November 2021 Line Rider Roundup

Welcome back! It’s been a slower month again in the Line Rider world (which isn’t too surprising after an extremely busy October) so we have no guest reviews this month. I actually really like slower months too though, because they give me a little more space to talk about creators that might otherwise get skipped over, and even in a slow month there’s always still plenty of great stuff to dig into. This month contains several fantastic releases that couldn’t be more different from each other if they tried!

Click here for a playlist of all videos in this roundup (in order). Titles also link to videos individually.

🙌 = highly recommended
👍 = recommended
🤷 = neutral
👎 = not recommended

King of Pride Rock - Matthew Buckley

Generally speaking, I always feel like I know what I’m getting with a Matthew Buckley piece. I know it’s likely going to be classical or at least orchestral music, I know it’s going to be heavily focused on precise movement synced to the music, and I know it’s always going to stick to something at least vaguely resembling sledding. Matthew’s work is sometimes rather forgettable (such as his most recent prior release Méditation) but consistently solid and well-executed, and occasionally extremely satisfying and entertaining for someone like myself with audio-kinesthetic synesthesia (such as the excellent Summer/Storm from this past May). King of Pride Rock has more riders than Matthew has used before set to music from a film soundtrack, but these are two minor divergences for a piece that contains all the hallmarks of a standard-fare Matthew Buckley video. What I was not expecting, however, was to have the thought “I can’t believe nobody has ever thought to do this before!” while watching a Matthew Buckley track. That’s right, this is a Matthew Buckley track with innovation.

The new idea is both brilliant and upsettingly simple: We’ve all seen DoodleChaos’s music staff decorations at the start and end of Line Rider videos - perhaps the most-plagiarized idea in Line Rider history - but seemingly nobody has ever thought to ask, what if we created ensemble staves like you would see on a full score of sheet music, with one rider on each staff? Not only is this brilliant, but Matthew chooses the perfect moment to debut the concept: namely, the music for the most epic moment in the original animated Lion King movie that I remember watching as a kid in the 90s, right at the end after Rafiki says, “It is time” and then Simba climbs Pride Rock to claim the kingship before Mufasa’s ghost(?) bellows “Remember!” This is one of the few moments in the movie when instrumental music completely takes center stage to convey the power of this moment, and composer Hans Zimmer is going all-out, as the orchestra is joined by a huge choir, with everyone playing and singing the main theme at fortissimo. As this epic chorale begins, the two riders we have seen so far in the piece are joined by four more, and all six of them ride through this music score. You wouldn’t think that having four additional riders riding straight on flat lines would be so profoundly affecting, but it’s incredible how well this gets across the epic feel of a massive orchestra swelling as they all play the main theme together, as the first two sledders continue to visualize the melody and drums, punctuated by hits on all six riders for cymbal crashes at the start of each bar.

The best part though, is that we’re not done! Immediately afterward the music explodes into an big ol’ celebration that makes you want to dance, and Matthew matches this raucous, joyful chaos beat-for-beat, by keeping multiple riders in unison motion on the main melody leaving others to frolic around and fly through the air. It’s a genius solution to a common problem in movement-based Line Rider music-syncing: What do you do when there’s one really powerful group voice in the mix, but there’s something added on top for flavor that’s much more rhythmically exciting? If you use two riders, the more exciting movement tends to pull focus and the second rider often seems, with relatively simple movement, like it’s failing to convey much strength or importance. The solution, as Matthew has demonstrated beautifully, is to have three or four riders in unison representing (for example) the big choir holding a single note, while a fourth rider can bounce around to the drum fills! Particularly brilliant is how Matthew will launch riders in huge airtime arcs across the screen on cymbal crashes while others are busy below syncing to other voices, capturing the playful feel of this section more than I imagined was possible. They’re jumping for joy! More than three riders has technically been done in other tracks, but this is the first time I’ve seen more than three riders in a Line Rider piece in a way that felt necessary, integral - like the piece was far better than it could have possibly been with only three. In King of Pride Rock, Matthew has apparently mastered the art of utilizing a large cast of riders for epic orchestral music, and I very much hope we see more large ensembles of sledders in future releases. Man, what I would give to see a full Shostakovich symphony with 12 or so riders in this style… Hey, I can dream!!

I’ve heard this piece of music many times throughout my life, but watching this Line Rider track made it feel fresh and new and hit me with a wave of childhood nostalgia. I’ve gotten emotional multiple times just writing this review! So I feel like it’s worth mentioning that Matthew Buckley has a Patreon, which I have now pledged to, and you can as well if you so desire. King of Pride Rock is the first time in a while that I’ve seen Matthew Buckley take a creative risk, and in my book it was a smashing success. His best work yet, and that’s saying a lot!
🙌

(Don't Get Yourself In) Another Lonely Mood - Alex Berka

I’m surprised that nobody has put Line Rider and ska music together before, because ska’s unrelenting optimism and enthusiasm is a naturally great fit for the slapstick, lighthearted brand of humour that Line Rider does so well. Another Lonely Mood is more than just the first ska Line Rider track though [correction: after publication OTDE pointed out that the classic early Beta 2 release Linerider skatepark is actually the first ska Line Rider track], it’s a genuinely amazing music video, period. It consists mostly of a nonstop barrage of scenery vignettes thematically connected to the song’s lyrics (which light up across the bottom of the screen throughout the piece), that our sledders zoom through - at just the right speed to keep your focus without becoming overwhelming. I’m actually shocked that this is the first time Alex Berka (who also wrote the lyrics and plays the guitar in the song) has released anything in Line Rider, because the music-synced choreography and movement control is surprisingly good for a debut, the line art is shockingly good, and the sledders’ interactions with the scenery are absolutely remarkable. Anyone remember TechDawg’s Make Believe from 2007? Imagine that - with equally impressive art - but the scenery actually fits the song thematically, and the movement is actually integrated with the scenery, because both were designed simultaneously with each other in mind by a single creator who didn’t feel like the track had to include manuals for it to be “good”. Oh, and it’s twice as long as twice as fun!

Another Lonely Mood throws so many brilliant ideas at the viewer so fast during its four and a half minute runtime that if I tried to critically dissect each one this review would be far too long, even for me. Suffice it to say they range from “well that works fine enough I suppose” to “holy shit that’s absolutely brilliant”. My favorite bit, though, has to be the magician sequence. First we see a magic wand, that Bosh and sled are suddenly reunited directly in front of, making it look like the magician granted Bosh a sled once again after a sequence of (thematically appropriate!) chaotic offsled tumbling. Then we ride down the magic wand and the magician’s arm, past their face, off their hand, and onto the queen of hearts card they are throwing dramatically towards the camera. There are also some amazing moments that blend vignettes with more abstract scenery, including one moment where an odd cloud of dashes and streaks suddenly becomes apparent as the fur of a huge tiger as you zoom past its mouth to ride what looks like some kind of abstract fire it’s breathing, and another moment where all three riders criss-cross as they fly upward past scenery that looks vaguely like an elaborate carving on an old piece of furniture, then a hot air balloon, then clouds, before finally finishing the ascent on the surface of moon, bouncing off a the snowboard of an astronaut who’s catching some sick air. The drawings are even consistently thematically relevant, such as the sledder blasting through a clock on the line “just to make it home by five”, zooming through a huge graveyard on “you’ve already etched your epitaph on a cheap slab of stone”, and a lovely little scene with a woman watching a sunset on a bridge on the line “she’s saving you the sunsets descending on the pier”. There’s even a loose narrative with a message I would summarize as, “Don’t get so down on yourself dude, stay open to possibilities and (straight) romance will be in your future!” It might come off as nauseatingly optimistic to some, but hey, that’s ska for you. Overall, Another Lonely Mood is an absolute gem. It’s a ton of fun, and one of the most rewatchable Line Rider videos I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing remotely like it, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get anything like it again, so make sure not to miss it!
🙌

(Qu)irk/eer | My DSM-5sona | Untitled* (see description) | Yet Another Gay Track | Daughterata V - Ava Hofmann

This extensively-titled piece is the first work by Ava Hofmann that actually resembles her poetry, the stuff she’s vastly more likely to be known for outside the Line Rider community. A dense, claustrophobic collage (decidedly not-synced to a strange minimalist John Cage piano piece) with dozens of little windows into a wide range of micro-scenes with abstract labels like “denial” and “gravity unwell”, with heavy space recycling, disconnected camerawork, and liberal use of remounting, color layers, and layer visibility automation, it’s got a lot going on. I would go so far as to say it’s one of the most unique Line Rider videos I’ve ever watched, to the point where it’s hard to even compare it to other Line Rider works at all. The idea of labels in a Line Rider track, for example, dates back to the original Omniverse - though Ava directly cites the satirical labels of i squared as a more direct inspiration - but this is perhaps the first instance in Line Rider of labeling something other than a trick, and that’s the most direct line of inspiration I can draw from this piece to anything else in Line Rider. It might seem almost alien to some at first glance, but upon closer examination there are layers to this piece worth unpacking and chewing on.

For one thing, it’s absolutely packed with little jokes and references that both mine the depths of Line Rider culture and hint at themes of queerness. For example, many of the little micro-scenes contained by red lines are either direct copy-pastes of scenery from tracks in the Line Rider Archival Project, or blatant plagiarisms of distinctive scening styles, such as the rock shading from TechDawg’s Monumental and the spiky caves from Toivo’s Line Rider Nightmare (amusingly labeled “Hope”). There’s also plenty of little pun-based jokes in the labels like “Dissociation Man-ual” and “XY Chromosome” with “h” and “omo” underlined. But there are two obvious narrative beats in the piece that give it a deeper meaning: the “Color Playback” moment, and the ending.

Two thirds through the piece, as the busy, dissonant music suddenly pauses on an unexpectedly poignant note, all of the scenery suddenly disappears except for the track itself (in light grey, on a layer hiding underneath the rest of the decorations for the entire piece), and a tiny box that Bosh freezes in, labeled “Desire”. Oh, and the words “Color Playback” which appear in the bottom left, because when the music and movement abruptly begin again, everything is in color. But not in the RGB colors of edit mode that the phrase “color playback” would usually indicate in Line Rider culture - instead, all of the scenery has been colorized with practically every color in the rainbow, as Bosh zooms through this space with movement far more energized and purposeful than the struggling, meandering, flailing movements in the first two thirds of the piece, before finally journeying upward, escaping the mess we’ve been in up until now to arrive at the final label, “Acceptance”. Far above the fray, alongside symbols of womanhood, punctuated by colorful layer animation and some clever speed automation to snap Bosh into the stall, it becomes clear that this track wasn’t just a messy, experimental collage of silly labels with some funny in-jokes, but a narrative about a journey to discovering one’s queerness, one that begins with confusion and disorientation and ends with clarity and understanding. Understood as such, I would consider this a remarkably well-executed piece, despite being a bit harder to get into than something like DoodleChaos. This isn’t art that’s going to jump out at you and say, “Here I am!” - it isn’t entertainment - but if you give it your attention and have some patience, I guarantee you’ll find the experience a rewarding one, whether that reward comes from “Aha!” moments where you notice some obscure little joke, or from coming away with a greater understanding of one person’s experience of queerness, especially from a transfeminine perspective.
🙌

Silhouette - UTD

[cw: themes of grief, depictions and discussion of physical and emotional relationship abuse]

Wowie is there a lot to unpack in this one. Not because it’s bad - I quite like it actually - there’s just so much to talk about that I’m not sure where to start. Let’s start with the opening 1 minute and 40 seconds, which is… almost unwatchably bad. It’s drop-dead simple flatsled with a few manuals and a few extremely-unfitting kramuals thrown in, accurately but superficially synced to a cloying Owl City song stuffed to the gills with clichés about grief. I don’t want to knock the song too much for people who genuinely relate to it, but for me personally it’s so saccharine it’s difficult to take seriously, and I consistently struggle to sit through the opening third of the video. The next 90 seconds however - the middle third - is where things start to get interesting. First, we are treated to bits of quirk on an invisible layer that flash into visibility on the beats when they affect Bosh, as we revisit the earlier track to discover these invisible lines were present all along. Second, we begin to see written phrases on this same layer flashing into visibility with the quirk - “I feel so small”, “I hate this life” - just as cliché as the lyrics, but certainly more interesting than the first third of the track. Then we see a brief cutaway to two sledders facing each other, a heart between them, on the lyric “regret”, followed a few seconds later by another cutaway, with the heart broken this time, on the lyric “burning me alive” - this was the first moment that the track really grabbed me. It’s an excellent representation of getting intrusive flashbacks to things you would really like to not remember, not because it was a sad memory but because remembering it right now sucks. Next we see crossfades back and forth to a closer view of Bosh, with song lyrics added across the bottom of the screen in post - I’m still not a huge fan of these lyrics, but what this does do is make it explicit that the lyrics about grief are integral to the piece and make sure they cannot be ignored, dodging a common issue in Line Rider where an attempt to convey a song’s message fails because viewers are paying more attention to the visuals than the song lyrics. Then, Bosh’s sled is removed as we see “…i must speak out” drawn on the track, and as they fall away, the animated-in-Line-Rider lyrics “no matter where i go” are drawn on the screen, getting larger and larger as they are repeated with increasing emphasis by the song. This section is really well done - much like the title drop in Tovio’s 2020 release I Can’t Ride These Lines Without You, it’s clear the lyrics aren’t just being animated because it sounds like it would look cool, but because the words are deeply important to the core of the piece, and the hand drawn style and the wiggly 2-frame animations really support this, and having all the drawn text be lower case up to this point makes for a big impact when they suddenly become all caps, and then finally overtake the screen for the ending.

Hooooooo boy the ending. The last minute of this piece is nothing short of stunning. The animated lyric “no matter where i go” expands to consume the entire screen, filling it with full-on animated post-production as the entire premise of Silhouette being a Line Rider track is tossed aside, replaced by a brutally and profoundly affecting montage of a white Bosh silhouette being physically and emotionally abused by a blue feminine silhouette with pigtails - presumably a representative of InXile’s “female Bosh” character, Bailey. The animation is shockingly good, with numerous little touches that make it feel downright professional. There’s just the right level of cartoonish exaggeration to effectively convey the emotions of the characters without it crossing the line into Looney-Tunes comedy, there’s the overall structure of still frames that pulse like a heartbeat on transitions to convey emotional beats, there’s a chaotic backdrop reminiscent of dense squiggles in Line Rider zooming by at high speeds at a high zoom level that gives the whole thing a sense of immediacy, and there’s the way the eyes of the characters appear halfway through each freeze-frame moment, to show first the scene of what is happening before drawing attention to how the characters feel in that moment. UTD’s depiction of Bosh’s pain, fear, confusion, and sadness, in the ways he draws their eyes as they suffer at the hands of an abusive partner, is what really gets me. As someone who made a Line Rider piece explicitly about Falling in Love (and which the cutaways earlier in this piece of two sledders facing each other with a heart between them is likely referencing), and as someone who had to escape the relationship that I made the piece about after it became toxic, good lord does this hit me hard. And then the animation depicts Bosh, having escaped the abuse, walking away from their sled as it leans against a wall, saying “now everyone knows” as they leave, before the final line of the song “I watch the summer stars to lead me home” is displayed on screen to end the piece. And the question I am left with is, “What the hell do I make of all of this?”

I’m torn. On the one hand, you could say the structure of this piece - a bland Line Rider track that initially fails to convey an emotional truth, that progressively becomes more and more heavy-handed before finally casting off the premise of a Line Rider track entirely, transitioning to an emotionally brutal animation that bluntly conveys the message - one could argue that that is, in and of itself, a narrative about struggling to speak your truth and tell your story in an environment and culture that would honestly prefer you to keep it all hush-hush. Abuse is rampant in our world today, but due to a whole variety of reasons it’s mostly invisible to people who haven’t experienced it firsthand. Mental health struggles are also a surprisingly common theme in Line Rider, immediately cropping up whenever Line Rider creators first try their hand at creating something emotionally affecting, from Kramwood’s Phantasmagoric Heart to JealousCloud’s Night Time Thoughts [cw: suicide] to Apple’s Hasta la Raiź, though historically most of them have fallen painfully flat. Mental health is, after all, something that many people in the Line Rider community struggle with and therefore often want to make art about, but Line Rider isn’t a medium immediately conducive to heavy topics like depression, anxiety, and abuse, and for many years the Line Rider community lacked the tools to tell even extremely simple narratives. Looking at Silhouette through this lens, it’s absolutely brilliant. Bosh is straining against the limits of narrative expression in Line Rider, trying to get their story out, just as a victim of relationship abuse struggles against a culture rife with stigma - in this case specifically against abuse victims socialized as men, who are taught and expected to refuse to identify as victims, resist facing and unpacking their emotions, avoid any expression of vulnerability, deny that anything affected them in a lasting way, and never ask for help. Eventually, Bosh says “fuck it” and grabs a goddamn bullhorn, the same way UTD says “fuck it” and makes a full-blown animated sequence with no Line Rider footage anywhere to be seen.

The thing that bugs me though, is that this carries the implication that there are hard limits to what can be expressed in Line Rider as an art medium, and in order to make art about the real shit, you gotta learn how to use a Big Boy Art Medium like animation or film or motion graphics. So, there’s the crucial question that gets to the heart of what we’re dealing with here. Are there things that can’t be expressed with Line Rider? And my answer is, well, yes and no. All art mediums have strengths and weaknesses in terms of personal expression. It’s much easier to convey a plot in film than in painting, for example, but it’s much easier to convey a specific emotion with a cartoon drawing than by taking a photo of an actor. Line Rider is no different than any of these. It’s great for depicting travel, movement, choreography, and conveying a sense of place, and less great at conveying complex relationships, emotions, character arcs, and choices. Is it impossible to convey any of these things in Line Rider? Not at all. Would it be difficult enough that certain works might be better served with a different art medium? Absolutely. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying to stretch the bounds of what is possible with Line Rider. As has been shown over and over and over for the past 15 years, at no point will we ever reach a point where there’s no further creative innovation possible and we are forced to throw up our hands and say, “well, guess Line Rider is all tapped out, time for everyone to move on to other things!” Like most things, it’s a balance. How much should you focus on telling the story you want to tell with whatever art medium works best, versus utilizing a medium you’re already proficient in? How much should you focus on breaking new ground in an art medium you love, versus learning a new one to better convey what you want to say? These are personal questions, ones every artist has to answer on their own terms. What I will say, though, is holy shit UTD specifically should do more straight-up animated music videos that don’t necessarily have any Line Rider footage in them, because judging from the sequence in Silhouette, he’s incredibly good at it.

Holy smokes this got long. So anyway, what do I make of Silhouette? Woof. As a meta-narrative Line Rider piece about abuse and stigma, for someone like me who has all this context via deep knowledge of the history of mental health in Line Rider and in the community, it’s pretty freaking great. But I’m struck by the fact that the animation sequence is easily the most evocative and affecting aspect of the work, and the Line Rider parts, in isolation, range from “that’s kinda cool” to “oh god this is insufferable”. So as work of art for a general audience, it’s… well, it’s still definitely good, but it’s complicated. I can’t help but wonder, if Silhouette was made from the starting point of, “How do I tell a story about abuse with animation?” rather than, “How do I make a Line Rider track about abuse?” how different it might have been. And to be honest, in this case I think it might have come out as a stronger piece overall. But as it stands, while it might not be an all-time favorite, in my book it’s still absolutely a success. Profoundly affecting and deeply important.
👍

Mass 2, Sanctus - Bucky29

Bucky29’s work has been very hit or miss - on the one hand is the surprisingly good Ride, and on the other hand is, well, virtually every other release of theirs (including the ones that got picked up by The Algorithm™ solely because they’re set to music from Disney franchises). After the extremely disappointing The Line Riders of Rohan in March and the not-worth-commenting-on Make Something Beautiful in September, I had pretty low expectations for Mass 2, Sanctus, but I was pleasantly surprised! An apparent commission from the Spanish composer Iván Villarrubia, Mass 2, Sanctus uses simple visuals and movement to effectively capture this offbeat, mysterious, almost primordial chant-heavy choral piece. Not every idea is brilliant or refined - it’s generally probably a bit too fast, there’s a noticeable cut a third of the way in when it becomes a three rider piece, there’s some clunky and obvious choices such as the explosions-of-rays effect that already felt played-out when Turner Wise did it in 2019, and Bucky29 is still struggling to manage speed and keep multiple riders on screen at once. But there are also some really creative and fun ideas, such as scribbled lines moving across the screen on long “s” sounds from the choir, lines slowly converging to form a cluster chord and then separating again as all but one voice drops out, and targeted use of freefall to effectively convey moments in the music that also feel like falling. One of my favorite moments is right at the end, when the choir sings “Sanctus” and holds out the final “s”, and the riders tumble against deceleration lines and crash as scribbles criss-cross the screen. It’s not as good as Ride, but it’s a big step up from anything else Bucky29 has made.
👍

Minstrels - Fantastic Sky

Fantastic Sky first rose to prominence in the world of Line Rider for a series of remarkably bland Line Rider releases because one set to the Harry Potter theme got picked up by The Algorithm™ and went viral, despite being extremely dull to watch. In 2021, Fantastic Sky has removed all of their old videos from their channel, in their place releasing two dual rider tracks synced to solo piano pieces: Rêverie in August and Minstrels this past month. They’re still very simple, but Fantastic Sky’s basic straight-line-heavy sync-to-virtually-every-note style matches solo piano decently well, and it’s clear they have been gradually improving. Rêverie was plagued by issues trying to keep both riders on screen, but it had some standout moments where it almost felt like an old Matthew Buckley track (back when his work had potential but wasn’t actually good yet). Minstrels - also a dual rider track in the same simple straight-line-heavy sync-to-every-note style - isn’t exactly a gripping viewing experience, with two riders that essentially sled from left to right on mostly horizontal straight lines until they reach a music staff end bar à la DoodleChaos, but in spite of this I inexplicably found myself enjoying it. Maybe it’s just sheer coincidence that the Untitled Goose Game soundtrack has a lot of lighthearted comedic intentionally-unpredictable eighth note piano plonking, and maybe it’s just a coincidence that that actually works decently well for a really simple, straightforward Line Rider track. Maybe it’s the whimsical drawing of the goose (from the aforementioned delightful game) holding a rose and saying “honk!” a third of the way in. Maybe it’s just that I really like Untitled Goose Game. In any case, while Minstrels seems like it should be utterly uninteresting on paper (and I have little faith that Fantastic Sky made any of these choices consciously beyond choosing the song), at the end of the day I have to admit I didn’t hate this one. HONK!
🤷

a _____ on the _____ of _____ / profile photos (liked by 2 users) / facial recognition training set - Ethan Li

Have you ever watched something that was clearly intended to provoke an emotional response, but felt nothing? Have you ever been watching a movie and thought to yourself “It really feels like the creators of this movie want me to feel something but it’s not doing anything for me”? Have you ever wondered to yourself, “Am I missing something? Is everyone else having a deep meaningful experience while I’m sitting here just bored and confused? Is there something wrong with me?” This is how Ethan Li’s newest release makes me feel. After two straight banger releases that had me pondering life, death, free will, and the nature of existence (namely, A Fleeting Life and A Shiver Sequence), I was extremely excited for whatever Ethan would do next, which is why their newest release has left me severely disappointed.

Let’s start with the basic concept, which appears to be a remix of OTDE’s what’s the point? using the same Album Leaf song and the same Georges Seurat painting, but somehow with even less Line Rider this time. I’m all for experimental video art pieces using Line Rider as a jumping-off point, but OTDE’s piece already got me to comment in my review of it last month that the same effect might have been achieved with a simple slow zoom out of a high resolution image of the painting without involving Bosh or Line Rider at all. Ethan’s newest release (I refuse to write out the title and cannot think of a satisfactory way to abbreviate it) perhaps took this as a challenge, showing us first cropped images of photos of Georges Seurat’s painting, then pixelated versions of those same images, and then finally screenshots of sections of what’s the point? with increased color desaturation and overall signal degradation throughout. Let’s be clear. There is no sledder in this piece. There is no sledding. There is no movement. In fact, if a viewer had not already seen what’s the point? they would have no way of knowing that this piece had any association with Line Rider at all.

In and of itself, this is not a bad thing. Believe it or not, some of my favorite videos on YouTube have nothing to do with Line Rider! But if I am to critique this as a video art piece (taking off my Line-Rider-critic hat and putting on my video-art-analyst hat), my first thought is, well, ok, it’s a slideshow. A series of images with iMovie ‘06 Ken Burns zoom effects. Other than an image at the start where we see all of the faces in the painting suspended in space, and one at the end where they have all been replaced by white squares, it makes me think of a collection of family photos that a boomer threw together for a gathering, but they degrade and fade over the course of the video, and instead of photos they’re faces in this particular painting. Judging from the editing decisions, along with the title, I think these are all intentional choices meant to evoke a slideshow of old photos of forgotten people fading into memory. Wistfulness. Sonder. Upon examination, it certainly seems like a concerted effort to that end, with numerous intentional decisions to create this effect, but it falls flat. So if Ethan had a clear goal in mind here, the question is, why doesn’t it work?

I think the main problem (putting on my art-historian hat) is that Georges Seurat’s 1886 pointillist painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” was never intended to be a character study. The painting captures a certain mood, a vibe, a moment of tranquility, through its use of color, shadow, and framing. There are plenty of people in this scene, yes, but Seurat is careful to avoid any of them pulling focus or drawing attention, letting the eye of the viewer wander steadily off into the distance, taking in the scene as a whole, perceiving the individuals as a general nondescript crowd of people, milling about, relaxing on a lovely day, keeping cool in the shade. You can almost sense the heat, the humidity, the still air, the sounds of boats sailing, of the trumpet that one guy is playing, of dogs and children running about, of polite conversation. It’s about the vibe, but, crucially, not about the individual people. Zoom in on their faces and they are muddy, blurry, in shadow, nondescript, a mere suggestion of a face. That’s because we’re not meant to be looking at their faces! We’re not supposed to be speculating about who they were - that’s what portraits were for! In the late 1800s, portraits were still the most common type of painting, meant to document people’s lives, and radical Impressionists like Seurat were actually pushing back on the status quo, rebelling against traditional painting techniques, for one by actually going outside to paint (using new paint-tube technology created in 1841), but also by painting impressions of things they saw like light and shadow - trying to capture the vibe of a moment in time, instead of continuing to paint portraits of carefully-posed rich people. By focusing on the faces of the figures in “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” and ignoring the context they are in, Ethan completely misses why the painting is so famous - and indeed, what makes it so compelling 135 years later - dramatically devaluing Seurat’s painting by trying to force it back into a mold that Seurat and others in the Impressionist movement were explicitly rebelling against.
👎

Mann Vs. Machine Theme - Skwid

[cw: strobing visuals]

Mann Vs. Machine Theme is Skwid’s second Line Rider release, after a debut last January synced to Knife Party’s 2012 dubstep piece, “Centipede”. Centipede was a mix of potentially-decent music syncing and animation ideas thrown haphazardly into a mostly-offsled track without much thought given to structure or concept, with no help from a song that’s simultaneously hyper-intense and also exhaustingly repetitive and predictable. But hey, it was Skwid’s first release, and a messy debut track with some potential leaves a lot of room for improvement in future releases. For their second release ten months later, Team Fortress 2’s Mann vs Machine Theme is definitely a more dynamic and interesting song, which is why it’s disappointing when the Line Rider piece is even less focused than Centipede, with even fewer ideas that are actually interesting - keeping all the stuff that sucked before, getting rid of everything with potential, and adding nothing new. The animations are even lower effort, the decorations are even less interesting, the ideas are even less coherent, Bosh again goes offsled when the drums comes in (for no reason that I can tell other than the fact that keeping them on the sled takes effort and Skwid doesn’t feel like putting it in), and the whiplash from Skwid just seemingly just getting bored and deciding to do something completely different over and over for no reason at all is somehow even more extreme.
👎

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