I'm trying to get my hands on a copy of a very rare animation from 1975 that I watched in Psychology class senior year of high school. I just recently remembered it and how it made me feel and looked it up. The title is "Everybody Rides the Carousel" and it is a cartoon consisting of different watercolor techniques (from what I remember) based on psychologist Erik Eriksson's idea of the Eight Stages of Man. The cartoon features a jester who is like God taking you along a carousel that stops at each stage of development of a normal human being from birth until death to give you a peak at what life is like. The jester narrates it with a calming, nascent voice.. the kind of voice you'd use to whisper into the ear of a new-born baby or someone on their deathbed. It is very stimulating, reminds me of how it feels to wake up bewildered in a late afternoon during the end of summer after a long strange, dream-filled nap and I am sweating. Some of the images still haunt me.
Another rare video that I am glad I actually own (back in Illinois) is "The Snowman," the short animation we used to watch as a family and often with the Gulezians around every Christmas time. We have another VHS copy than the one we used to. The old one was slightly shakey since it was a TV recording. It had an antiquated feel to it, even then. The video started off with a real-life man walking through snow near the edge of the woods, and it always reminded me of the back field behind our house. The man stops and his British voice comes on as a narration. He says: "I remember that winter because it had brought the heaviest snows I had ever seen. Snow had fallen steadily all night long and in the morning I woke in a room filled with light and silence, the world seemed to be held in a dream-like stillness. It was a magical day... and it was on that day I made the snowman." And then the video turns into a cartoon and this really dramatic piano song comes on. That video (and its contents) is an important thing from my childhood. Thinking of it now brings me back to a nostalgia of Christmas in Chicago. Everything from picking out the Christmas tree with my mom and decorating it with my brother(s). Sometimes snow would fall on the Day, and sometimes the Eve which we spent with my dad and went out to eat at Grand Mandarin. And it makes me think of the cookies I'd put out for Santa, the following morning reduced to crumbs and a thank-you note scribbled in my mom's hand-writing.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
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