The London International Animation Festival
Today sees the start of the fifth annual festival, which showcases animated features and shorts. The focus of this year's festival is puppet animation, but there seems to be plenty of variety, including individual programmes of animation from China, San Francisco, Britain and Switzerland. It's not often that one sees Swiss culture represented - that's one in the eye for Harry Lime. I'm going to be out of London for the whole week of the festival so unfortunately I'm going to miss it, but if anyone sees a film that's particularly good then let us know. The British programme includes several of the shorts that we've shown in our animation slot on The Culture Show: The Control Master, Magnetic Movie and Cat Man Do, so if you missed them or would like to see them on the big screen then head over to the Curzon Soho.
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I’ve always been intrigued by the origins of things. From whence did they originate? How did they come about? What gave rise to it being done so, rather than not? Now, one can read about the origins of almost anything; man, earth, the side parting. You can do so by using THE great modern invention of our time – the web. Or the old fashioned way, by reading a book. Here you will find a myriad of different theories, put forward by an equally dazzling list of authors claiming to have THE definitive solution. Equally, and perhaps more satisfying, there are events that have occurred that cannot be fundamentally explained, or if they can, certainly not in a way that allows my mind to picture the event. Take, for example, the Moai statues of Easter Island. Now various theories place the creation of these statues at differing periods separated by centuries. What they all agree on is, they were created using stone not indigenous to the island. And certainly not a stone that was transportable by any known means. Which begs the question, “How did they get there?” My mind can’t even fathom such an event occuring…well, actually I can, but to realise it, one would require a Dreamworks production budget and most would then just argue that it was far fetched. Similarly, my mind and imagination hit a vacuum like wall when challenged to imagine what time must have been like prior to what many like to call The Big Bang. This is my favourite description of The Big Bang, “a cosmological model of the universe that is best supported by all lines of scientific evidence and observation. The essential idea is that the universe has expanded from a primordial hot and dense initial condition at some finite time in the past and continues to expand to this day.” Come again? I don’t get it. First I don’t get how something is growing at an infinite level. What exists on the other side of infinity? It’s growing, right? Well, what’s it growing into? A big space? A big empty space that drops as deep as it ascends high? An ocean of nothingness that drops into an abyss of nada…? Exactly. I just can’t do it. Then, there is the issue of what existed before tick tick boom? Again, we’re told that, “the universe was filled homogeneously and isotropically with an incredibly high energy density, huge temperatures and pressures, and was very rapidly expanding and cooling. Approximately 10-35 seconds into the expansion, a phase transition caused a cosmic inflation, during which the universe grew exponentially. After inflation stopped, the universe consisted of a quark-gluon plasma, as well as all other elementary particles. Temperatures were so high that the random motions of particles were at relativistic speeds, and particle-antiparticle pairs of all kinds were being continuously created and destroyed in collisions. At some point an unknown reaction called baryogenesis violated the conservation of baryon number, leading to a very small excess of quarks and leptons over antiquarks and anti-leptons—of the order of 1 part in 30 million. This resulted in the predominance of matter over antimatter in the present universe.” Yes but antiquarks, antischmarks…what did the gaff look like? I mean just try and fathom it. Bearing in mind that nothing existed in this ‘infinite density’ you can’t start imagining swirls of clouds, or “C-beams shimmering in the dark at the Tannhouser Gate.” And that for me is the fundamental intrigue, letting the imagination run to a point so far removed from the shackles of time and space that no book or theory can actually paint the picture. It instead requires an experience of the event. The joy of unchartered territory is that no one can tell you you’re wrong…
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