- Jan 24, 2022

✧ MIFA - 0.01 ✧

Musings, Inspirations, Features, Aesthetics

This is my personal dork center where I share things I like and dork out. This time about stop-motion animation and my bad music taste.

digital drawing inspired by La Casa Lobo (2018)

FILM

Recently, the Criterion Channel was streaming a bunch of excellent animated works both older and more contemporary. I’ve always been enchanted by stop-motion in particular, (Svankmajer and the like!) and ton of these films were leaving the streaming service at the end of December. So, naturally, I spent December 31st watching as many films on my list as I could reasonably handle before they turned into pumpkins at midnight lol.

✧ La Casa Lobo/The Wolf House (2018) is one of the films I watched that day, and immediately captured my imagination (as seen in the illustration above!) It’s so visually impressive, and the eerie premise had me analyzing and thinking about every word, movement, motif, etc. Watching what is essentially a house full of sculptures come alive and tell a story is such a wonder. The love, care, and commitment this team of artists and filmmakers undertook to make this film is truly incredible, and it shows in every single frame.

✧ As much as I love me some of the aforementioned Jan Svankmajer, I haven’t actually been able to access and watch a number of his films, so I desperately wanted to watch Faust (1994) before it left Criterion as well. And of course, I fucking loved this film. It’s simply the tale of Faust, but obviously in the most Svankmajer way, full of puppets and clay and old things and food textures, all of which I am clearly and unabashedly partial to. Also for whatever reason I found it really refreshing to watch a film that has absolutely no dialogue at all for like, the first 30 minutes. Sometime just creaky noises and visuals is all I need to stay captivated lol.

IDK, I’m just a simple man that loves Czech cinema in a way that I have yet to figure out how to explain.

A BAD PLAYLIST

I always love the magic of finding new music to listen to. I grew up listening to whatever my parents downloaded on Napster, whatever my older brother discovered and showed me, whatever was on the radio or TV. Soon that graduated into whatever CDs I could rip from my local library, whatever label’s compilation album I was handed out at Warped Tour, and whatever I could download from sketchy blogs full of pages with links to free RAR and ZIP files.

I've never had a very consistent taste in music. I like all the things I like for various different reasons, but at the end of the day I like them because something resonates with me and I just do. I’ve also never been very good at making playlists and mix CDs for this reason, a lot of it is pure whim and what I “feel” like and understandably most people don’t know how to make sense of someone else’s whims and wills and whatnot. But I think that it’s kind of fun, trying to parse out why these things got put in a category together when they’re all seemingly different.

This is all to say, I wanna share some tunes I’ve been listening to in this sort of ~bad compilation album~ style because I know people are always looking for things to listen to and my taste is kind of eclectic and especially bad but I'm trying to not care; so, this is my service to others with bad taste maybe looking for the same thing.

This playlist is a compilation of songs I was listening to while feeling absolutely pathetic. I was holding onto things that needed to be let go, but I wasn’t sure where I was supposed to go after moving on either. But I was also holding onto things for comfort, which I also greatly needed. So consider this like, the soundtrack to my weird internal tug-of-war between self-loathing and self-preservation. Also I’ve been listening to a lot of power metal lately because it’s something I find very comforting (Power Metal and City Pop are what bring me the most comfort these days?? lol)