Over the past week I’ve been attending a number of sessions at the London International Animation Festival. The LIAF has been around since 2003, but this is its first year in the Barbican Centre, where it comes at the tail end of a summer celebrating the art of animation.

July at the Barbican saw a retrospective of Studio Ghibli’s films, which I was shocked to discover never made it to British shores until 2001. Being a kid who remembers precisely two films from his toddlerhood, one being the Cantonese dub of My Neighbour Totoro (the other was The Land Before Time), it continues to astonish me that the childhoods of my peers were Miyazaki-free until Spirited Away. Also running at the Barbican Art Gallery until 11 September is Watch Me Move: The Animation Show, a gallery exhibition spanning 150 years of global animation history that I’ll have to write about another time. My readers in Canada will be happy to note that the exhibition’s next destination is the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, where Watch Me Move will run from 8 October through Christmas Eve.

All digressions aside, I really must commend the LIAF’s outstanding curation. In the out-of-competition programmes alone I’ve found some classics I had hitherto missed like the Russian masterwork Hedgehog in the Fog, which grounded a session dedicated to cut-out animation past and present, and discovered some new and instant favourites. Two that stood out for me, both selections from last year’s SIGGRAPH conference: Mobile by Verena Fels, a crowd-pleasing shuffle of animals on wires reminiscent of Pixar’s For the Birds; and The Wonder Hospital by Shimbe (Beomsik Shim), a surreal descent into what I’d best describe as a funhouse of cosmetic surgery.

The piece that I want to draw attention to here, however, is Les journaux de Lipsett (Lipsett Diaries). It was presented as the fulcrum of a session dedicated to the oeuvres of its director, Theodore Ushev, and its subject, the 1960s Canadian filmmaker Arthur Lipsett. Ushev himself was in attendance as one of the LIAF’s featured guests this year and told the audience of the many coincidences behind his latest project. Here’s one: when Ushev moved from Bulgaria to Montreal, where he has been based since 1999, he stayed in the same building that housed Lipsett for most of his life—until the latter committed suicide in 1986, aged 49.

Now that the National Film Board has digitized most of its treasures, you can see Lipsett’s films for yourself. His breakout work, Very Nice Very Nice, attracted the notice of Stanley Kubrick, who asked him to cut the trailer for Dr Strangelove. (Lipsett declined.) As an aficionado of the history of science and technology and the future as imagined by the past, my personal favourite is A Trip Down Memory Lane. Subtitled as “additional material for a time-capsule”, it features newsreel footage of everything from airships to chemistry experiments to wartime munitions, which were already nostalgic miscellanea in 1964, when the film was made. It’s an early work of retro-futurism, if you will.

As you can tell, Lipsett’s signature style involved the rapid-fire juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated images, often extracted from other documentary material, and his speciality was sound collage. The effect is one of funnelling our perception of the visuals through contrasting audio, although in truth, Lipsett typically began with the soundtrack first and set the images second. The technique is comparable to what William S Burroughs was doing textually with cut-up books like Nova Express, only Lipsett got there first. (I’m certain Marshall McLuhan must have written about Lipsett—how couldn’t he?—but not having my McLuhan volumes handy I’m not in a position to check.)

Lipsett Diaries is not a biography of its subject, but is closer to a work of historical fiction, diving into the recesses of a mind we only know by the trail of creations it left behind. It incorporates many of Lipsett’s own techniques and splices imagery from his films, although everything is rendered in Ushev’s painstakingly hand-painted frames. In terms of process, Ushev and Lipsett were very well matched. “For me to animate something, I have to hear it first,” Ushev explained at the session’s close. An illustrator and graphic designer by training who came to animation relatively recently, he confessed that he did not have a natural facility for timing, and preferred to assemble his work to the rhythm of existing sounds. “If the text is not recorded,” he said, “I cannot do the film.”

The voice-over narration comes not from Lipsett’s actual diaries, which have never been found, but is a reconstruction of what he might have been thinking as he hurtled through successive phases of his troubled life. It was written by Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and well-known chronicler of Canadian animation history, about whom I’ll have more to say in a moment. First, here’s a brief video where Ushev and Robinson talk about the film in the very corridors of the NFB that Lipsett used to scrape for clippings.

At its heart, Lipsett Diaries stands as an intensely moving effort by one Canadian animator to revive the profile of a once-prominent predecessor who has since fallen into obscurity. If this sentence doesn’t ring a bell, it should. It also describes one of the first films that gripped my attention when I started to take a serious interest in contemporary independent animation: Chris Landreth’s Ryan.

Ryan, which won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2005, was Landreth’s depiction of his encounter with Ryan Larkin, a former animator who was once of some renown thanks to his film Walking, and who was rediscovered at the turn of the millennium as a panhandler on the streets of Montreal. After Landreth’s film sparked a renewal of interest in Larkin’s work, it looked as though he would recover from his long spell of homelessness and substance abuse and return to animation once more. Sadly, this was not to be: Larkin died in 2007.

At the end of the LIAF screening I asked Theodore Ushev about whether Ryan had any influence on the conception of Lipsett Diaries. There was a very direct connection, he answered. For one thing, Arthur Lipsett and Ryan Larkin were contemporaries and rivals at the NFB of the 1960s—both of them Oscar nominees at the vanguards of experimental forms, both of them turfed in the 1970s. Their acolytes set them in opposition to one other: they would say, for instance, that Larkin was a monster and Lipsett was the true genius. “You were for Lipsett or for Larkin,” said Ushev, referring to their competing legacies.

Even more relevant is the involvement of Chris Robinson. Robinson, after all, was the one who rediscovered Larkin on the tip that a homeless man who claimed to be an animator was panhandling on the Main. It was Robinson who brought Larkin back to the attention of the animation community in a profile he wrote for Animation World Magazine in November 2000, and who ultimately introduced him to Chris Landreth.

Indeed, I recall how the most indelible piece I read about Larkin upon his death was the extremely ambivalent remembrance Robinson penned for The Ottawa Citizen and Cartoon Brew, where he lamented the undue sanctification Larkin received in the wake of Ryan‘s success. An excerpt:

After [OIAF 2000], an animation co-op in Calgary was all set to invite him to get back into animation. But Ryan refused. He said he was worried about losing his welfare cheque. In truth, Ryan was scared that he didn’t have anything to say anymore and frankly, the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he didn’t want to be saved. He’d lived this flaneur existence for so long, he couldn’t turn back. Initially I respected this, but I quickly soured towards him because I could see that he had a routine. He convinced many people before and after me into thinking they could save him when all he really wanted was some smokes, beer and chicken wings.

Ryan returned to Ottawa in 2004 to accompany the screening of Ryan. It would be a homecoming of sorts. I even arranged to have Ryan’s film Walking shown in the cinema (Ryan hadn’t seen the film in 35mm in thirty years). My excitement faded fast though. Ryan had changed. His drinking had reached the point of no return. Ryan needed constant supervision. We kept feeding him with beers and smokes to keep him happy, anything to stop him from flipping out. Of course, by late afternoon, he’d be a mess anyway. As much as I enjoyed watching Ryan piss on the streets in broad daylight, I wanted to grab him and slap some sense into him, tell him to stop being a child and take some responsibility for his life.

It was too late though. The winds of success blew Ryan into mythological status. Young animators made pilgrimages to Montreal to pay tribute to their hero, the flawed genius.

What I didn’t know until I dug up that article again today was that Theodore Ushev drew the accompanying illustration. In fact, prior to Lipsett Diaries, Ushev collaborated with Robinson as an illustrator for his Larkin biography, Ballad of a Thin Man; you can view Ushev’s artwork for the book on his website. To see Ryan as a direct precursor of the Lipsett film was more accurate than I knew.

Two years ago, when the NFB celebrated its 70th birthday, The Walrus published an article questioning the film board’s future vitality. It’s a flawed piece, and another Walrus contributor correctly noted that the NFB remains a pervasive fixture of Canadian culture even if people don’t know it by name, but never mind all that. I wish to attend to one particular passage:

The Memories of Angels, like another recent NFB film, the Oscar-winning animated short Ryan, looks back at NFB history. Memories is a reconfigured collection of shots from films by such masters as Denys Arcand, Arthur Lipsett, Michel Brault, and Claude Jutra. Ryan is an exploration into the work and life of the Oscar-nominated filmmaker Ryan Larkin, a former wunderkind who was found, a quarter century after his work had essentially stopped, homeless and broken. These films’ success begs an obvious question: is the NFB an institution that has nowhere to go but to look back to the glory days of its golden age?

Not surprisingly, the NFB’s new commissioner, Tom Perlmutter, takes umbrage at the suggestion. Ushering me into his office at the NFB’s Montreal headquarters, he makes the distinction between empty nostalgia and creative renewal. “It’s interesting, to me; that’s precisely the way not to be a slave to the past. Those films are an homage, and they’re both entirely original in their own ways. The editing in The Memories of Angels is amazing—it’s a tribute both to the city and to the history of filmmaking. It’s not simply a recycling, but rather a reimagining of those images.”

Like Perlmutter, I view artistic reflection on the past as a sign not of stagnation, but of maturity. Some of the most pivotal works in any medium are the ones that recapitulate their genre’s history and trace a lineage back to their forebears. Look at Billy Wilder’s resurrection of Gloria Swanson from DeMille’s silent Hollywood in Sunset Boulevard; Maurice Ravel’s post-WWI reconstruction of the Straussian Viennese waltz in La valse; Charles Mingus’s tributes to the big-band orchestration of Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington in Mingus Ah Um; Cervantes twice over with his grand parody of the Spanish chivalric romance in Don Quixote, which goes on to swallow itself when Part II of the novel makes history out of Part I.

The interwoven network of Canadian animation is well past coincidence, particularly in Montreal’s history-steeped community. Films like Ryan and Lipsett Diaries are not so much acts of reverence as they are cases of artists exploring the uncharted crannies of their own studios. This, I think, is how culture motivates the definition of an identity, a distinctive local stamp. What we may see in retrospect as gestalt movements are, in reality, a scatter of new visions finding their place in the halls of their ancestral inspirations.

When I was very young, I heard a legend about a Chinese muralist who painted the most vivid and lifelike dragons but refused to fill in their eyes, lest the dragons come alive and fly away. I tried to track it down four or five years ago for a fragment I was writing at the time, but on that occasion I never found it. Today it occurred to me to make another attempt, and for reasons of n-grammatic potentia that shall remain mysterious, Google was far more helpful this time around.

As with any old story, mutations abound, but the preponderance of them involve the painter Zhang Seng-You (張僧繇) from the period of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 AD). Depending on who’s telling the story, Zhang Seng-You is asked to fill in the eyes by a bystander, the abbot who commissioned the monastery mural, or the Emperor himself (who, in this case, must have been Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty). The ending is always the same: the painter finishes the eyes and the dragons bolt away from the mural in a flash of lightning and thunder.

The wonderful thing about fables is the discordance of what they say—typically a blunt moral lesson, delivered as the payload of a cruise-missile punch line like a Feghoot minus the funny—versus what they do, which is leave innumerable gaps for diverse interpretations to take root and flourish. Stories are not reducible to definite lessons. Fiction is a space for debate, and a fable is an open meadow for all and sundry to frolic. (“I don’t believe in stories with morals,” says the man with the childish fantasy of teaching Lolita in schools.)

So what can we make of the tale of the painted dragons?

Is it a statement of sumi-e aesthetics?

This story embodies the philosophy of Oriental sumi-e. The goal is not simply to reproduce the appearance of the subject, but to capture its soul. To paint a horse, the sumi-e artist must understand its temperament better than its muscles and bones. To paint a flower, there is no need to perfectly match its petals and colors, but it is essential to convey its liveliness and fragrance. Oriental sumi-e may be regarded as an earliest form of impressionistic art that captures the unseen.

Or is it about attention to detail? Here’s one reading of the story and the proverb it spawned:

The idiom 画龙点睛 “draw a dragon, put in pupils” could be translated “finishing touch” in English. In Chinese it describes a key or emphatic phrase to a speech or in writing to drive home a point, giving the work more power.

And here’s another:

Based on this fairy tale [...] the last touch in a masterpiece is the most important part of a drawing, or any other important business.

Here’s a take on the story as it pertains to the tradition of dotting the eyes of dragon boats. It differs from the others in attributing the dragon murals to the fourth-century painter Gu Kai-Zhi (顧愷之), who left them unfinished until Zhang Seng-You was asked to complete them a century later:

[Gu Kai-Zhi] had a strange habit of leaving the eyeballs out for several years after the rest of the painting was finished. When he was asked why, he said, “The most life-like strokes of a subtle portrait come from the eyes.” He was actually implying that even a single stroke should not be done casually.

Nowhere have I read an interpretation that captures the essence of what I always thought the story to mean. Only the last one above comes close to grasping the part of the tale I find most resonant: the artist’s reluctance to finish the eyes until ordered to do so by somebody else.

In English, there’s a motto that art is never finished, only abandoned. It’s attributed to Leonardo da Vinci—who wouldn’t have said it in English, of course—but good luck sourcing it. One imagines that Leonardo, who filled in the most iconic eyes in the history of western art, derived the expression himself from a nugget of wisdom that arrived in the Italian Peninsula by way of Marco Polo’s expeditions to the Orient. But the insight resonates with anxieties of creativity everywhere, no matter which culture you’re in, and I lean towards believing it cropped up in many places independently.

What is perfectionism, really, but the avoidance of declaring something finished? Leaving out the pupils of the dragons, the way I see it, captures like no other parable the reluctance to put the lid on something magnificent. Once you’re done—once you’ve published—you’ve released your monster into the wild where it no longer bows to your command. The desire to create something magnificent conflicts with the compulsion to retain control over every detail. If the dragon flies away, it’s no longer within your power to polish the scales.

This is the perfectionist’s paradox: what if the creative apotheosis is only attainable through the loss of control? Here we’re not too far from the thematic stomping grounds of the most visceral film of 2010:

In the age of digital media we’ve grown accustomed to perpetual self-editing. It’s easy to deceive ourselves into believing that with instantaneous editorial revision at our fingertips, we now have the freedom to publish first and ask questions later. For many, this is true, and it’s why they propel the Internet’s flux of content at a pace that is nothing short of torrential. But in the other direction, there flows a strange inhibitor. Many now fear that substantial blog content is drying up, squashed in the middlebrow sandwich between personal intimations in social networks and the impersonal platform of paid journalism (where long-form is already on life support).

We’ve discussed some of these matters before, but I think they are worth revisiting. The dwindling of journals like this one has nothing to do with the terror of public scrutiny. What the decline really comes from, I believe, is an anxiety of impermanence. Good content—the transcendent stuff that rises above the encroaching tides of what Philip K. Dick called kipple—has a reputation for sticking around. This is a reputation the Internet does not share. It’s not just because online content is liable to be edited or outright wiped: it’s also because the connectivity of hypertext inherently carries a poison pill of long-term decay. Links break with time, and their container vessels get dragged into the undertow regardless of their independent eloquence.

I have before me a draft box overstuffed with nearly painted dragons. Many of them will never take flight. They will die in captivity.

Don’t even ask about my offline albatross.

There was an essay in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review about writers who abandoned their novels—beginning, as it should, with Michael Chabon’s Fountain City, which consumed a good five years of his life before he left it for Wonder Boys. And it’s worth remembering that the novelists in the essay—American titans like Chabon, Updike, and Harper Lee—had all already knocked something out of the park. Spare a thought for the failures-to-be who haven’t even made it that far; the roster must be endless.

If you think about it, it’s miraculous that anything of lasting power ever sees the light of day. I wonder sometimes if this is achievable without coercion, or if you really do require an external agent to flick the creative-inhibition switch to off. It takes a special force of will to abandon one’s baby on the river.

So whether it’s helpful or not, it’s worth remembering that even the best things in life aren’t finished. Like the serpents on the temple walls, they just get released.

Somewhere along the way, I penned a dissertation of sorts, but let’s not talk about that. Here is the crust of readings that has built up in the meantime. There are more, but the list below was becoming rather overgrown and at some point I had to stop.

• Two of the great figures in things I care about passed away in May, both of them at ripe old ages after leading fulfilling lives: jazz pianist Hank Jones at 91; mathematical popularizer and Lewis Carroll expert Martin Gardner at 95. I came to both Jones’ and Gardner’s works late in life but quickly—very quickly—came to understand their immeasurable impacts on music and mathematics, respectively, which I had previously felt secondhand without being aware of it. More on Jones here and here; more on Gardner here and here.

• It speaks volumes for how long I’ve been away from saturating this page with hyperlinks that sitting atop the pile in my draft box is an ominous article by Dominic Lawson on David Cameron and Nick Clegg’s public-school upbringings at Eton and Westminster, written the week of the first televised debate.

• IBM has developed a Jeopardy!-playing computer. Observe the promotional video. From an AI perspective, this is orders of magnitude more exciting than Deep Blue, and takes us deep into Turing Test territory. I hope to say more about this should I find the time.

• One of the disadvantages of being in the United Kingdom—indeed, the most serious one I have yet encountered apart from the absence of fine, extravagant steaks—is that for the first time since 1998, I was unable to see a new Pixar film on or before the date of its release. Two Pixar films of note, in fact: Toy Story 3 and the accompanying Teddy Newton short Day and Night. That hasn’t stopped me from following the resurgence of coverage of Pixar’s process of perfection in this Wired piece and this interview with Lee Unkrich.

• Typesetting matters, folks. Just ask the consummate professionals behind these two book-size online resources: Typography for Lawyers, and LaTeX for Logicians.

• Everyone with an interest in the romance of modern international affairs has read it already, but Raffi Khatchadourian’s profile of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is an outstanding piece of storytelling, if also one that tends towards the making of myth.

• And while on the subject of journalism and international intrigue, here is the Rolling Stone feature on Stanley McChrystal that led him to be sacked from command in Afghanistan.

• Civilization V is on its way, but there’s still plenty to say about Civilization IV. Troy Goodfellow shares a letter from Christopher Tin about composing music for the game. Kotaku asks lead designer Soren Johnson about the mathematization of religion.

• Jeremy Parish reflects on this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and calls out much of the game industry for the creative bankruptcy of video game violence.

• Neil Swidey of The Boston Globe courageously explores the mind of the anonymous comment-box troll.

• As this year’s graduate session at Singularity University gets underway, The New York Times talks to Ray Kurzweil and gang about the posthuman lifestyle.

• John Naughton writes in The Guardian about what the Internet has really changed.

• England has been swept up in the pathos and misery of football fever, as usual, and one may as well get some World Cup readings out of the way before the Three Lions have truly met with yet another ignominious doom. (Or, preferably, they could win.) Tim de Lisle enquires into the origins of spectator sport’s global draw. And then there’s this article on the North Korean national team, published in timely fashion just before Portugal blanked them 7-0.

• Finally, the only thing that can stop this asteroid is your liberal arts degree.

• I was already aware of Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi as a superb animation educator via the meticulous frame-by-frame studies at his blog, but Letters of Note has a real treat: a letter from Kricfalusi to a 14-year-old aspiring cartoonist.

• Rohan Maitzen makes a passionate argument that the value of a literary education is in the study of literature, not just the ancillary job skills that English departments cite to defend their own worth. (Continued here and here.)

• Jeff Foust surveys the debate over the scientific value of human spaceflight and what it means for NASA policymaking now.

• Sarah Eve Kelly, whose Anne Boleyn novel got picked up by an agent and is currently being shopped around, tells writers inundated with industry advice to shove it aside and get cracking on a draft.

• In the Columbia Journalism Review, Miles Corwin gives us a look at the young Gabriel García Márquez as journalist.

• The Economist‘s Democracy in America blog muses on the conservatism of the Muppets.

• Finally, in anticipation of whatever Apple is announcing this week, Beat-era poet Gary Snyder shares a poem about his Mac.

It is far more succinct to inspect an example of animation done wrong. And so I present John Kricfalusi’s illustrated horror story about a pitch meeting with DreamWorks executives tragically dispossessed of a clue. Here is the DreamWorks process:

1. Pick an “arena”—like woods, or the sea.
2. Put funny animals in it.
3. Match every species with a celebrity voice.

Is anybody surprised?

(For the record, I found Over the Hedge, Kung Fu Panda, and the first Shrek to be capable entertainments: there was a competence to them and an ambition to do more than game the market for laughs. With the tacit exception of the short-lived distribution deal with Aardman that gave us Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, I’m not sure if I can say that for anything else with the DreamWorks Animation stamp.)

In recent years, the best thing AMPAS did for itself was move the Oscars forward by a month. By curtailing the ability of the major studios to do a heavily funded marketing push in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter to conquer the industry’s mindspace with their chosen representative, and moving the ballot deadline ahead of the precursor awards that once rendered the Oscars too predictable, the show virtually matured overnight.

Since then, the trend has been towards greater recognition of artier, if not outright independent fare. A decade ago, it would have been unlikely, if not unthinkable, for excellent and unique films like No Country For Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire to claim the top prize. This is not to say that the Oscars used to be bad and suddenly became good: it is merely to acknowledge that the awards were increasingly living up to their social responsibility as a counterweight for the market, as a way of boosting the fortunes of films the public may have wrongfully overlooked. The public may have complained that they had never heard of the films being awarded, let alone seen them—often because the lesser-known nominees had yet to see general release outside of the major American cities by the time the shortlist was announced—but that is as it should be. If an awards show comes off as elitist, it is doing its job.

Personally, the only question I care about is whether this means Up will be Pixar’s first Best Picture nominee, and the second animated feature to make the shortlist in history (Beauty and the Beast being the first). But without an even playing field comparable to that of previous years, it is impossible to tell whether this is actually a sign of forward progress. And against the objections of those who believe the Animated Feature category has created a permanent ghetto for the artform, I do believe some progress has been made. Yes, only very recently did we see the outrageous exclusions of Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, two of the finest pieces of American cinema in the twenty-first century. But the nomination of WALL•E in the Original Screenplay category last year was already a significant step forward, a recognition of what story really means in a visual medium.

The sudden expansion of the shortlist to twice its previous size is a nightmare for historians and other cineastes whose interest is in tracking the evolution of Hollywood’s congratulatory attitude towards itself. And unlike similar lists that whittle the present vintage down to ten—the American Film Institute’s comes to mind—the selection of a victorious picture as the best of the ten guarantees even more pervasive vote-splitting than what we have seen in the past.

(My opinion has always been that significant industry awards should be determined by discussion and debate rather than democracy, but the Oscars are the film industry’s way of patting itself on the back and I wouldn’t expect it to conduct itself any differently. It is a real shame that the Oscars, and not the critics’ awards or the AFI, serve as the primary guidebook for future generations to select films for preservation or rediscovery. One day, this may change.)

In my estimation, this is an unwanted and unnecessary concession to populist sentiment that The Dark Knight—a sterling if overrated crime drama, and the superhero genre’s most earnest bid for serious acceptance—was wrongfully snubbed. It is an intentional return to the pattern of including token box-office hits (remember The Fugitive?), under the appealing guise of easing the inclusion of films that have already been given uncomfortable pigeonholes to keep them out of everybody else’s business—animated and foreign-language features in particular.

If we do see increased recognition of animated, foreign, and independent films—not just this year, but going forward in the long term—I will temper my objections and stand corrected. It is far more likely that the big-studio horses will crowd the race.

Last week I finally got around to seeing Sita Sings the Blues, a majestic animated feature by Nina Paley that I would describe as the fulfilment of the postmodern promise. I had been curious about the film ever since Amid Amidi raved about it last year. In December, Roger Ebert wrote:

[Sita] has not found a distributor. Times are hard, and indie distributors are not rolling in available funds. To them, no doubt, this doesn’t have the ring of box office gold: An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920′s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Once they read that, and they’re like me: Uh, huh. And if you were to read that description in the mailer from your local art house, would you drop everything and race through driving rain see it? Uh, uh.

Are you kidding, Roger? That’s exactly what I’d drop everything and race through driving rain to see.

No matter. With the gracious assistance of the Creative Commons license, Ms Paley has since made the film available online.

I could go on about the endless charm of the musical numbers, the playfulness of the shadow-puppet storytelling sequences, the perfect partnership of Sita’s woes and the Jazz Age torch song, or how my apprehensions toward the stiffness of rigid objects often characteristic of Flash animation were washed away with frame after frame of gorgeous design. And there’s no lack of human-interest stories about the making and distribution of the film, either. But my recommendation is to go in cold, bathe in the sheer personality of this very personal project, and come back later to read about its accomplishment as a triumph for the copyleft movement.

Sita Sings the Blues is the epitome of what postmodern art was always supposed to deliver—and coming from yours truly, this is a high compliment indeed. It’s not merely a stylistic pastiche for the sake of being one: the pastiche is a joyful source of creativity that marries several artistic traditions and revels in showing us how the marriages unfold. It celebrates the instability of oral traditions and the diversity of interpretations of myth, while adding to both.

In that light, I’m baffled (but not surprised) that Sita has drawn the ire of academics of the postcolonial school. From an interview with Nina Paley:

On the far left, there are some very, very privileged people in academia who have reduced all the wondrous complexities of racial relations into, “White people are racist, and non-white people are all victims of white racism.” Without actually looking at the work, they’ve decided that any white person doing a project like this is by definition racist, and it’s an example of more neocolonialism.

This is an understanding of Orientalism, as Edward Said called it, of such undergraduate maturity that I wonder how its proponents made it that far in academia at all. If anything, Sita is the very model of where art can go when the narcissistic presumption that cultures can only talk about themselves has run its course: towards the syncretic and the globally aware. Bill Benzon is quite correct when he says:

And if your inner geek is thinking “ancient text + contemporary story = Ulysses,” well then your inner geek’s ahead of mine, because I didn’t think that until 10 or 20 minutes into my first viewing. But I wouldn’t count that as any more than a casual observation, one with a non-casual corollary.

By the ordinary method of reckoning such things, the culture of ancient Greece and Rome is in the direct ancestral line of 20th Century European culture which would necessarily include Joyce’s Dublin. The same mode of reckoning sees little relationship between ancient India and contemporary America, thus both Hindu nationalists and post-colonial Theorists have been criticizing Paley’s cultural miscegenation. Alas for them, cultural miscegenation has been the way of the world since whenever and it’s only accelerating in our era.

For my part, I wasn’t thinking of Ulysses at all, but of this:

Obviously, there is never a consistent set of criteria for determining the “greatest” of anything. I decided to look for shorts that would be somewhat broadly representative of the Looney Tunes brand’s leading directors and staple characters in their finest moments, taking into consideration both historical value and the nuance of the animation itself. As with books, music, and live-action cinema, I like to reward works that show off what the medium can do, but not at the expense of a clear and engaging story. Ties were broken by personal taste.

My list will reveal that I have a strong preference for director Chuck Jones, particularly his legendary unit with background artist Maurice Noble and storyman Michael Maltese. Not to downplay the talents of Friz Freleng, Robert McKimson, and others, but I think most Looney Tunes aficionados end up gravitating towards one of Chuck Jones or Bob Clampett, since they represent two contrasting ideals of what the animated cartoon should be. Jones is to Clampett as Sonny Rollins is to John Coltrane on the tenor saxophone: one is known for the elegant clarity of his inventions, the other for his unrestrained virtuoso insanities. (On further reflection, the better analogy may be to Oscar Peterson and Thelonious Monk.) It’s not out of the ordinary to admire both styles, but adore one more than the other.

I came up with a clear and likely interchangeable top four, which I had to shuffle a few times, and limited my list to ten. Without further ado, let’s begin with #10 and work our way down.

10. Birds Anonymous (1957)

I considered three Friz Freleng cartoons for the #10 spot (the other two being High Diving Hare and Knighty-Knight Bugs), but this is the one that has stuck with me the most. Remember the “fish are friends, not food” recovery group of sharks in Finding Nemo? This is where it comes from. From the note-perfect opening scene in shadows to the outstanding voice work of Mel Blanc at the heights of sufferin’, succotashy desperation, Sylvester’s craving for birds makes for a risible allegory of alcoholism. Freleng’s shorts have always represented the more sober side of Looney Tunes, and there’s no better proof of it than this.

9. Rabbit Seasoning (1952)

The second film of the Wabbit Season Twilogy (following Rabbit Fire and preceding Duck! Rabbit! Duck!) is also the smartest. For an eye-opening gander at how much of a role body language can play in a conversation, look no further than the scene where Daffy and Bugs stand side by side and rehearse their “pronoun trouble” one more time. It’s hard to choose just one of the three-way duels between the Bunny, the Duck, and the Elmer, but this is the one I’d pick.

8. The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946)

Daffy Duck’s zany Dick Tracy daydream tends to be a favourite among animators, and rightly so. The unpredictable dynamism of Daffy’s solo scenes make for a classic study in character performance at its squashiest and stretchiest. And Dick Tracy’s rogues gallery was strange enough as it is, but their counterparts in the Bob Clampett universe (Neon Noodle?) are a farce to be reckoned with. While Clampett’s penchant for wild surrealism is, incredibly, more restrained here than it is in shorts like Porky in Wackyland, Piggy Bank only benefits from its stronger grounding in conventional notions of story.

7. Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z (1956)

One of the problems with the wild expansion of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner into their own series is that after seeing many of them, they all begin to blur together. Since most of the gags are isolated enough to belong in any Road Runner cartoon, the individual shorts often lack their own sense of identity. Gee Whiz-z-z-z-z-z may be the pinnacle of Wile E. Coyote’s lifelong chase: it’s a complete primer on Road Runner physics (in particular, the recurring Magritte-like gag of superimposed pictures becoming reality), and plus, it’s the one with the Acme bat-suit.

6. From A to Z-Z-Z-Z (1954)

And while on the subject of Z-Z-Zs, one would be remiss to overlook Chuck Jones’ best effort with a memorable one-off character (that is, apart from the film I’ve placed at #1). Ralph Philips’ cartoon daydreaming should be familiar to anyone who grew up on Calvin & Hobbes, but here we see it in the inimitable Jones style, where every strong character pose is a springboard for the imagination. The scene where Ralph blends into the arithmetic problem on the blackboard and beats off a 5 with a 4 is the icing on the cake.

5. A Gruesome Twosome (1945)

Not to slight The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, but this is the definitive Bob Clampett. Notable for its eye-popping violence and the unforgettable shot of the cats falling up from the bird’s nest to the ground, there’s nary a sequence that isn’t by itself a study in motion. Apart from the early, pre-Sylvester Tweety Bird, the characters in this cartoon should be new to those seeing it for the first time, but they make for perfect foils working towards a common goal—a character dynamic we don’t see very much among the Looney Tunes personalities that have become famous. This cartoon also features one of my favourite musical scores in the Looney Tunes oeuvre: composer Carl Stalling usually strings classical music and the Great American Songbook alike into situational parody, but here he gives us a playful meowing melody right off the bat, snatches it right back, and runs with it.

4. What’s Opera, Doc? (1957)

Considered by many to be the epic masterpiece of the Looney Tunes canon, the transposition of the classic formula of Elmer Fudd hunting Bugs Bunny onto Wagner’s Ring lives up to its operatic aspirations. The backgrounds are awe-inspiring, and never has music been a more integral party to a cartoon’s success. (Well, almost never; see #1.) The ingenuity of this cartoon is that it doesn’t merely employ Elmer and Bugs to make fun of Siegfried and Brunhilde: it also does the exact reverse. And that’s not to mention its awareness of the history of animated takes on classical music; I speak here of its nods to Fantasia. The animated cartoon has never produced a finer parody.

3. Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2th Century (1953)

This is the best of the Warner Bros. duels. It’s typical enough of a Looney Tunes cartoon to place two characters at odds and have one subject the other to slapstick humiliation, but a real clash of titans goes well beyond letting us sit back and watch the good guy win. Here we see arch-villain Marvin the Martian and perennial fall guy Daffy Duck fight over an entire planet, and the thrill of escalation never stops. I place this classic send-up of golden-age space adventure this high because the gags are phenomenal, be it Daffy’s disintegration-proof suit or the way Marvin pops out of a viewing screen. Along with What’s Opera, Doc?, Maurice Noble’s background work is here at its most grandiose and transporting. Like Don Quixote is to literature, Duck Dodgers is comic take on a genre that works as a superb genre piece on its own.

2. Duck Amuck (1953)

The greatest of the fourth-wall frame-breakers, Daffy Duck’s nemesis in this exemplary demonstration of what animation can do is none other than Chuck Jones himself—the Artist as God. Like all the best work of the Jones unit, this is a short that remembers that sounds are as much a part of film as pictures. The revelation in the final shot is an unexpected bonus. There is no better cartoon about cartoons, and if animation has a Citizen Kane—a proof of concept for the medium as a whole—Duck Amuck is it.

1. One Froggy Evening (1955)

I regard this as the masterpiece of the animated short. Told entirely in song, there isn’t a line of dialogue in this film, leaving the animation to do all the legwork of story and characterization—and boy, does it ever. The recurring Looney Tunes characters play on quirks that were established as convention over time, but among pieces that stand alone and give us a complete window into personalities we’ve never met, there is no beating the singing frog and the man who wishes to commodify its talent. It’s more than a lively song-and-dance: it’s a multigenerational fable of human greed at the intersection of art and capital. But even if we only see it as a lively song-and-dance, One Froggy Evening gives us so much to love.

We’ll try the plan for two years. Don’t worry, good ideas like this take time. When the fine people of India feel they’re good and ready to respect the animation art form, I will personally send over a print of One Froggy Evening. If you enjoy that more than you did Roadside Romeo, we’ll send you Dumbo the following month. If you still enjoy Roadside Romeo, we’ll take more drastic measures like defrosting Walt and sending him over to help you see the light. Either way you’ll finally be able to see that your enthusiasm for Roadside Romeo was one huge terrible fucking mistake. Don’t feel too bad, even animation-savvy countries make mistakes sometimes.

It’s a satirical piece (“Additionally, any DVDs containing animation can be dumped in useless neighboring countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh”), and all the more effective because the plan would garner my full support. Honestly, sometimes I think we need drastic measures like this right here in North America—my fellow Canadians, that includes you—and I can’t think of a better remedial syllabus.

Let’s set Roadside Romeo aside for a moment, since I haven’t seen it. When India pulls off its equivalent of Spirited Away, which earned its way to becoming the biggest domestic success in the history of Japanese cinema by also being one of the best animated features in recent memory, then we’ll talk. Of far greater concern is the link in the last sentence I quoted. The Cleveland Show? This is like milking a diseased cow. Is Seth MacFarlane out of his giggity mind?

I make it no secret that I consider Family Guy a televised disgrace, a cancer upon the storied art form of Walt Disney, Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Hayao Miyazaki, Nick Park, Brad Bird, and everyone else who belongs on my abbreviated list. And that’s to speak only of its offence to animation, never mind comedy (or, for that matter, Americana). I’m not sure when it became fashionable to equate “adult” animation with crude construction and crass immaturity; I grew up believing that adults were people who grew up. Maybe this is the same audience that never grew out of the adolescent sensibility of feeling too cool for cartoons.

The Family Guy franchise bothers me considerably more than the usual decadent pop-culture rot because of how it has managed to swindle so many otherwise intelligent people, possibly including Seth MacFarlane himself, into believing that it is in any way clever. It’s dumb-as-bricks entertainment that purports to be smarter than the average bear. It’s like a Dan Brown novel (which makes the ineptitude of Family Guy‘s onetime jab at The Da Vinci Code all the more ironic), though it casts a loftier net. At least trashy bestsellers fill the coffers of publishers who can then make risky gambles on unknown authors. (There was a rumour going around that Doubleday’s recent layoffs happened because they expected the next Brown novel to show up on this year’s ledger, though it was denied.) Family Guy begets more Family Guy, be it in the isomorphic stupid-to-make-you-feel-smart sitcom family of American Dad or the selfsame nucleus in The Cleveland Show. It has no excuse, and I will celebrate when it dies.

One often forgets that Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons attempted spades of pop-culture “references” (as distinguished from parody). Shorts like Hollywood Steps Out have declined into trivial irrelevance for all but the most serious collectors, and I say that as someone who recognizes classic film stars like James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson; still, at least the drawings back then were actual caricatures. And one would have to admit that 8-Ball Bunny gets a little stale by the third time Humphrey Bogart’s character from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre shows up to pester Bugs.

True classics like One Froggy Evening will prevail as they always have, as will the best of the parodies—your What’s Opera, Doc?, your Carrotblanca. And there’s no question that there’s a lot of great animation being produced today, be it in North America, India, or anywhere else. The problem is the undiscerning audience that never sees any of it, and is stuck with deplorable examples of what animation can do. Unfortunately, that audience comprises a great many people. Some of them may even be your friends. I fully support their systematic inoculation, and if we have to haul Uncle Walt out of the freezer, so be it.

In commemoration of World Animation Day, the Metro Cinema exhibited two free, back-to-back screenings of National Film Board shorts: a kids’ programme, and another one. I’m not sure what the criterion for inclusion in the children’s screening was, though the films in that package tended to be the ones with a more straightforward attitude to story.

The kids in attendance loved it, at any rate, and broke out in applause at the end. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that among children outside of packed advance screenings and Pixar opening nights. What a treat it must be to see a whole new generation of potential NFB classics at so young an age, when one pays little heed to the finer subtleties of design and technique, but bathes in the overwhelming effect; the age at which a card trick is real magic.

Here in Canada, many people my age who think they only have a casual exposure to animation probably have vague recollections of The Cat Came Back or The Log Driver’s Waltz flickering across their television sets. NFB animation is truly one of the government-funded arts initiatives that is successful even by the Stephen Harper metric, and it isn’t at all a case of nationalistic self-aggrandizement to acknowledge that it has made this country a world player. And considering how many of the best shorts come out of Quebec, I’m glad they’re still here.

As for this weekend’s films: there was a lot to like, and I reserve an especial fondness for the hysterical India-ink anachronisms of Claude Cloutier’s Isabelle au bois dormant (Sleeping Betty) and the punch line that caps off the rhythmic metamorphosis of Malcolm Sutherland’s Forming Game. But there was one film that was the very height of magnificence: Le noeud cravate (The Necktie), Jean-François Lévesque’s mixed-media meditation on the horror of the lifelong dead-end job.

Le noeud cravate was exhibited in both screenings, so I had the pleasure of seeing it twice. I don’t want to give away its most shocking moments, so a careful synopsis will do: a young man receives a striped necktie as a graduation gift, packs his accordion away, and ascends the skyscraper of the aptly named Life Inc. As he rises from floor 25 to 39, the necktie tightens around his neck like a noose, his briefcase overflows with paper, and he develops a hunch. At 40, the only three-dimensional person in an office of 2D worker drones, he wakes up to the realization that he has spent his life sitting in a dimly lit office ironing crumpled paper for no reason whatsoever—so he takes the elevator to the top floor to see what lies ahead.

More than that, I won’t say; you must see it for yourself. I haven’t seen enough of the field to know what the competition is like, but Lévesque’s piece is without a doubt comparable to the quality of past Oscar winners, and I hope it ends up on the shortlist this year.