Category Archives: Video

A dialogue-free ink-on-paper short by east London based animator Elizabeth Hobbs, based on the Grimm Brothers’ ‘The Fisherman And His Wife’.

As in the original fairytale, an enchanted flounder offers to improve a fisherman’s life in exchange for sparing his own but – again and again –  both are thwarted by the outrageous, spiralling demands of the fisherman’s wife.

Of course, it’s all a metaphor, and if you watch closely in the final minute, you’ll see what for.

shortoftheweek

50 years ago this week, local officials of a small seaside town in Oregon decided to dispose of a long dead beached whale by detonating a charge inside it, hoping to obliterate the bulk of the problem and let seagulls and crabs deal with the rest.

They estimated a half a ton of dynamite would do the trick.

As it turns out, that was overkill. Mammalian marine guts spewed everywhere, raining down on townsfolk. A quarter-mile away, cars were smashed with chunks of cetacean carcass. This story remained a local legend for two decades, until the early ’90s , when the newspaper columnist Dave Barry mentioned seeing footage of the exploding beast. Soon after, this video clip — originally reported by Portland news channel KATU — went viral on the internet, long before “going viral on the internet” was even a thing.

kottke

As a prima ballerina in New York during the 1960s, Marta C. González performed Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake perhaps hundreds of times.

Marta had Alzheimer’s and recently passed away. But in this poignant footage, filmed last year in Valencia, interspersed with clips of her past performances, she is reanimated by the music of the ballet, recalling choreography that she still knew by heart.

kottke