Partly Cloudy

Everybody knows that storks deliver babies, but.... where do the storks get their babies from?

Thank you, MJP!

The Danish Poet

The Danish Poet is was written, directed, and animated by Torill Kove and narrated by Liv Ullmann.It has won an Academy Award (2007) and a Genie Award (2007) for best animated short film. It follows a poet called Kaspar, whom his psychiatrist suggests to travel to Norway to meet a famous writer called Sigrid Undset. Little was he to know that the bad weather, an angry dog, a slippery plank, a careless postman, hungry goats and a broken thumb would change his destiny.... Or, how seemingly unrelated factors might play important roles in the big scheme of things after all.

Borrowed ideas - Case Studies from the Groat Center for Sleep Disorders and Her Morning Elegance

Intertextuality as a concept was first introduced by Bulgarian-French philosopher Julia Kristeva in 1966. Kristeva didn't believe a text could be an isolated entity which operates in a self-contained manner. Any text, she said, is the absorption and transformation of another. Meaning, it could be an author borrowing and transforming a prior text, or a reference to one text in doing another. However, intertextuality is too often used to excuse plagiarism, as one of my favorite Spanish writers, Lucia Etxebarria, has done on a couple of occasions. I still like her books, but one does wonder where true creation begins and "inspiration" ends.

Her Morning Elegance was the release single from the album The Opposite Side of the Sea (2009) by Israeli artist Oren Lavie.; the video was directed by Eyal Landesman and Yuval & Merav Nathan:

When I start looking for trivia of Her Morning Elegance video, I was far to imagine that I would bump into yet another intertextuality case. It turns out the makers of Her Morning Elegance had taken one of Mitchell Rose's films as a source for their own video, borrowing more than a couple of ideas from it. Rose, was not to happy about it and bitterly said: It does matter where you “TAKE this from.” Intellectual property — ideas — are all an artist has.

The film is the award winning Case Studies From the Groat Center for Sleeping Disorders (2002), and in Rose's own words is a faux scientific investigation study of ASDICT (Adult Sleep Disorder Induced by Child Trauma), showing glimpses of rare archive footage from the renowned - but fictional - Groat Center for Sleep Disorders.

Oktapodi

I just found out into this video in one of the newspapers I normally read. Two octopuses fight for their lives with a stubborn restaurant cook in a comical escape through the streets of a small Greek village, which reminded me of Santorini.

 

 It turns out that Oktapodi (2007) had won a number of awards as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film in 2009. A whole achievement, considering it started off as Graduate Student Project from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image. It was directed by Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi; the music was composed by Kenny Wood.

Aren’t them adorable? Or, how they would say in German, so suuuuuuuuuuuuuss.