Satiemania (1978)
6/10
lovely music and decent animation...
20 September 2009
Warning: Spoilers
This is a well done animated film in many ways. It takes the music of Satie and provides animation that is perfectly timed to it. I know that this isn't an easy thing to do and I liked how as the music changed, so did the animation style and tempo. It was really quite striking and the animation, while simple, was often very nice. A few scenes reminded me of Bill Plympton's work--with the colored pencils and the style matching his.

The only serious negative to all this is that although music and animation are in sync, the animations themselves don't really tell any sort of story of have any theme. Most of the time, the images you see just seem totally random. Also, and I know this might sound weird, but I was perplexed why there were so many nudes that lacked nipples. It did seem unusual.

By the way, the film is broken into roughly five different segments (times given by me are rough approximations). The first involves people walking. At two minutes, it switches to a slide show. At three, the tempo slowed a lot and images of rain and nudes appeared. At six minutes, the Plympton-like segment began. The final segment, at eight minutes, seemed the most pointless--with people punching and kicking and maiming each other. The final seconds involve what I assume is a brief tribute to Van Gogh--with flying birds over the wheat field (one of Van Gogh's last paintings) as you hear a final gunshot.
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