Blu's New Street Animation: Big Bang Big Boom
If, like me, you're a sucker for stop motion animation, street art, slightly skewed theories of evolution and apocalyptic premonitions, the mere mention of a new street animation by Blu invokes your salivary glands. And, like a well trained dog, you stop whatever you're doing and sit to watch minutes of film that take months for the artist to create. Blu's newest release holds true to the artist's evolving aesthetic of outdoor illustrations. In true Blu fashion, Big Bang Big Boom starts small and quickly expands. Like Muto before it, outdoor illustrations multiply, converge, grow and devour each other, stumbling forward towards oblivion. This time however, Blu takes on the challenge of an expansive narrative, beginning at The Beginning and ending at The End.
Ten minutes long, Big Bang Big Boom displays Blu's developing craft and imagination. Urban environments become the interactive sets for the artist's bizarre (yet less strange than one might expect from him) wall-painted take on creation and evolution. The fairly straightforward plot involves a surrealistic journey through time as basic geometry moves, multiplies and advances in complexity, eventually birthing basic life forms, which also squirm, multply, and grow in size until they give rise to their own successors, which, survival of the biggest style, progress through cannibalizing their kin. Eventually the male hominid arrives on the scene soon followed by technology and the means for mass destruction.
Blu continues to juice the jaws with technical cleverness as the animations periodically break through into the third dimension, directly engaging the real world. A particularly glandular moment comes when a wall-bound prehistoric reptile bumps into a wheeled trash can sitting in front of the dinosaur's backdrop. The bin starts to roll down the street alongside the wall as the creature chases after it, leaps on top, and appears to ride the dumpster into the mouth of an even larger sleeping dinosaur, all while real life passersby walk by unnoticed. Woken by the same species meal, the two story illustrated beast rises and wanders forward when a real-world woman approaches directly acknowledging the lizard. Unlike the other ignored accidental extras included in shots, the dinosaur spots her immediately and belloww a roar so lowd that it blows the living pedestrian off of her feet and off eventually offscreen, at which point an even larger behemoth shows up and eats the callous T-Rex.
Blu's ability to combine inventive technique, humor and social commentary, make him one of those rare artists who's work is universally accessible. Of course, first that universe has to be created.
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