A Colour Box

While gentle Cuban music plays, shapes dance across the screen in this film featuring early examples of the animation of Len Lye. This is an early experimentation with the animation style of painting directly onto celluloid and it produces some nicely hypnotic images. The use of music helps because it gives everything a bright, breezy feel that worked for me in so much as it gave the images something to move in front of.

It was a surprise at the end to suddenly have advertisement slogans popping up in the final 30 seconds to inform me how great value my local post office is but then I guess this was actually an advert for the GPO. Despite that this still works as a bit of animation. Simple perhaps but enjoyably effect and the issue of it being a Post Office advertisement only adds novelty value to it. Maybe not worth hunting down but for animation historians it is perhaps worth a look for being one of the first of its type.

I know this is experimental. The problem is that all the creative forces could come up with were a bunch of colorful squares and flashing lights. Then there was something about parcel-post. I guess you'll have to explain this one to me. I just didn't feel I got anything new concerning the Latin music used here.

This is an art film and a nice little experiment. However, since it is only an art film and makes no attempt to be mainstream or tap into what audiences usually like, I doubt if the average person will care much about A COLOUR BOX, no matter how difficult it must have been to make.

The film consists of lots of colors splashed directly onto celluloid and they are done in a pop art style--almost like something Peter Max or Leroy Nieman would make. The colors dance and move about to the sound of Cuban band music. It's all rather hypnotic and weird.

By the way, three years after being made, the film was bought and a message about parcel post was added rather crudely. I am not sure if a version without this message is available--the one I saw had it and I would think it would be more interesting without the more poorly animated ad.

Direct Animation (further referred as DA) is by far the most eccentric of all the animation techniques & undoubtedly the rarest. The very concept of it is so absurd that it still remains a puzzle to me how these monsters of DA like Norman McLaren, Stanley Brakhage & Caroline Leaf were able to make it work. But it all was later, until then there was Len Lye & his groundbreaking COLOR BOX. Any DA is always an experiment & COLOR BOX is no exception. The trick is how to make this experiment prevail & generate some artistic/production value. DA is totally about abstraction & viewing experience is the key point. When you watch COLOR BOX you can feel its affect on your 'sentiment, memory & imagination'. To me watching its texture construction draws very strong similarities to having sex with an alien.

For the note: the post office/card commercial in the end of this cartoon doesn't belong to Lye. It was added later by some other guy who bought the ownership rights & used it as a queer marketing device.

I think mentioning the level of Historical Importance of this cartoon would be superfluous.

Just saw this on YouTube and was blown away by the various paints of colors directly on film and the post office prints at the very end. Reminded me a lot of Chuck Jones' The Dot and the Line where we see lots of shapes and sizes of various colors of lines, circles, and what have you. Great period music to set the mood to whatever abstraction is matched for the rhythm of the picture. This, The Peanut Vendor, and Free Radicals are the first time I've seen anything by Len Lye. Great experimental work from such an independent artist. Makes me wish I can find a DVD or VHS that might possibly have some of his works preserved. I guess I'll keep on searching YouTube...