C
by Joe Nolan
Critical i
artoons used to be just for kids, but about forty years ago that all began to change: Generation X watched Looney Tunes reruns on Saturday mornings, went to high school with The Simpsons, attended college with Beavis and Butthead and Aeon Flux, and now queue up for tickets to Japanese anime festivals in their forties—but enough about me.
© KRÁTK Ý FILM PRAHA A .S.
The Frist’s new exhibition Watch Me Move: The Animation Show is an expansive history of animation organized by the Barbican Centre in London. The show is a more-is-more display that takes viewers on an encyclopedic tour from Eadweard Muybridge’s still-magical 1887 images of a galloping horse, to early cartoon “stars” like Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop, to the once-mind-boggling light cycle races created for the movie Tron, and to contemporary digital cartoons like Pixar’s 2004 feature The Incredibles.
JiríTrnka, The Hand (film still), 1965, 35mm color film, sound
As soon as I walked into the darkened gallery space and entered the first roomful of displays, both the show’s courageous breadth and obsessive attention to detail were immediately on display, and one has to refer back to the packed walls of their 2012 Carrie Mae Weems retrospective to recall a Frist exhibition as driven with crazy ambition. The show includes eighty-six films from the US, Spain, France, the Czech Republic, Japan, China, Canada, Germany, Poland, Sweden, and New Zealand. The Frist’s 2012 summer program was the folk-art-focused pairing of Bill Traylor and the Gee’s Bend quilters that gave folks from around the region something to flock to. Last year’s Sensuous Steel: Art Deco Automobiles found the galleries filled with giddy little boys and their giddy fathers gushing over the gorgeous horsepower on display. While this show delivers plenty of whimsy and BANG! POW! excitement for the smaller set, it also includes adults-only displays with more mature content and the abstract experiments of cinematic sorcerers like Stan Brakhage and Harry Smith, which were the highlight for me.
If the show has a downside it’s that its blinking images and cacophony of sounds can prove overwhelming at first. The designers and installation crew at the Frist deserve kudos for keeping the noise to a minimum and creating quiet spaces in the exhibition, but it’s a lot to take in, regardless. My advice to day-trippers and tourists is to come early, stay late, and plan to eat lunch at the Frist’s cafe. For locals, I can’t think of a better example of an exhibition that requires—and will reward—multiple viewings. Watch Me Move: The Animation Show will be on exhibit at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts through September 1. For more information, please visit www.fristcenter.org. 100 | August 2014 NashvilleArts.com