Black Hula

Here's another animated short from Marv Newland of Bambi Meets Godzilla fame I just watched on YouTube. Accompanied by a recording by King Bennie Nawahi called "Mauna Kea", it seems three pirates go to an island and manage to convince some natives to build some fast food restaurants on their undisturbed isle. I'll stop there and just say the drawings are quite abstract in the way some people and natural and man-made objects are drawn, particularly in the way mouths are shaped while moving. Since this short ends when the song does, the running time is not much more than 3 minutes, tops. So trying to write the required 10 lines here isn't easy without not revealing the ending but it seems I'm going to make it as I've just reached the goal. So on that note, Black Hula comes recommended.

Three odd little men in a boat flying the colours of colonial powers and bearing icons of war, religion, and 'western culture' bring fast-food, industry, despair, and destruction to 'primitive' lands (or at least they attempt to). This short (about four minutes long) animated fable by Canadian auteur Marv Newland features very strange artwork and a memorable sound track ('Mauna Kea' by the 'King of the Ukulele' Bennie Nawahi). Like Newland's famous ninety second kaiju epic 'Bambi meets Godzilla' (1969), 'Black Hula' is a tiny, unforgettable, animated gem. Available as of this writing on YouTube.

Seeing this video was a life altering experience. My 9-year old daughter was watching MTV one day, and I walked through the room when Liquid Television was on. I couldn't take my eyes off it, and suddenly realized that there was a new generation out there that was making just unbelievable material. (Aeon Flux was also introduced in Liquid TV.) This little film stuck in my mind all those years, and two decades later, I still remembered it and googled it and dug it out on YouTube, where it can be seen in its entirety.

When older people tell me that the younger generation is just a bunch of uncreative layabouts, I refer them to Black Hula to see just what people are now capable of doing, if you put tools in their hands.