As I was reading Art In Motion, Maureen Furniss mentioned that some abstract animator have "use[ed] hallucinogenic drugs to encourage intuitive thought processes" (Furniss, 252). This got me curious as to what I knew that had been animated with the help of psychedelics, and I quickly recognized two movies that fit perfectly with this chapter and with the themes of psychedelic animation: Pink Floyd's The Wall and part of The Grateful Dead movie. With both of these clips we can see the mix of abstract animation with realist animation, but it seems as though psychedelics will drive the animator more towards a surrealist style than an abstract one.
Clip from The Grateful Dead Movie
Clip from Pink Floyd's The Wall
In both of these clips we see a subtle mix of narrative with abstraction. In The Wall, the narrative lies with the music itself, as Pink Floyd made it as a narrative album, but through the animation we can discover new links between the right and left sides of our brains. This mix of abstraction and narrative is present in The Grateful Dead Movie, as we see the beginnings of a story, a space man playing pinball, but what slowly turns into a surrealistic motorcycle trip with a dead Uncle Sam.
However, most of the animation in both films does not only on abstraction, but an elaborate mixture of abstraction and surrealism. In The Grateful Dead Movie we see mountains morphing into feet, flowers floating in mid air, and a skeleton in a suit jacket leading us on a crazy trip into the desert. However, a little after four minutes into the clip we can see a strict abstract animation develop as Uncle Sam rides into nowhere. The Wall provides similar combination of abstraction and surrealism, morphing flowers, but also giving us shots where it is hard to imagine what we are seeing.
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In watching the clip you posted from The Grateful Dead Movie, the film seemed to have somewhat of a mixed media feel to it. To be more specific, what I mean by this is that there seemed to be, at least in appearance and presentation, a mixture of different approaches to animation. I saw elements of cel animation as well as cutout. The animated Uncle Sam character kind of looked like it could have been a cutout figure based on its movement. There was also real-life imagery (photograph pictures) combined with hand drawn material. This creates a visual difference between objects in look and feel (the guy playing pinball does not look and feel the same way as Uncle Sam, the styles are drastically different) and thus this blend gives the clip an abstract feel. It could be telling a story, or be expressing a multitude of different ideas. Individuals who view this will definitely walk away with different perspectives.
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