For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see this yet, it is a contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, commissioned for the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death. Wish I could have seen the exhibition at the MOTI Museum in Holland when it all happened last year, I bet it was amazing.
PARADISE – A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.
There are a couple of good options this week. I pretty much have to see Kingsman: The Golden Circle because the first one was such a hoot. And I am a big fan of the franchise, so I will probably also check out The LEGO Ninjago Movie, having laughed my way through their Batman endeavor. But there is a wonderful animation I absolutely have to mention: Loving Vincent. This may be the first animated feature film about an artist done in that artists own painting style, and it looks amazing.
Miss Hokusai is a film by Keiichi Hara about the daughter of Katsushika Hokusai, one of the most famous artist’s of Japan. You may not know his name, but you have seen his work, like the iconic Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, of which this is one:
He was also the man who made Manga a household word meaning a picture book with words and sometimes a story, although that wasn’t his intent. Starting at the age of 55 in 1814, he wrote a series of Manga which were published every week or two as an instruction manual for his disciples and apprentices (pretty much the same thing in Japan at that time). There were only around 220 of them, so the publisher put the magazines up for sale to the public, in hopes of recouping at least part of his printing costs. Sales took off; working class people used them to to educate themselves and become more cultivated, craftsmen used the illustrations as models for their work, and the nobility and wealthy classes collected them avidly. Hokusai produced well over 1,500 of the volumes, and Manga became a mainstay of the Japanese culture. This anime is obviously a loving tribute of one artist for the work of another; I am sorry I missed it in the theaters, and will have to track down the disc or streaming service it resides on, because I really want to see it.
Over at Deviant Art the creator Breath Art has posted some excellent images of the Planets as Stained Glass in his Solar System series. I am putting a few here to give you the idea, you can click one to go directly to that images page. These are absolutely amazing, you should go take a look at the entire collection.
Ghost in the Shell Manga is how that whole universe started, when Masamune Shirow’s original graphic novel came out. But until this month, it has never been released digitally. Now it has, with the folks at Kodansha Comics offering up Ghost in the Shell in English digital format for the first time. While you can get that today, the The Ghost in the Shell Deluxe Edition won’t be coming out until January 31st, to help us all gear up for the new movie. This will be the hardcover definitive new edition supervised by Shirow himself, in the original right-to-left format with Japanese sound effects and with a ton of brand new bonus content.
Marvel’s Doctor Strange will be hitting theaters this weekend, and as a great tie in between that visually interesting comic book movie environment and the VR colonization of mainstream media in 2016, three of the best Google Tilt Brush artists are participating in a global event. In Hong Kong (Stuart Campbell), New York (Danny Bittman), and London (Steve Teeple) they will be sharing their creations for all to enjoy.