Flock to "Flicker Fusion"

Don't miss the powerful, curious animation screening at DiverseWorks

Comments (0) By Troy Schulze Wednesday, Jan 30 2008

I wish Colburn's Destiny Manifesto were screening here as well. It's very much a companion piece to Meet Me in Wichita in its exploration of parallels between Old West battles (cowboys and Native Americans), and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (draw your own connections).

Hands down the most entertaining video is Ich Bin Ein Manipulator by Wright & Rojas. Fashion and advertising get skewered and manipulated in this elaborate excuse to destroy magazines. Page by page, monsters emerge from fashion ads and models' faces melt off. E.T.'s head sprouts from a female mannequin's neck, one model sports a literal camel toe, Christian Bale's face morphs into an alien skull, a cow standing on a tree stump squirts milk into a model's eye, and a Buddhist monk self-immolates over a Versace ad, all set to silly ping-boing sound effects. Eventually, the video's creators let us know how they really feel about their subject, once their creative juices peak and must be, well, released. It's all tidied up and wrapped by the word "ende."

Courtesy of DiverseWorks

Fashion and advertising get skewered in Ich Bin Ein Manipulator.

Details

Through February 23.

DiverseWorks, 1117 East Fwy., 713-223-8346.

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"Flicker Fusion" has its filler, like Zhou Xiaohu's repetitive and pretentious clay animation Crowd Around, which wears out its gimmick quickly. And Home Video by Kota Ezawa never materializes into much of anything except a cartoonish suburban home in daylight and nighttime. I kept waiting for Hello Kitty to run across the screen. On the whole, though, "Flicker Fusion" is a fantastic buffet of powerful and curious animation.