Insanely Cute Cat Commercials from Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki’s Legendary Animation Shop

in Animation | July 14th, 2015

Back in 2010, Hayao Miyazaki’s company Studio Ghibli produced a commercial for the massive food conglomerate Nissin Seifun. The spot centers on a rotund cat named Konyara who bats lazily at a red butterfly – Nissin’s logo. Konyara is rendered in simple thick, black lines that recall Japanese sumi‑e painting.

Miyazaki reportedly didn’t have much to do directly with the piece but his influence is all over it. The commercial was produced by Miyazaki’s long time collaborator Toshio Suzuki and animated by Katsuya Kondo, who did the character design for perhaps Miyazaki’s most cat-centric movie Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Another Miyazaki collaborator, pop legend Akiko Yano, did the music. More to the point, Konyara looks like some of Miyazaki’s most enduring characters from Totoro to Ponyo to the Kodama from Princess Mononoke. Adorable, elegant and vital.

The commercial was so successful that Nissin commissioned two more. The second one aired in 2012 and featured a sleepy Konyara struggling to grab 40 winks while her offspring, named Ko-Konyara (trans: Little Konyara), insists on cuddling. The calligraphy on the side reads “Always together.”

The most recent Ghibli/Nissin commercial came out a few months ago. Konyara’s brood has expanded to three – the two new cats named Kuroneko and Buchi. All three tumble into the frame as Konyara presents them with a fish while text appears reading, “I’m hungry.” When the little black kitten, who looks a lot like a soot sprite from Totoro, runs off with dinner, Konyara gives a resigned sigh. It’s an expression that anyone who has spent long periods with very young children will recognize.

You can watch all three above or here.

via Cartoon Brew

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.

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Alexander Pushkin’s Poem “The Mermaid” Brought to Life in a Masterfully Hand-Painted Animation

in Animation, Literature | July 13th, 2015

Though his name may not carry much weight in English speaking circles—his virtues “lost in translation”—no Russian writer stood as high in his time as Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). In his short life of 37 years, Pushkin—the great grandson of a captured African prince—authored two of his country’s most revered and influential works, the play Boris Godunov and the novel in verse Eugene Onegin. Like a character in that latter work, the erudite nobleman poet met his death at the hands of a supposed romantic rival “on a winter evening,” writes Phoebe Taplin in The Telegraph, when he “travelled by sleigh from Nevsky Prospekt to the Black River area of St. Petersburg, then filled with woods and dachas, where Georges D’Anthès fatally wounded him in the stomach.”

Pushkin wrote as passionately as he lived—and died. (That final duel was the last of twenty-nine he fought). His work remains viscerally compelling, even in translation: into other languages, other genres, and other media, as in the animated film above of a short poem of Pushkin’s called Rusalka, or “The Mermaid.” Animated in a masterful hand-painted style by Russian artist and filmmaker Alexander Petrov, the film tells the story of a monk who falls in love with a beautiful and dangerous mythical water spirit. You can read a paraphrase, translation, and interpretation of the poem here. I recommend watching the ten-minute film first. Though presented in Russian without subtitles, you will—even if you don’t speak Russian—find yourself seduced.

Petrov, who painstakingly paints his images on glass with oils, has also adapted the work of other dramatic writers, including another fellow Russian artist, Dostoevsky. His take on Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea won an Academy Award in 2000, and most deservedly so. Petrov does not adapt literary works so much as he translates them into light, shadow, and sound, immersing us in their textures and images. His Rusalka, just like the poem on which it’s based, speaks directly to our imaginations.

Find more literary animations in the Animation section of our collection, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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10 Rules for Writers by Etgar Keret, the Israeli Master of the Short and Strange

in Books, Creativity, Literature, Writing | July 13th, 2015

Etgar Keret, above, is a best selling author and award-winning filmmaker with the soul of a teenage zine publisher. He’s a master of the strange and short who plays by his own rules. This sounds like a recipe for outsider status but Keret frequently pops up in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and on public radio’s This American Life.

The child of Holocaust survivors told Tikkun that he began writing stories as a way out of his miserable existence as a stuttering 19-year-old soldier in the Israeli army. This may explain why he’s so generous with young fans, handing his stories over to them to interpret in short films and animations.

When Rookie, a website for teenage girls, invited him to share ten writing tips, he playfully obliged. It’s worth noting that he refrained from prescribing something that’s a staple of other authors’ tip lists — the adoption of a daily writing practice. As he told the San Francisco Bay Guardian:

For me, the term “writing routine” sounds like an oxymoron. It is a bit like saying “having-a-once-in-a-lifetime-insight-which-makes-you-want-to burst-into-tears routine.”

With no further ado, here are his ten rules for writers, along with a liberal sprinkling of some of my favorite Keret stories.

1. Make sure you enjoy writing.

You won’t find Keret comparing his chosen profession to opening a vein. As he told Rookie:

Writing is a way to live another life…be grateful for the opportunity to expand the scope of your life.

2. Love your characters.

…though few will ever seem as lovable as the girl in Goran Dukic’s charming animation of Keret’s story “What Do We Have In Our Pockets?” below.

3. When you’re writing, you don’t owe anything to anyone.

Don’t equate loving your characters with treating them nicely. See Keret’s story “Fungus.”

4. Always start from the middle.

This is perhaps Keret’s most conventional tip, though his writing shows he’s anything but conventional when it comes to locating that middle. His novella, Kneller’s Happy Campers (on which the film Wristcutters: A Love Story, starring Tom Waits, was based) manages to start at the beginning, middle and end.

5. Try not to know how it ends.

At the very least, be prepared to dig yourself out to a different reality, like the narrator in Keret’s very short story “Mystique,” read below by actor Willem Dafoe.

6. Don’t use anything just because “that’s how it always is.”

Here, Keret is referring to what he termed “the shrine of form” in an interview with his great admirer, broadcaster Ira Glass, but his content is similarly unfettered. If your writing’s become bogged down by reality, try introducing a magic fish who’s fluent in everything, as in “What, of This Goldfish, Would You Wish?,” read by author Gary Shteyngart, below.

7. Write like yourself.

Leave the critics holding the bag on comparisons to Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut and Woody Allen, Lydia Davis, Amos Oz, Donald Barthelme…

8. Make sure you’re all alone in the room when you write.

um…Etgar? Does this mean I have to give up my coffice?

9. Let people who like what you write encourage you.

Nerts to underminers, frenemies, withering internal editors, and deliberately hateful reviewers!

10. Hear what everyone has to say but don’t listen to anyone (except me).

Read the Rookie interview in which Keret expands on his rules.

via Rookie

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel

in Art, Travel | July 13th, 2015

Earlier this year, we featured vintage Japanese print advertisements from the golden age of Art Deco and for such products as beer, sake, and cigarettes. If you like that sort of thing, you might consider paying attention to the recently launched Branding in Asia, a site detected to covering “the art of branding” as expressed in “the exciting new ideas and concepts exploding from the mind of Asia” — or the exciting old ideas and concepts which, aesthetically speaking, remain pretty explosive still.

Take, for instance, their collection of classic Japanese steamship ads. “In the early part of the 20th century,” writes Steph Aromdee, “Japan’s increasingly prosperous middle class was taking to the high seas for travel. One company, the Japan Mail Steamship, advertised heavily, hoping to attract would-be tourists to their luxury ships. What were likely at the time regarded as simple advertisements and brochures that simply showed departures and destinations, have today become viewed as stunning works of art.”

Here we’ve excerpted a few such advertisements from their impressive selection which, as you can see, ranges artistically from the stylized to the realistic, and conceptually from the practical to the purely evocative. They might entice readers onto a steamship voyage with an Art Deco bathing beauty, a contrast of human traveler against mountain’s majesty, a detailed map enumerating a variety of possible destinations, or, as in the case of deer-filled Nara, a scattering of local icons.

The age of the steamship has, of course, long since dissolved into the romantic past, even in Japan. Or perhaps I should say especially in Japan, whose shinkansen bullet train not only put every other mode of transport straight into obsolescence, but — at least to my mind — also boasts a cutting-edge romance of its own.

And so these advertisements, more than 70 years after their printings, still get me planning my next trip to Japan, a country that knows a thing or two about desire and place. “Even in Kyoto,” wrote 17th-century poet Matsuo Bashō, “I long for Kyoto.”

via Branding in Asia

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Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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Read the First Chapter of Harper Lee’s New Book, Then Hear It Read by Reese Witherspoon

in Audio Books, Books | July 10th, 2015

After much press and debate, Harper Lee’s new novel — a sequel of sorts to her beloved book, To Kill a Mockingbird — will be released on July 14th. You can pre-order Go Set a Watchman: A Novel (already #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list). But, even better, you can head over to the The Wall Street Journal or The Guardian and read the first chapter online. The Guardian also features an audio version read by the Oscar-winning actress Reese Witherspoon. Stream it right below. (And, fyi, you can always download a free audio copy of To Kill a Mockingbird through the free trial programs run by Audiobooks.com and Audible.com.)

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With Medieval Instruments, Band Performs Classic Songs by The Beatles, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Metallica & Deep Purple

in Music | July 10th, 2015

We’ve seen Europeans cover famous rock and metal bands in an American folk style—Finnish musicians playing AC/DC, Iron Maiden, and Dio in Appalachian folk, to be exact. Now, prepare to hear famous rock and metal bands in a distinctively European folk style: Medieval Belarusian folk, played by the beautifully named Stary Olsa. The band’s name derives from a stream in East Belarus—their clothing, instrumentation, and rhythms from an early Lithuanian state called the Grand Duchy—but the songs are all 20th century radio fodder. Above, see them do Deep Purple’s “Child in Time,” and below, they tackle the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Californication.”

Stary Olsa’s cover of Metallica’s “One” (further down), already an incredibly dramatic song, works particularly well in their syncopated Spartan style. The sounds and costuming of the accomplished Belarusian musicians will inevitably remind you—if you haven’t been under a rock in Belarus—of that Medieval-style fantasy show in which your favorite characters meet horribly violent ends week after week.

When we look at the bloody history of Medieval Europe, the gruesomeness of Westeros can seem like only a slight exaggeration—dragons and ice zombies aside—of the so-called “dark ages.” These associations, and the solemnity of the song selection and starkness of the voices and instruments, lend Stary Olsa’s performances a gravitas that, frankly, elevates some of the material far above its pop origins (I’m looking at you, Red Hot Chili Peppers).

In order for such meldings of styles, periods, and cultures to work, whether they be played for laughs or deeply serious, the musicianship must be top notch. Such was the case with Finnish bluegrass metal cover band Steve ‘N’ Seagulls, and such is certainly the case with Stary Olsa, who have appeared on Belarusian TV (from which some of these videos come) and are currently finding a level of popularity outside their native country that few Belarusian bands have achieved. It’s unlikely we’ll see them soon on the rock festival circuit, but their status as an internet sensation is all but guaranteed. Just below, see the band translate a medley of The Beatles’ “Obla-La-Di, Ob-La-Da” and “Yellow Submarine” into their musical idiom, proving that they don’t just do dark, haunting, and mysterious; they’re also positively danceable.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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The 321 Books in David Foster Wallace’s Personal Library: From Blood Meridian to Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder

in Books | July 10th, 2015

Not long after David Foster Wallace died, his fans found themselves with a new place of pilgrimage: not his tombstone, in the manner of a Jim Morrison or a Kurt Cobain, but his literary archives. You’ll find them at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. From their collection, we’ve previously featured Wallace’s fall 1994 English 102 syllabus from when he taught at Illinois State University, his English 183A handout breaking down (in the way that only he could) five common usage mistakes, and the language books contained in his personal library.

Any reader even casually acquainted with Wallace’s novels and essays will immediately sense his deep interest in language. But if you browse through the Ransom Center’s collection of 321 books from the author of Infinite Jest and A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again’s own shelves (most of them seemingly well-annotated), you’ll find a good deal of evidence about what else interested him. The Awl’s Maria Bustillos did a post on the surprising variety of self-help books found therein. Other represented types of books include:

Mass-market thrillers like Thomas Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal and Hannibal Rising, and Stephen King’s Carrie
The novels of his peers like Rick Moody’s The Diviners, Richard Powers’ Gain, Galatea 2.2, and Operation Wandering Soul, Mark Leyner’s Et Tu, Babe and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, Jonathan Franzen’s Strong Motion, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and Nicholson Baker’s Room Temperature
Books he wrote about like Bryan Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage, Edwin Williamson’s Borges: A Life, John Updike’s Toward the End of Time
Books on his own work like William C. Dowling’s A Reader’s Companion to Infinite Jest
Books on the midwest from which he came like A Place of Sense: Essays in Search of the Midwest
Books clearly used as research materials for his final, incomplete, IRS-centric novel The Pale King like Michael J. Graetz’s The U.S. Income Tax: What It Is, How It Got That Way, and Where We Go from Here, William L. Raby’s The Reluctant Taxpayer, and Marty Kaplan’s What the IRS Doesn’t Want You to Know: A CPA Reveals the Tricks of the Trade
My own favorite novels like Joseph Heller’s Something Happened, Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, and Alexander Theroux’s Darconville’s Cat

Have a look, and maybe you too can find a few of your own current or future favorite books. We could all do worse, after all, than to read like David Foster Wallace did, even if it leads us to the occasional volume like Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder; Barbed Wire: A Political History; or Jack B. Nimble’s The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories. And for a weekend activity, we could do worse than comparing Wallace’s personal library to that of Marilyn Monroe, which we featured last year.

David Foster Wallace’s Love of Language Revealed by the Books in His Personal Library

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David Foster Wallace: The Big, Uncut Interview (2003)

30 Free Essays & Stories by David Foster Wallace on the Web

Colin Marshall writes on cities, language, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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CERN’s Cosmic Piano and Jazz Pianist Jam Together at The Montreux Jazz Festival

in Music, Physics | July 10th, 2015

The Montreux Jazz Festival — the second largest jazz festival in the world — has seen many acts come and go since it kicked off in 1967. Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Nina Simone, Bill Evans and Ella Fitzgerald have all played there. And now we have the first concert performed by a jazz pianist (Al Blatter) and The Cosmic Piano, an instrument created by particle physicists at CERN, the home of the Large Hadron Collider, in Switzerland. The Cosmic Piano works something like this: “When a cosmic ray passes through one of four separate detector pads of the Cosmic Piano, it triggers a musical note and a colourful flash of light.” The rays arrive in random intervals, and once they’re combined with Blatter’s notes, you get some interesting polyrhythmic jazz. Catch a few highlights above, and get more background information and video clips on CERN’s web site.

via @matthiasrascher

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