Russian Winnie the Pooh - Fyodor Khitruk (1969)

Comparing different versions of familiar stories can be a great example of how many ways there are to see the world.  The video above is a fascinating example: Winnie-the-Pooh or Vinni-Pukh (1969) by Russian animator Fyodor Khitruk.

Created between 1969 and 1972, Khitruk's three films star a bear named "Vinni-Pukh" who looks nothing like the Winnie the Pooh that Westerners grew up with.  But viewers will certainly recognize the storyline and spirit of the original Pooh in the Soviet adaptations.  For decades, these films have enchanted Eastern European viewers, both young and old.  And they still occasionally appear on Russian TV.

Watch Winnie-the-Pooh Goes on a Visit (1971):



And Winnie-the-Pooh and the Day of Concern (1972) in two parts:





Via Open Culture

An Anglerfish's Last Meal - Natural History Museum

In 1999, near the Cape Verde Islands, “an unusually large Caulophryne pelagica, a fanfin or hairy anglerfish, was captured in perfect condition, due perhaps to a lethargy induced by a prodigious meal which had expanded the stomach in excess of the standard length.” Not long after, the rare, deep-sea specimen was a part of the Natural History Museum‘s collection in London.

Only 17 examples of the hairy anglerfish have been discovered thus far, and this was the largest, so scientists were reluctant to cut it open for examination. However, a 3D scan of the fish could easily reveal its huge last meal.

Hummingbird Frenzy

Turn up the volume and listen to this Hummingbird Frenzy around a cluster of eight hummingbird feeders on a back patio. The happy swarm was filmed by YouTuber Duane Reid in Valley Center, California in August. How many hummingbirds can you count? Reid writes of his wife’s hobby:

Lunchtime for Cheryl’s Hummers! Enjoy the frenzy. Over 150 hummingbirds feeding at the same time. Starts out with only one or two, then builds up to a swarm, so view it thru till the end to see them all. Notice the different colors and markings?

Star Trek Double Knit Scarf

Colosse - A Wood Tale

Collosse – A Wood Tale, directed by Yves Geleyn: a short film about the meeting of a robot marionette and a little bird.

Le Merle (1958) - Norman McLaren

Le Merle (the Blackbird) is a cutout animation directed in 1958 by cinematic innovator Norman McLaren. Based on a French-Canadian folksong, the story tells of a bird who loses a beak, a neck, eyes, wings, legs, etc, and then finds them in duplicate and triplicate.

The Chandelier Tree

Over the course of six years, Adam Tenenbaum turned his Silver Lake, California front yard tree into one that was filled with the warm light of 30 vintage chandeliers. In this short, filmmaker Colin Kennedy (who lives down the street) talks with Adam about how this public art project began.

T. S. Eliot Reads T. S. Eliot

Did you know T.S. Eliot’s portentous and heavily allusive 1922 masterpiece “The Waste Land” was originally titled “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” a quote from Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend? Filled with references to Dante’s Divine Comedy, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and James Frazier’s The Golden Bough, this most famous of high modernist poems—scourge of millions of college freshman each year—was a very different animal before notorious modernist impresario Ezra Pound got his hands on it. Pound’s heavy reworking is responsible for the poem you hear above, read by Eliot himself. The first image in the video shows Pound’s marginal annotations.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

In the video above listen to Eliot read his second-most famous work, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with the text of the poem choreographed by Wordookie, an open-source version of Wordle.  “Prufrock,” first published in 1915, is as dense with literary allusions as “The Waste Land” (and thus as painful for the average undergraduate). And if Eliot’s reedy alto doesn’t deliver "Prufrock"'s gravitas for you, listen to Anthony Hopkins read it.

Interview with Dr. Kathy Ann Miller - KQED Science

In this Science on the SPOT: Preserving the Forest of the Sea, watch Kathy Ann Miller, PhD, curator of the University Herbarium at the University of California – Berkeley, as she shares the wide variety of seaweeds in the collection.

I love when someone gives a personalized video tour of their work, especially when it mixes nature, science and beautiful, art-like specimens all together. Kathy and her team are digitizing samples of 80,000 kinds of seaweed collected from the North American west coast, so that they can be shared online with researchers from around the globe. You can read more about the project here.

Streamschool (Patakiskola) - Peter Vacz

Streamschool (Patakiskola) by Péter Vácz: Inspired by a Hungarian poem, this beautifully-textured stop motion piece about growing up tells the story of a little girl who travels with a river to the sea. The version above is in Hungarian with English subtitles, but it’s also available in French: L’école des ruisseaux.

Plus! Notes on how it was made. 

Ryan (Short) - Chris Landreth

Winner of the 2005 Oscar® for Best Short Animation This Oscar®-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Ryan is living every artist's worst nightmare - succumbing to addiction, panhandling on the streets to make ends meet. Through computer-generated characters, Landreth interviews his friend to shed light on his downward spiral. Some strong language. Viewer discretion is advised. Directed by Chris Landreth - 2004

The Silence Beneath the Bark (Short) - Joanna Lurie

A tender fairy tale about discovery and growing up, this is The Silence Beneath the Bark, Le silence sous l’écorce (2010), by Joanna Lurie. Read more about the film here. 

Make Puppets with Jim Henson (1969)

This video is 15 full minutes of amazing. And the best part of watching is that these puppet activities will no doubt inspire kids of all ages to create their own muppet-like characters. Watch Jim Henson and muppet designer and builder Don Sahlin demonstrate how to make puppets from socks, tennis balls, cloth, wooden spoons, potatoes, and other things you can find around the house.

This pre-Sesame Street video aired on Public Television on Iowa Public Television’s Volume See kids’ show in 1969.

More about Sahlin’s work on Muppet Fandom:

He is “the inventor” of the Muppet look, from a design point of view. As discussed in the book Jim Henson’s Designs and Doodles, many of the Muppets began as Henson’s rough sketches, which Sahlin then built and modified as needed… Sahlin was known to refer to himself as the “guardian of the essence” of the Muppets.

Beyond building specific characters, Sahlin contributed two significant concepts to the Muppet aesthetic, “the Magic Triangle” and “the Henson stitch.” The former was a simple but effective approach to positioning eyes, creating a triangle in relation to the nose and mouth. Jim Henson explained the importance of eye placement: “It would be the last thing [Sahlin] would do, and he always wanted me there, to make sure it was right for both of us — making sure the eyes had a point of focus, because without that you had no character.”

The stitch is a specific method of sewing cloth as tightly as possible so the seams would be “nearly invisible,” thus aiding the illusion of stylized “reality” when characters were filmed in close-up. This technique, dubbed the “Henson stitch” by Sahlin, does not in fact create a truly invisible seam, but worked sufficiently for television purposes (hiding, for example, the seam down the middle of Kermit the Frog’s snout).

The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem - Amy Uyematsu

The Meaning of Zero: A Love Poem
by Amy Uyematsu

--Is where space ends called death or infinity?
Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

A mere eyelid's distance between you and me.

It took us a long time to discover the number zero.

John's brother is afraid to go outside.
He claims he knows
the meaning of zero.

I want to kiss you.

A mathematician once told me you can add infinity
to infinity.

There is a zero vector, which starts and ends
at the same place, its force
and movement impossible
to record with
rays or maps or words.
It intersects yet runs parallel
with all others.

A young man I know
wants me to prove
the zero vector exists.
I tell him I can't,
but nothing in my world
makes sense without it.

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

Cookpad bills itself as having the "Best Japanese recipes from the largest cooking community in Japan." And that's not just your usual web site hyperbole. Established back in 1997, Cookpad houses 1.5 million recipes created by a base of 20 million users. And it's now a publicly-traded company on the Tokyo stock exchange. This week, Cookpad did everyone in the Anglophone world a favor by releasing an English-language version of its site. Right now, you can navigate your way through 1,500 recipes and find dishes like Udon with Thick Egg Soup, Very Delicious Stir-fried Tofu with Shimeji Mushrooms, and Pan-Fried Autumn Salmon with Ginger Sauce. And if you're patient, you'll soon find another 30,000 recipes added to the site. It's worth noting that all recipes are translated by humans, not computers, and the translators are apparently compensated for their efforts.

via The Next Web

Sorry I'm Late Stop Motion Animation - Keith Henniff

Sorry I'm Late from Keith Kenniff | Helios, Goldmund on Vimeo.

Shooting stop-motion straight down on the ground is such a great way to animate. In Sorry I’m Late (2009), written and directed by Tomas Mankovsky, a man tries to reach his destination by bus, bicycle, horse, hot air balloon, shark, and car.

The life-sized stop-motion is all filmed from above in an auditorium in London, with props arranged on the floors and sometimes held directly in front of the camera.

The endeavor required lots of tests, and trial and error. See how they put it all together here: sorry-im-late.com.