Categories: Music

How Did Pink Floyd : the Wall Impact Animation in Film

Pink Floyd The Wall – Awesome animated scenes set to Pink Floyd that are broken up with live action footage so disturbing and jumpy that you will probably have to watch it a few times to understand it. The Wall has scenes of imagery inspired about Nazis, World War II Britain and a hallucinogenic state of consciousness that only Pink Floyd could produce.

In 1982 Alan Parker worked with Pink Floyd on their concept album and turned it into a feature film. You may also remember Alan Parker from other films in the 80’s and 90’s like the madness induced Angel Heart ; other musicals like Fame and Evita ; the hilarious The Road to Wellville ; and the mind numbing of Midnight Express . Putting music and visuals was nothing new to Parker after Fame, but storytelling wise it is a bit confusing. Despite how many times I have seen this film, I get lost between flashbacks, flashforwards, and dwellings on Pink’s (the main character played by Bob Geldof ) drug induced fantasies.

The hallucinogenic scenes lend themselves very well to the traditional animation during the Pink Floyd strobe-like solos of the synthetic. Probably the best thing about the animation is it seems to be done in colored pencil and shot on and extremely slow frame rate. About forty animators worked on the film, but one man stands out as one of the best. Mike Stuart , who also animated other works like The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine , Monty Python’s Meaning of Life , and even a few episodes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which also made it to my countdown). His works shows lots of objects morph into one another as it goes through scenes of exploding churches, abusive teachers and a post World War II torn Britain . The animation is only a total of fifteen minutes and it was designed by Gerald Scarfe . Scarfe also did the artwork for Pink Floyd’s Wall album and political cartoons for the New Yorker . Scarfe and a group of animators worked three years on the animation and the work was never really done again except with Digital Dreams which is a rock biopic about the Rolling Stones and written by Richard O’Brien , who also penned The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Pink Floyd originally started to have stage productions of The Wall, but it became too expensive. A feature film came out that backed up the resources about a pseudo tale from Pink Floyd’s original frontman, Syd Barrett . Oddly enough, this is the second film on my countdown that features British actor Bob Hoskins , who plays the “overly protective” Rock and Roll Manager in the film in one of his earliest feature film roles. The music goes so great with the movie, and if you like the film, I heavily suggest you invest your time on watching Dark Side of the Rainbow / Dark Side of Oz. Coincidentally, if you play the Wizard of Oz and sync it to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, there are several strange coincidences of bizarre synchronicity .

Resources:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084503/
http://www.thewallanalysis.com/main/goodbye-blue-sky.html
http://dark-side-of-the-rainbow.com/dark-side-of-oz-instructions.html
http://scribblejunkies.blogspot.com/2010/01/chat-with-mike-stuart-animator-wall.html