMI/Capital album delighting in the way this film raises the group by implication to the level of musical visionaries? Obviously, it helps a lot to have an incestuous familiarity with this album before you watch the film. You see what you are ready to see. And I wasn't ready. The album was toured live from Portland through New York’s Radio City Music Hall and on to big summer music gatherings including Bonnaroo, Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits. It grows on you. And as for the film, it certainly deserved to be shown on the big screen as one of the most ambitious animation efforts of the past year.

The collaboration is an impressive one. Peter Sluszkais is a New York-based animator focused on stop-motion and photo-based effects. Julia Pott is a versatile young English animator with a 2009 MA from the Royal College of Art. Guilherme Marcondes is a Brazilian illustrator and animator who has lived and worked in London and (currently) New York. Santa Maria is a directing team comprised of Josh Goodrich and David Hill whose eclectic work bridges styles and includes animation and live action film. Sluszka, Pott, Marcondes, and Santa Maria, respectively, directed four successive segments of the film, each containing four or five musical pieces. Sluszka's ultra-slow motion capture of exploding mushrooms and elegantly disseminating seed pods fades into Julia Pott's line art of wolves and foxes hovering in geometric constellations; then Guilherme Marcondes takes over with his renderings of skeletons caught among leafless branches and verdant human arms that unfurl like ferns. Santa Maria winds up with cosmic computer-generated vistas and cartoons of splintering bones. The various segments were curated by the visual arts collective Flux and the whole was produced by Hornet.

The Opening Night film of the San Francisco International Animation Festival, presented Thursday, November 11 at 7:30 pm at Landmark's Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco.

Here Come the Waves: The Hazards of Love Visualized is available through iTUNES and was released in that form in December 2009.

Excerpt from Mardondes' segment on YouTube.
Another.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.