“Tuca and Bertie,” a new animated series on Netflix, was created by Lisa Hanawalt, an illustrator for the dark Hollywood satire “BoJack Horseman.” Like “BoJack,” it’s set in a trippy universe full of visual puns and talking animals-mostly birds, although there are also chain-smoking trees and gossipy cats, not to mention a breast that pops off one character’s chest, puts on a flowered hat, and wanders away in a huff. You may be watching them dance to computer-created beats on an HDTV, but their shoulder, knees and hips eschew any kind of synthetic aid.This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
And in an age when our entertainments tend to be thoroughly manufactured, from the relentlessly stage-managed careers of pop starlets to the stunning CG vistas that hide in the background of our television and movies, there’s something downright old-fashioned about a massive audience tuning in to see a purely physical spectacle, something that can’t be faked, futzed with or aided.
The competitors here aren’t just people whose parents don’t believe in damaging their self-esteem: they’re fully trained dancers, and often damn fine ones at that. On the small screen: So You Think You Can Dance Competition shows like these tend to get grouped into the “everyone wants to be famous” explanation of society, but there’s something else going with SYTYCD (and, to a lesser extent, American Idol, at least past the open auditions). The monster is stitched together from human parts, and even feels all-too-human emotions, but his laboratory provenance keeps him forever separated from a truly human connection these days, probably by necessity, we try to strike a balance between our nature and our new creations, but at the edge of a world that could be remade by scientific progress, it looked to Shelley like holding on to our humanity wasn’t even a passing possibility. Shelley practically invented artistic unease in the face of technological triumph, and the story of Victor Frankenstein and his melancholy monster warns us about the world we’re creating, one that could be equally disorienting for us and our (metaphorical) children. Portrayal of the sallow-faced lug with a bolt through his neck, but sift away the monster’s connection to the rogue’s gallery of Halloween horrors, and Mary Shelley’s story is a frighteningly modern story, all about alienation, obsession, curiosity and what humans can turn themselves into if they’re ever overwhelmed by those impulses. The shriveled body of Henry’s mutant child is the perfect stand-in for any kind of psychological or spiritual satisfaction Henry’s found, and as the mechanical world keeps pushing out perfect pencils, the people seem to be withering into nothing, in more ways than one. Henry Spencer (Jack Nance), is ostensibly a drone at a pencil factory, but he spends most of his time in an chiaroscuro surrealist nightmare, a world so drained of warmth and feeling that even the prospect of a child only promises an alien horror. Filmed over years in the back half of a decade that saw a lot of the ’50s and ’60s technological optimism go splat, Eraserhead is a classic story of man being dehumanized by the modern world. On film: Eraserhead, David Lynch Some of David Cronenburg’s paranoid ponderings on our augmented futures wouldn’t be out of place here, but the alienating aspects of Purity Ring’s glitchy synths are a much better aesthetic fit for another David: Lynch’s ’70s cult classic Eraserhead. The if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em attitude made a lot of sense when the possibilities of musical machines seemed endless, but these days, when they’ve gone from new gimmicks to ubiquitous, the disquieted struggle against full machinehood of Purity Ring seems the more necessary, if not more logical, response. Robots is quite typical of the spirit, every element tweaked to make the band seem like melodical automatons.
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So how about we talk about electronic pioneers Kraftwerk, who solved this duality by completely obliterating the human half of things? From regimented uniforms that seem to deny the existence of free will to their insistence on heavily tuned vocoders, the German group was a kind of art rock Tron, shedding their human form for one entirely electronic and mechanical. But considering both of Purity Ring’s principles have spent some time with the outfit, that feels a bit too easy. In your headphones: Born Gold/Kraftwerk Purity Ring’s actual closest antecedent, to my ears, is spastic Edmonton dance outfit Born Gold: 2011’s incredible Body Songs is an electronic bacchanalia, the manic rave answer to Purity Ring’s afterparty-at-my-place vibe. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.