“Oh, wouldn’t it be great if I *was* crazy? Then the world would be okay.” ~ James Cole played by Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys (1995)
One of the most interesting subjects in 12 Monkeys strikes to the very heart of reality and truth. How is it decided and how is it shaped? Who is crazy and who isn’t? Maybe just maybe our concept of reality is just a blind faith in a consensus of opinion. As Brad Pitt playing the character of Jeffrey Goines says, “You know what crazy is? Crazy is majority rules?”
I guess that is what I love about graffiti. It is by its very nature subversive to the majority. I am not saying that what I have created here is subversive in any particular way nor have a really broken new ground, but it is fun to contemplate the ways in which reality can be bent and the majorities stranglehold shaken loose.
I happened upon the original graphic on a 12 Monkeys poster which looks pretty darn amazing and I thought I would provide it for your reference.
There are some basic similarities in general shape and design, but I didn’t try to duplicate it. I was trying to do my own thing and for the first stencil I have ever made, I decided to keep things simple. I also liked the gear shape since I thought it was suggestive of a gritty tech future instead of the encircling monkeys.
All in all, I am pretty happy with the result, but somewhere on the internet some dude is saying hey those aren’t at all alike and let me let you in on a crazy little secret: they aren’t.
At the beginning of Coraline, one is presented with a lonely heroine grabbing a divining rod and wistfully following its lead. Instantly, I was brought back to when I was kid where I could be free to follow my imagination wherever it took me. It was a nice first step down the rabbit hole.
Based on the children’s book by Neil Gaiman (of The Sandman fame), the film is a marvelous display of imagery courtesy of the stop-motion genius of Henry Selick who also directed Nightmare Before Christmas.
Coraline is an isolated little girl living in a new environment with busy parents who seem to pay her little concern. An annoying neighbor boy named Whyborn (constructed especially for the screenplay), two bizarre has-been burlesque actress spinsters, a bizarre Russian gymnast, and a trickster black cat voiced by Keith David (the voice of Spawn and Goliath in the TV show Gargoyles) are her only companions.
Coraline finds a door in the wall to another reality in which her parents are attentive and loving, but in which everyone has horrific buttons sewn over their eyes. The alternate reality first is presented as the ultimate escape for an unhappy girl, but as the dream reality and the real world begin to blur, it quickly descends into something much more sinister.
Comparisons to Alice and Wonderland abound, but the movie visually breaks new ground that reinforces tried and true themes in novel ways. I have always found myself partial to these types of magical realities.
I really don’t want to give away more than that except to implore you to support this film and the artists who made it. The garden scene in particular will blow your mind with vivid colors and an amazing praying mantis tractor.
The “other mother” is also one of the best character designs I have seen for an evil witch in a while. She is certainly up there with some of the most menacing witches in film bettering some of my favorites like the Grand High Witch from Ronald Dahl’s Witches, the witch mother of the Sheriff of Nottingham in the Prince of Thieves, the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz or any of the Disney witches including those from Snow White and Sleeping Beauty.
As an artist, I am simply blown away by the surrealistic vision that was put on screen and this marvelous presentation of the dream reality. Unlike the sleek and smooth perfection of the CG realm, I could see and feel the textures of Coraline. Even the slight imperfections conveyed an eerie feeling that stayed with me throughout the movie.
My artist’s instincts believe in imperfection as a basis of conveying a reality even in a completely fantastic form. Whenever, I watch a CG film I can’t help but feel that I am being lied to. There is no doubt that Selick has achieved a new state of the art in stop-motion animation managing its weaknesses and exploiting its artistic advantages to great effect.
Watching Coraline, I just couldn’t stop thinking about the state of film animation in general. The CG Pixar films, Kung Fu Panda, Shrek, ect. have their place and I enjoy many of them, but frankly a lot of what we have been getting lately has not been all that great. It is like the difference between a digital painting and oil painting. In Coraline, I could feel the brush strokes and it didn’t feel like a lie. It was a little reality constructed painstakingly by hand.
Coraline certainly pushes the limits of what a child can handle, but I noticed a lot of children in the movie theater. In fact, I think a child exiting the theater summed up the film best. Her mother asked her how she liked the film to which she responded, “It freaked my head out.” I found this a most appropriate response to a movie that contained both a child’s greatest fears and wondrous dreams. It freaked my head out too and I loved it!
As a little bonus, check out the HBO First Look featuring Coraline and just try not to jump out of your chair to see the movie if you haven’t already:
I spent so many of my adolescent years reading and admiring comic books. I delighted in my weekly trips to the comic book store and I devoured the latest books with an unrivaled enthusiasm. I often wondered if anyone else cared about the art, the characters and the stories like I did. In fact, a well-drawn tale would sometimes take on such personal significance I could hardly believe that anyone could care as much as I did.
Maybe it was because I was a visual person and never much of a reader, or maybe it was because like most adolescents I was in search of meaning in a world that all too often felt like it had little, but I genuinely felt that I had uncovered something profound in these comic books and graphic novels which others dismissed.
It was interesting to revisit this part of my adolescence in the existentialist short The Raftman’s Razor (2005) created by Keith Bearden and Joel Haskard with illustration by Tim Lane. Somehow a very confusing part of my life was made a bit clearer.
Adrift in the sea of adolescence in search of meaning, it is often all too easy to project significance, meaning, and purpose on to anything: even to find meaning in meaninglessness. Some might argue that this is a fruitless exercise, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Is life a series of meaningless poses? Will I ever know anything? Every thinking person must resolve an existential crisis of sorts at some point in their lives and the truth is that nothing and nobody matters as much as we think it does. As the great existential thinker Kierkegaard once said, “the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die.”
I still read comic books. I still find meaning in them and the point really is that I have used them as a tool to find meaning for myself both in my art and in my life.
I saw a crappy movie last night called the Unborn, starring Odette Yustman. I like the idea of the scary movie. There are some great ones out there, but the Unborn wasn’t one of them.
*Spoilers Ahead (If you insist on wasting 11 bucks on this movie)*
Other than admiring Odette Yustman’s god-given assets, I could only uncover one redeeming idea contained in the movie: the notion of a Jewish exorcism.
I was certainly well aware of the Catholic tradition of exorcism as made famous in such flicks as The Exorcist (1973), but it never occurred to me that there was a Jewish analog to such a ceremony. Being Jewish myself, I was doubly intrigued. Why should Catholic’s have all the fun?
In the movie, I learned that there is an entity of Jewish folklore called the Dybbuk. It is described as a demon of sorts which having unfinished business on earth seeks to inhabit the soul of another. In the film, I can’t really blame the Dybbuk.
Who wouldn’t want to inhabit that?
My mom used to tell me that I was a twin and that my twin had died in the womb so I found the identical premise in The Unborn eerily familiar… hand to god.
When I got home, I found myself drawn to attic for some unknown reason as if my unborn twin was calling to me. If you are still reading this, and haven’t cried bullshit, please let me finish my tale of horror.
I found myself rummaging through ancient papers which have been in my family for centuries. Finally, I came across a parchment of paper of my Great Great Great, Great Great… Great… Aunt or something like that.
As if possessed, I found a magical pen in my hand and began to draw furiously. It seemed like hours had passed, but in fact it was only minute or two. I awoke from my trance to see the drawing above in all its frightening glory.
My Hebrew is a bit rusty, but I could read those ancient letters as if they were inscribed in my brain. Dybbuk, DYBBUK, DYBBUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU… K!
The Goat Community is a continuation of my character study of Centaur-like creatures which are half man and half goat. I plan on using them for one of my upcoming projects which will involve a war between the Centaurs and the well known rabbit Thumper along with his whole family.
What it lacks in the sheer epic mythology of barbaric Centaurs attacking Lapithae to carry off the king’s bride, it shall hopefully make up for in the pure satisfaction of the scene.
Here is a few concept sketches of a goatman character that I am designing. I am trying to give him a sense of personality and I have used some reference material from Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame.
I was told once that the only way for true character design is to take characters that already exist and “misremember” them creating a kind of remix. In this case, I took a character design from a goat and another one from a man and did just that. Hopefully, you will be seeing more of these soon.
The Cigar Man is inspired by General Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
General Ripper is a deranged lunatic who has a bizarre theory that occured to him mid-coitus that there is a Communist theory that intends to “sap and impurify” the “precious bodily fluids” of the American people through fluoridated water. Clearly, sexually frustrated and impotent, General Ripper uses the prospect of nuclear war with the Soviets to redeem his sense of potent manhood.
Kubrick was a brilliant director who had a talent for getting in the head of his audience. He had a particular ability for finding comedy in our greatest fears. Kubrick proved that there is no subject so serious that it cannot be satirized, but even still I don’t know that I can ever look at flouridated water the same way again.
Stanley Kubrick is one of my favorite directors and I did this piece in honor of him. Here’s a little life imitating art…. imitating life… imitating art…. Jay Zuck the Cigar Man!
I am illustrator in the entertainment arts focused on visual development, character design, layouts, concept art, and anything in the realm of visual storytelling. Around these parts though, I'm letting it loose Simian Style and devolving into a higher state of consciousness on the boundary of an infinite-dimensional manifold in quasi-time. There's plenty of room down this rabbit hole! Learn more About Me and check out the Portfolio.
