Anna and Bella is an 1 984Oscar award winning short film by Danish director Borge Ring. It follows the lives of two sisters from childhood to reincarnation (don’t miss the last seconds). Beautiful and moving.
(Link: Lex. Thanks!)
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Voyage To Next – Faith & John Hubley (1974)
3 JunThe mother and father of the world are wondering at the follies of their human children. An anti-materialistic, anti-nationalistic film created by Faith and John Hubley, sponsored by “The Institute for World Order” with an original and beautiful soundtrack by the one and only Dizzy Gillespie.
(Link: Lex. Thanks!)
Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards
29 May
The film is an allegorical comment on the moral neutrality of technology and the potentially destructive powers of propaganda. Blackwolf’s secret weapon is propaganda, used to incite and motivate his legions and terrorize the good fairy folk of Montagar; Blackwolf also utilizes technology for evil ends. However, in the end, it is Avatar’s willingness to use a technological tool (a handgun pulled from “up his sleeve”) which saves them all. Bakshi also states that Wizards “was about the creation of the state of Israel and the Holocaust, about the Jews looking for a homeland, and about the fact that fascism was on the rise again”.
The Soil & The Sun – “Prolegomenon”
18 MaySome of you might remembers the Spiritual Cuisine video featured here in 2011. Here is another psychedelic food video, a stop motion mandala created from peppers rice, peanuts, kale, Coffee beans, and spices.
Shugo Tokumaru “Katachi”
4 MayThis video was made from 2000 silhouettes extracted from PVC plates using a computer-controlled cutter. Beautiful.
(Link: 6dmind. Thanks!)
Psychedelic Oldies – Pre-1945 hallucinogenic videos
27 AprFor its 3rd birthday the DPV is featuring a series of psychedelic videos specials which will run between the 22 and the 28 of April 2013. Stay tuned for more of our psychedelic specials.
It is surprising how many of the earliest films contained psychedelic elements. In the field of animation especially one finds not only many psychedelically styled videos, but even 1920s videos focusing on the mind-altering effects of drugs. And while these films don’t feature the fancy CGI effects of today’s videos, they have a special kind of charm.
Emil Cohl – Fantasmagorie (1908)
“Fantasmagorie” by French caricaturist and animator Emil Cohl,“the father of animated cartoon”, is considered by film historians to be the first animated cartoon.
Watching Fantasmagorie today, the inherently psychedelic character of animation becomes even clearer. The film make me think about how it must have been for the first viewers of this video, one of the earliest of animations, when they watched it more than a hundred years ago. How did they react to the fantastical world on the screen in which things appear out of nowhere, and bottles of wine are transformed into flowers? Interestingly, it is right after our hero, who removes many hats worn by the lady in the front, arrives at a smaller hat, which makes the woman look like a mushroom (0:29), that weird things start happening…
Emil Cohl – Hasher’s Delirium (1910)
Two years after Fantasmagorie, the topic of intoxication becomes explicit in another video by Cohl titled “Hasher’s Delirium”. In this video our hero, who drinks wine and absinthe in a restaurant, enters into various states of delusion. The psychedelic transformations of objects reach new levels here.
Walter Ruttman – “Das Wunder” – Kantorowicz liquor commercial (1922)
This highly amusing early Kantorowicz liquor commercial was created by experimental film maker Walter Ruttmann at a time when alcohol was already illegal in the US. The Kantorowicz liquor is created by a magician who uses the basic elements of the universe. Later the liquor performs the impressing feat of appeasing the angry and fighting men, eventually even making them kiss each other. No wonder the film is called “The Wonder”…
Pat Sullivan – Felix the cat – Felix dines and pines (1926) (Trippy sequence starts at 4:13)
Silent era’s Felix the cat went on occasional and sometimes unintended hallucinatory trips. In this first video from 1926 Felix eats some food from the garbage and consequently enters a long and highly trippy hallucination.
Pat Sullivan – Felix the Cat – Woos Whoope (1928)
In this video from 1928, Felix drinks too much in Whoopee Club and enters into a state of delirium full of intimidating hallucinations.
Max Fleischer – Betty Boop Nitrous Oxide film (1934) (Trippy sequence starts at 4:00)
American animator Max Fleischer created a number of drug-related videos, some of which were already featured in the post about Terence McKenna’s taste for psychedelic animations.
Still one has to have a Fleischer video in a post about psychedelic oldies. Here is one my favorites. His nitrous oxide video… The funny trippy part starts at around 4:00)
Oskar Fischinger – Allegretto (1936)
German-American abstract-animator Oskar Fischinger had to fight for his film “Allegretto”. The video which was created by Fischinger in 1936 in synchronization with a tune by Ralph Rainger, was altered by Paramount Pictures who changed the Technicolor imagery to B&W, and intercut the abstract images with live action scenes. Fischinger eventually asked to be let out of his contract, and completed the film by himself in a way which suited his vision. The colorful result, which remains visually engaging even today, is considered “one of the most-screened and successful films of visual music’s history.”
Walt Disney – Fantasia (1940) (Trippy sequence starts at 5:00)
Disney’s Fantasia (1940) was an unprecedented orgy of colorful splashes, and colorful rainbows.
The whole film is psychedelic in style, but the sequence above is particularly distinguished for its synesthetic qualities.
The name “Fantasia” in itself alluded to a fantastic other-worldly land, perhaps the kind which can be discovered through the ingestion of substances from a chemical family which was known at the time as the “Phantastica”.
This might be a bit farfetched, but maybe not. Acording to Peter Stafford’s “Psychedelic Encyclopedia” the chief visualist for Disney’s Fantasia (1940) participated in the mescaline experiments conducted in Germany by Kurt Beringer in the 1920′s. Artist Paul Laffoley claims that Disney himself experimented with Mescaline “On a regular basis” during his stay in Germany in the 1930′s. Many other theories regarding the relations between Disney and psychedelics exist, and you can find out about some of them here in this fascinating article.
Walt Disney – Dumbo the flying elephant (1941)
A year after Fantasia, Disney released Dumbo the Flying Elephant. In it Dumbo starts drinking the contents of a bucket, following which he begins to hallucinate highly peculiar visions, which you can see in the scene above.
CATNIP: EGRESS TO OBLIVION?
16 MarAn educational anti-catnip video done in the style of 1960’s anti-drug propaganda. Hilarious.
Psychedelic dream
13 Marhttp://www.dailymotion.com/video/xkj9wz_reve-psychedelique_creation
A french team trying to render dream effetcs and feelings in their short movie productions!
Terence McKenna on Psychedelic Animation
9 Mar
A few months before Terence McKenna passed away, he gave a last interview to countercultural writer and pundit Erik Davis. The interview, which has since gained mythical status can be listened to on YouTube or downloaded as a podcast from the “Psychedelic Salon” website.
Listening to it recently, my attention was caught by the part in which McKenna discusses the metaphysical meaning of animation and the part where he names some of his favorite cartoons. I then searched YouTube to find some of the cartoons he mentions and enjoyed them quite a bit.
What follows is the transcribed section of the interview in which Terence discusses animation and then the actual psychedelic animation videos which Terence mentions in the interview.
Terence McKenna on Psychedelic Animations – From Erik Davis’s last interview with Terence McKenna
“I encourage everybody to think about animation, and think about it in practical terms. To look at objects, and pose these things to themselves as a model of old problems, because out of that will come a language rich enough to support an actual form of human communication that’s been very elusive and maybe never at hand at all.”
“It’s very interesting when you talk to people or listen to people, how many people who take psychedelics have cartoon-like encounters with beings. And you say: Gee, this is weird, cartoons only go back to 1920 or 1915 or something. How weird that an out there technical phenomena could just grab a whole section of human psychology and camp there with that kind of tenacity. And to me that indicates it has an archetypal claim on that territory”
***
“Well, The great genius of Disney… Disney is my idea of – beyond Edison and Ford or anybody – of what we really mean by an American genius. Because he had mice who wear gloves living inside his head, but he was able to create a mechanical technology to show people these mice. So instead of just being put quietly away by his brother or something like that, he said: “No, no, you don’t understand. Money! This is worth money! If we can show people these glove wearing mice and talking ducks and all this stuff.”
“And then he was a sufficiently American Yankee genius that he saw how to take a flip book and put it on celluloid and do all that. Yeah, I think Disney is a very very far out person. He went to the platonic ideas and came back with baskets full of [???] released them in American towns and cities, and did very well.”
Erik Davis: “Animation is a great place to see the reflection of things that are happening at the culture at large.”
Mckenna: “And certain people take it to incredible Heights. Do you know that animation called “Asparagus”? You should check it out. It’s about 20 – maybe it’s 15-20 years old – but it’s very highly detailed, as realistic as a van Eyck painting, and totally surreal. Also, do you know that one by Sally Cruikshank called “Quasi at the Quackadero”? that’s a DMT extravaganza carnival basically, a cartoon carnival, but a carnival crazy enough to convince you you should go take drugs basically. And Max Fleischer is a genius and all these people.”
“Absolute psychedelic genius”. Robert crumb
Erik Davis: “Fleischer is great. I think Fleischer is the true origin of underground comics. I think you find the most pregnant images of a certain kind of seedy – like the way that Robert Crumb presents a certain kind of seediness – and sort of failure of the bodies and spaces, and yet that’s infused with a kind of like magical eye. So you really have that both in Fleischer. You really have the mania of the Betty Boom but also a certain kind of quotidian, almost proletarian graininess to these characters.”
McKenna: “Yes, it would be very hard to imagine postmodernity without Crumb’s input. I consider him an absolute psychedelic genius. Very few people have had the influence without the karma that crumb had. He basically did all that stuff, sold the drawings and moved to a chateaux in southern France and called it quits. And got away with it.”
Asparagus – Susan Pitt (1979)
Suzan Pitt’s Asparagus was screened together with David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” for two years on the midnight movie circuit. It has a loose plot, lots of phallic imagery and surreal, psychedelic content.
Quasi at the Quackadero – Sally Cruikshank (1975)
Quasi at the Quackadero is about two ducks and a pet robot who visit a futuristic psychedelic amusement park in which you can view your thoughts, watch yesterday’s dreams, or go visit the past.
Max Fleischer Videos
Max Fleischer was one of the leading pioneers of American animation who worked in animation since the 1910s. He invented the Rotroscope technique which has since been used in films such as Waking Life and Scanner Darkly, as well as a number of other animation techniques. Fleischer’s biggest animation stars were Betty Boop, Bimbo and Popeye the Sailorman. A few of his videos were already featured here on the DPV: Betty Boop – Ha Ha Ha, Bimbo’s Initiation and the Saint James Infirmary Blues in Betty Boop’s Snow White.
Wikipedia says has this to say about Fleischr’s style of animation:
“Fleischer cartoons were very different from Disney cartoons, in concept and in execution. The Fleischer approach was sophisticated, focused on surrealism, dark humor, adult psychological elements and sexuality. The Fleischer milieu was grittier, more urban, sometimes even sordid, often set in squalid tenement apartments with cracked, crumbling plaster and threadbare furnishings. Even the jazz music on Fleischer’s soundtracks was rawer, saucier, more fitting with the unflinching Fleischer look at America’s multicultural scene.”
Below are three short and psychedelic animations by Fleischer Studios. The first one was banned because of the explicit use of nitrous oxide. In the second one, Betty Boop and her partner Bimbo sell a magic potion by the name of “Jippo”, which can cure every malady and cause fantastic transformations. The third one follows Bimbo through his incredible psychic initiation.
Betty Boom – Ha Ha Ha (Nitrous oxide video – Don’t miss the part starting on 4:00)
Betty Boom M.D.
Bimbo’s Initiation
The Daily Psychedelic Video 