By Ed Howard
The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. is the new IFC.com web series from comic artist Dash Shaw, representing his first venture into an animated series after establishing himself as one of modern comics' most innovative and unusual formalists. The series, which can be viewed in its entirety for free at the IFC site, consists of four episodes, each roughly two minutes long, applying Shaw's characteristic style—a blend of clean-line cartooning, diagrammatic precision, and stylistic collage—to the animated form. Shaw is an astonishingly precocious young artist, who in the last few years has progressed from the sketchy but intriguing formalism of his short story collection Goddess Head to the fully flowering imagination on display in his 700-page tour-de-force family drama Bottomless Belly Button and, more salient to this film, in the online strip Bodyworld and his sci-fi contributions to the Mome anthology. It's the style of these stories, which exploit Shaw's idiosyncratic use of color overlays, that directly led to the style of The Unclothed Man.
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1 comments:
That series is pretty good and I'm eager to see what else Dash Shaw (whose comics I've been meaning to read, esp. the long one) does with the medium. Web-based animation in general is really interesting and full of potential. There are quite a lot of juvenile or inept examples of it out there, but there's been some wonderfully creative, hilarious and sometimes brilliant work done, too, the most prominent example for me being the demented oeuvre of David Firth, who isn't really that much of an animator per se and might be a little too facilely sick for his own good at times but who has transcended his obvious Lynch and Python influences and forged a style of his own that can veer from dream-logic and dada to satire to parody to visceral, ugly horror without breaking tone or feeling any more schizophrenic than it should.
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