By Benjamin Pineros

Many dystopias no longer feel like visions of a future far away. High-tech surveillance states, artificial intelligence interfering in elections and lab-grown steaks are all things that have jumped from the pages of speculative fiction to our real world. If we think about it, we’re practically living in a dystopia that could have very well come out of the mind of someone like William Gibson or George Orwell.

The first precursors of dystopian fiction appeared in late 19th-century literature, and over the last hundred years or so the genre has spread out to almost every other art form. Comics, in particular, has proved to be a fertile medium to develop these cautionary tales of society gone wrong.

We’ve decided to showcase five of the most fascinating dystopian tales ever told in comic book form, stories of disgusting organic cities, virtual sex, fallen superheroes, and desperate societies plunging into anarchy. These dark visions serve both as exquisite examinations of what it means to be human, and resounding presages of the bleak place we could end up at if we keep ignoring the warnings.

So have your Prozac ready, play Shiny Happy People on repeat, and prepare yourself to take your existential angst for a hell of a ride. Weltschmerz guaranteed.

Ruins (Marvel Comics, 1995)

“You ever get the feeling it’s all gone wrong Sheldon? Like, maybe all this weird, sick stuff that happens should really be somethin’ wonderful?”

That line of dialogue by Nick Fury from the first issue of Ruins pretty much describes the whole premise of this astonishing, depressing, and thought-provoking mini-series from the 90s.

This title needs a bit of backstory so bear with me…

For hardcore comic book fanatics, Marvels is something of a sacred book. The four-issue miniseries from 1994 by Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross was developed as the ultimate love letter to the company’s long history. In a very realistic tone, and told from the perspective of a photo reporter called Phil Sheldon, the story follows the progressive apparition of superheroes, villains and mutants in our world and documents society’s reaction to these amazing beings.

Sheldon is witness to some of the most iconic events throughout Marvel’s publishing history, from the original Human Torch’s appearance in 1939 to Gwen Stacy’s death in the 70s. The book, like its title suggests, is a celebration of these wonders, an exaltation of super-powered beings as another element of everyday life, bringers of both chaos and hope.

Ruins, on the other hand, is a completely different ride.

This two-issue mini-series published in 1995 just one year after Marvels is a tale of wonder gone horribly wrong. What if the introduction of these fantastical beings just brought forward humanity’s worst instincts?

Written by Warren Ellis, with gorgeous painted art by Terese Nielsen, her husband Cliff Nielsen, and Chris Moeller, in this tale, photo reporter Phil Sheldon is not witness to the rise of these outstanding beings, but an attestant to their miserable demise.

It spins Marvels on its head and instead of honoring the naivete of the Silver Age of comics, it plunges superheroes into a cesspool of cynicism, misery and hopelessness.

Jean Grey (a.k.a. Dark Phoenix from the X-Men) is a desperate prostitute, the Avengers are a cell of anti-government revolutionaries and Bruce Banner contracted a hideous form of cancer from his exposure to gamma rays instead of the superpowers of The Hulk.

Set in the late 60s in the midst of the Vietnam war and the Civil Rights Movement, Ellis and co. rewrite the Marvel Universe as this bleak world of hunger, poverty and sickness. It’s a shocking experience to see all these heroes that popular culture has idolized for more than half a century, turned into weak, vulnerable, wretched poor souls at mercy of such puerile things like disease and human nature.

Although extremely bleak, the universe of Ruins is incredibly intriguing. If this short mini-series has any problem, it’s that it ends up crumbling under the weight of its own rich worldbuilding. It takes the trouble to create a vast universe only to wrap up the story after just 63 pages.

Evocative image from Ruins.

The title is collected in a trade paperback called “Marvels Companion”. Available at:

Amazon.com

Ballistic (Black Mask Studios, 2013)

Bam! You open the book and the first thing you see is a hyper-detailed closeup of a fucking brutal punch in the face. Now that’s how you start a comic!

Not to be confused with the popular character from Cyberforce, – the superhero team from Image Comics – Ballistic is a tale of crime set in one of the wildest exercises in worldbuilding ever done in comics.

In the early 21st century, the Western world has collapsed because of an unprecedented banking and ecological crisis.

American cities have literally turned into “flowing rivers of shit” and the rest of the world is in flames. Amidst this grim scenario, a billionaire industrialist takes an island of waste located somewhere in the Philippine Sea and reforms it to create Repo City State, a breathing, biotechnological wonder.

Heavily inspired by David Cronenberg’s twisted bio-contraptions, Repo City’s foundation is not concrete, but DNA. In this fantastic dystopia buildings are gown from live tissue and electricity is carried throughout the city using nervous system fibres. Plastic is replaced by hyper-flexible membranes made of spider silk. Bone and skin are used to make computers, clothes and vehicles. Power mainly comes from red algae energy plants and other living structures that suck energy directly from sunlight.

Everything in Repo City looks and feels disgusting, people eat cloned body parts, phones are implanted in one’s skin and information is stored in liquid. If an appliance stops working you need more of a doctor than a technician to fix it.

Surprisingly, every element behind the conception of this insane metropolis has an origin in a real-life scientific advancement, which makes Ballistic even more mind-blowing.

In this genetically designed city, order is instituted by a curious alliance between corporations and crime bosses who are given free rein to exert law in their sector. Culture in Repo is an inventive smashup of Asian tradition with western pop, with vibrant, frenetic streets in which you can hear chatter in Korean, English and Singlish: an English-based creole language spoken in Singapore.

Butch is the everyman in this tale, an air conditioner repairman with serious criminal aspirations. His best friend is a genetically-engineered sentient gun with a loud mouth and a bad attitude, a literal brother-in-arms.

This five-issue mini-series written by Adam Egypt Mortimer and drawn by superstar Darick Robertson follows Butch in his quest to pull off the ultimate heist, that one job that will save him from the dullness of his nine to five work and earn him the respect of the criminal underground.

But of course, like in all tales of amateur crime, things go horribly wrong.

Ballistic is so impressive, Grant Morrison, one of the most lauded authors of the comic industry in the last four decades, named it as his favorite comic of 2013.

If you like ingenious stories of sex and crime, where guns get high, air conditioners get sick, and TV’s can hallucinate, look no further.

The title is collected in one trade paperback.

Amazon.com | Booksetc.co.uk | Bol.com

The Private Eye (Panel Syndicate, 2013)

In the early 21st century, a series of security failures led to a spectacular burst of the cloud, where the personal information behind every comment, post and search ever made was disclosed to the general public.

This massive privacy breach led to the total dismantlement of society, forcing a new era in which personal identity is every citizen’s most precious asset.

Just imagine if every search you’ve ever done was put into the spotlight along with all your personal information. What would happen if your grandmother, mother-in-law and boss had access to all of your naughty midnight Googling?

Welcome to Los Angeles in 2076, the frightening and utterly engrossing world of The Private Eye.

This vision of the future, part Orwell’s 1984, part The Truman Show, is set decades after the digital cloudburst. With the internet banned and dismantled, TV and books become people’s most popular distractions. Citizens wear elaborate masks and use aliases to protect their identity, and the press has morphed into a weird entity that fusions the duty to inform with the authority to police.

In this world, paparazzi are illegal, and their job isn’t to follow the shenanigans of the rich and famous. They act more like private detectives, hired to find a person’s true name.

The ten-issue limited series, written by Brian K. Vaughan, with art by Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente, follows the story of an unlicensed paparazzi immersed by chance in a case that’s too big for his expertise.

It was more than fitting that a story about digital privacy was the first to inaugurate the initiative called “Panel Syndicate”, a collective of high profile creators that joined forces to innovate the way comics are distributed.

Inspired by Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-want” launch of their album In Rainbows, the comic was published on the Panel Syndicate website in March 2013, with users given the liberty to choose whatever they wanted to pay to read it.

The story plays out as a classic Crime Noir tale with evident nods to the 50s but updated to fit a neon-lit colored aesthetic. Paced like a skilful action-thriller and done in landscape format to fit a computer screen, the art is absolutely flawless in every way.

Dynamic and vibrant, Marcos Martin resorts to detail when it serves a purpose in the story, but isn’t afraid of going the minimalistic route when it’s warranted.

Perfectly constructed to leave the reader with a huge cliffhanger at the end of each issue, The Private Eye is a very intelligent, effective meditation on our current information society.

Is it worth to surrender our personal privacy in the name of security?

Winner of one Eisner Award for Best Digital/Web Comic and a Harvey for Best Online Comics Work in 2015, the comic is currently available for digital download at The Panel Syndicate website or in hardcover format from Image Comics.

Amazon.com | Booksetc.co.uk | Bol.com

Transmetropolitan (DC Vertigo, 1997)

The US president is an amoral, narcissistic, sex obsessed, overweight bully, who uses his power solely to feed his self-interest. His rise to the top was only possible thanks to a complacent society, numbed by overwhelming consumerism and summed in an excruciating state of apathy.

To make matters even worse, due to unprecedented technological advances, information spreads at real time, creating such an overload of data that it’s almost impossible for the public to discern truth from falsehood.

No, I’m not describing current day politics. This is the world of Transmetropolitan, the frighteningly prescient 60-issue comic book from 1997 written by Warren Ellis with art by the great Darick Robertson.

Set in “The City”, a brutal megalopolis in the 23rd century, – a mix of San Francisco, New York and Chicago – the story follows renegade journalist Spider Jerusalem, a bitter, chain-smoking, cynical drug addict who turns out to be America’s only hope.

Heavily based in man-turned-myth Hunter S. Thompson, Jerusalem is probably the most flawed character in the book, even more so than the villains he confronts.

He’s a highly troubled, foulmouthed nonconformist who hates everything and everyone – that includes dogs – and yet, despite all his shortcomings, he embodies the immaculate ideal of a free press that relentlessly pursues the truth in service of the governed, not the governors.

Spider starts out the book as this long-bearded, dishevelled hermit physically reminiscent of comic book writer Alan Moore. He has been living in the mountains in self-exile for five years, having spent all the money of a substantial advance from a publishing contract he hasn’t yet fulfilled.

Our tattoo-ridden protagonist comes back to The City forced not only to complete the books in the contract but to take up work in a newspaper to support his writing.

Throughout the 60-issue run, we are witness to sardonic Jerusalem turning out to be this perverted version of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; an “enlightened” being descending from his high mountain to bring truth to the wretched, poor devils below.

Spider’s quest pits him against the police, mainstream media, and not one, but two US presidents. This is not a superhero comic book at all, and yet, the general template perfectly fits the bill; Jerusalem has sidekicks, a rogue’s gallery, and yeah, even a set of superpowers: his unflinching approach to the truth and a blunt, persuasive writing style.

Oh, and he’s also good at kicking-ass.

Transmetropolitan is vulgar, nihilistic and blatantly sarcastic, but at its core, it’s a tremendously idealistic manifesto.

We’re living in times when the truth is under assault. Politicians, corporations and individuals concoct their own tailored version of reality and swear by their fabrications, making of the cultural discourse something akin to a screaming contest among deafs.

And right in the middle of all this mess stands the media, still waving the flag of truth, but these days more preoccupied in metrics like page views and engagement time over the actual content.

Transmetropolitan serves as the ultimate homage to a free uncompromised press, a tale of one man that is willing to give his life in the quest for “The Truth”. And such a message during these mad days is not only relevant but necessary. We need more guys like Spider.

The title is collected in two presentations, a premium series of three slipcased, oversized volumes from DC/Vertigo and a series of trade paperbacks labelled 0 to 10.

Amazon.com | Booksetc.co.uk | Bol.com

V for Vendetta (Quality Communications/DC Vertigo, 1982)

To include V for Vendetta in a list of dystopias or “best comics” is as necessary as it is redundant. This ten-issue miniseries by Alan Moore and David Lloyd (with additional art by Tony Weare) is not only one of the most celebrated comic books of all time, but it’s probably the only work in the medium that can brag about inspiring political action in real life.

The problem –if it can be considered a problem at all, I mean, it’s not the book’s fault to be hyped to oblivion– with V for Vendetta is that it has become one of those creations like Citizen Kane or the Mona Lisa, that end up overwhelmed by the weight of their own success. All these are pieces of art so influential, they’ve turned into a mandatory cultural cliché.

Notwithstanding, if we isolate the actual comic from all the noise, it’s evident that we stand in front of a genuine, massive artistic achievement. No shit, right? It’s friggin’ Alan Moore we’re talking about here.

The world of V for Vendetta is an elaborate, incredibly rich cultural pastiche with influences that go from Orwell’s 1984 to Vincent Price’s deliciously twisted character from the 1971 comedy horror film The Abominable Dr. Phibes.

Elements from Judge Dredd, David Bowie, Batman, The Shadow and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and more, all converge to form a singular, pessimistic vision of the future, one that almost 40 years after it’s original release seems frighteningly relevant.

The story’s main premise is the contraposition of the antagonistic ideas of Anarchy and Totalitarianism. “Lives of your own, or a return to chains” as Evey Hammond, one of the main characters says at one point.

Interestingly, the tale starts with these boundaries clearly defined, and as the narrative advances, the lines blur until they become almost indiscernible.

The world has plunged into a profound economic crisis which lead to a devastating global nuclear conflict. Amidst this dark hour, fascist politicians have stepped into the scene offering security and stability, and a desperate, vulnerable society has taken the bait. Sounds familiar?

The world of V for Vendetta is one of governments closing their frontiers and casting nations into international isolation. Politicians unify people around a hand-picked, carefully constructed scapegoat that represents everything that’s going wrong in the country.

Alan Moore takes the conditions that have lead to the rise of authoritarian regimes of different affiliations in the past, –Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the 30s, Thatcherism in the 80s– and transposes it into the near future.

“It’s 1988 now. Margaret Thatcher is entering her third term of office and talking confidently of an unbroken Conservative leadership well into the next century…” Moore wrote in his introduction to the 1988 collected edition of the book. “The government has expressed a desire to eradicate homosexuality, even as an abstract concept and one can only speculate as to which minority will be next legislated against. I’m thinking of taking my family and getting out of this country soon, sometime over the next couple of years. It’s cold and it’s mean-spirited and I don’t like it here anymore. Goodnight England.”

The playbook of fear-mongering and polarization is trending again today, as leaders like Bolsonaro, Trump and Wilders are gaining ground by pouring fire on the collective frustrations of their people.

Initially published in 1982, the most shocking virtue of V for Vendetta is its ability to remind us of events from the past, describe our present, and warn us about the future all at the same time. And now more than ever, it stands as a prescient, cautionary tale of the dark paths we as a society, are still prone to take.

V for Vendetta is available as a graphic novel at: Amazon.com | Booksetc.co.uk | Bol.com

The post Best Dystopian Tales Ever Told in Comics appeared first on Submarine Channel.

By Benjamin Pineros

Background art from Ghost in the Shell

Dystopia is perhaps the one genre solely dedicated to exploring those scenarios where everything just goes to shit. We could argue that animation, unconstricted from many of the rules that apply to other art forms, is the perfect medium to convey these highly inventive and morbidly irresistible visions of the future.

The first animated feature films to portray dystopian tales are probably The New Gulliver from 1935, a Soviet production that mixed stop motion, live action, and 2D animation, and Fleischer Studio’s 1939 classic Gulliver’s Travels, both adaptations of Jonathan Swift’s famous satirical work from the early 18th century.

Since then, animation, both as a technique and as a genre, has mainly been considered as an affair directed to children,—thanks Disney!—and it’s just until the 1970s that adult-oriented animated projects started to appear with relative frequency, with authors incorporating nudity, drugs, and violence into the medium.

We’ve decided to list five of the most innovative and distinctive dystopias ever told in animation; angst-ridden tales that take us from hyper-stylized versions of Paris to psychedelic far away planets.

While we acknowledge that these tales don’t make the best of date movies, we do guarantee you won’t see your smart home assistant the same way ever again.

The Congress (2013)

Ari Folman’s The Congress is many things at once, and that’s both its biggest merit and its most notable flaw. Imagine an onion with so many layers, at one point it gets so complex you can’t even tell if it’s an onion anymore.

Part live-action, part animation, the movie is, in essence, a cautionary tale of capitalism gone wrong, but it doesn’t stop at that. Throw in there a multilayered love story, a very poignant commentary on identity, a scorching critique of the Hollywood studio system, lots of pop culture references and an insurgent revolution for good measure; this is one of those films that turns out to be a real a challenge to sum up when someone casually asks you, “what is it about”?

That multiplicity is precisely what makes this film so special, and also so divisive. At the time of its release, audiences and critics either hated it or liked it with equal passion.

The Congress starts off with a 45-minute live-action segment where we are introduced to actress Robin Wright playing herself. In The Congress, Wright is an aging performer who never quite fulfilled her superstar potential because of a reputation of being capricious and unreliable. As we get to know her, we learn that her career has tanked in part because her attention is mostly focused on her son Aaron, a pre-teen who suffers from Usher syndrome; a rare genetic disorder that is slowly deteriorating his sight and hearing.

Out of the blue comes an offer from the biggest player in the industry, “Miramount Studios”, which are interested in owning the rights of Robin Wright’s artistic persona. They want to scan not only her body but her gestures, movements, and performances so they can use her in as many projects as they like, just as any other digital or physical asset. (Real life studios are already doing this by the way) The deal offers a hefty sum of money, but has one caveat; she can never act again.

Despaired to see the worsening condition of her child and pressured by her manager (played brilliantly by the great Harvey Keitel) Wright accepts the deal in a 20-year contract.

It’s at this point where the film splinters off both stylistically and thematically, moving from a grounded live-action universe into a psychedelic, wacky toon world reminiscent of the Max Fleischer cartoons of the 1930s and loosely inspired in Stanisław Lem’s classic sci-fi novel from 1971 The Futurological Congress.

The movie fast-forwards two decades into the future when the contract is close to expiring. The studio is interested in renewing their agreement and invites Robin to speak at an annual congress where they unveil their latest productions. What makes the soiree special is that it’s held not in any physical venue, but in a reality that only exists in every assistant’s mind.

It turns out, in this hypothetical future pharmaceutical companies have made an unlikely alliance with Hollywood studios to develop the new frontier in entertainment; a drug-induced state where people escape from reality to adopt any shape they want and carry out their fantasies in a universe unhindered by any sense of morals, law or even physics.

Israeli-born director Ari Folman made a brave move when he departed from the documentary approach that earned him so much praise with Waltz with Bashir, to plunge himself into this expensive, risky and convoluted affair.

It feels like this is Folman’s ambitious attempt to make “a mother of all movies”, that film that manages to be relevant and prescient, heartfelt and intellectual. And well, he did throw everything in there, kitchen sink and golf clubs included. Yet, not having a restraint is precisely what dilutes the impact of the film and makes it so discordant.

Nevertheless, it still stands as a thought-provoking, masterful piece of cinema that raked up ten awards in festivals all over the world, including best European Animated Feature Film in 2013.

If you’re in the mood for a trippy, poetic ride with fantastic acting, look no further.

Ghost in the Shell (1995)

Flashy action scenes? Check! Political intrigue? Check! A deep philosophical exploration of the meaning of life? Hmm, yeah. Check! Nudity? Hell, that too. Check! If there is a film out there that could be described as “perfect”—if such a concept exists anyway,—this is as close as it gets.

The story takes place in the near future, in a world where people have artificially controlled metabolisms, computer-enhanced brains, and cybernetic bodies. Criminals are able to hack into minds and synthetic beings seek political asylum. Ghost in the Shell is not only a thought-provoking dystopian vision of the future but has a place among the pantheon of titles that helped define the cyberpunk subgenre, along with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.

The film follows the exploits of “Section 9”, a special-operations task-force assembled from former military and police agents to combat cyber-criminals and terrorists. Yet, the police procedural aspect is just a Trojan horse that carries a much deeper, philosophical inquiry: What does it mean to be human?

Major Motoko Kusanagi is one of the top agents of “Section 9”, a cybernetic organism composed of a human brain enclosed in a fully synthetic body. She was designed to be a highly efficient and lethal weapon in service of the government, but under the stoic and resolved facade of a loyal enforcer, she hides a pensive, troubled character. Not only does she question the real motivations of her superiors, but constantly wonders about her very own existence.

If that reminiscence of your first kiss, if that image of your spouse holding your baby for the very first time, along with all the rest of your memories, were at the end just a pile of data, would that make you any less human?

The very title, “Ghost in the shell” refers to the concept of consciousness, or soul, that is “trapped” in our body. It’s a premise that alludes to the thought experiment known as “brain in a vat”, a question that has been making people scratch their heads as early as Hindi tradition and has been tackled in one way or another by many philosophers from Plato to Descartes.

What if we could remove a person’s brain from their body, and somehow trap it in some kind of apparatus that provided it with the same electrical impulses that it receives naturally. In theory, the brain would continue to create a “life” and have normal conscious experiences as any other normal person with their brain in place. Furthermore, that disembodied brain won’t have any means to realize what its experiencing is a simulation and not the real thing.

This scenario inevitably ignites a flurry of questions. What is real? What is that thing that defines us as human? Our experiences, or our corporality? And here’s a fun one… how can we be so sure that what we’re living right now is real and not a simulation?

Ghost in the Shell not only provides plenty of food for thought but as a whole, is a brilliantly executed piece of cinema.

Director Mamoru Oshii chooses here to approach the mise-en-scene as a live-action project, limiting the camera’s movements as if he was constrained by tripods, dollies, and cranes. The film is stylistically closer to something from Yasujirō Ozu or Jacques Tati than to a traditional anime, especially when he opts for wide, static shots that allow the events to unfold uninterrupted in front of the “lens”, embedding the film with a contemplative, eerie tone.

The backgrounds are a work of art in itself, each frame a painting that breathtakingly depicts colorful, battered shanty towns coexisting with mammoth high tech skyscrapers and futuristic vehicles.

A world where people enhance their bodies with robotic parts, and everybody is connected to the net is a premise that sounds quite natural today, which makes it easy to forget that the universe of Ghost in The Shell was created twenty years ago in the original manga by Masamune Shirow.

Influential, relevant and brilliantly executed, this is one of those works where everything just clicks. If you’re in the mood for sexy robots that go scuba diving in their free time, recite existential poetry and kick some serious ass, then this is the one for you.

Renaissance (2006)

Paris in 2054 is an overpopulated, crime-plagued city where people resort to drugs, digital entertainment, and excessive consumerism to escape from the dullness of 9 to 5 work.

Demographic explosion forces the metropolis to grow upwards, with towering buildings built on top of other buildings giving the cityscape the resemblance of a mammoth termite mound made out of glass, concrete, and steel.

As far as dystopias go, Renaissance doesn’t really venture too far from our current state of things; worldbuilding isn’t something truly groundbreaking or particularly special as it chooses to depict a futuristic, yet familiar universe that hits a bit too close to home.

However, what does make of this one of the most underrated movies of the last two decades is an utterly unique stylistic approach that I’d argue had ever been done before, or since.

Directed by painter and author Christian Volckman, Renaissance is part of a wave of high profile films in the early aughts—Attack of the Clones (2002), Dogville (2003), Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004), Sin City (2005)—that pioneered in the adoption of digital filmmaking tools and experimented with the aesthetic possibilities of what was back then a brand new medium.

The crew of Renaissance embraced the use of motion capture technology and virtual environments years before much more popular films like The Polar Express and Sin City. In a rented warehouse in Luxemburg, the filmmakers spent nine weeks shooting the movie and capturing the actors’ performances to feed the animation team with enough data to create this utterly distinctive vision of Paris.

The whole project took in total over six years to make on an $18 million budget collected from various sources that included Onyx, Canal Plus, France 2, Disney and Miramax. Just to put that number into perspective, Blue Sky’s Ice Age: The Meltdown from the same year had a budget of around $80 million.

So, what about the story? Well, in a nutshell, Renaissance is an old school whodunnit with a twist. Under all the technology and heavy stylization, the film is at its heart a classic crime mystery in the best tradition of the French masters of the genre, like Daphne du Maurier, Louis Malle or the duo Boileau/Narcejac.

Avalon is a mega-corporation that develops beauty and health products, a conglomerate so powerful you can’t walk two blocks without seeing one of their ads. Imagine a fusion of Johnson & Johnson, Coca-Cola, and Apple.

Ilona Tasuiev is a young scientist developing for them a secret anti-aging project, but one good day she ends up being kidnapped in strange circumstances. Hard-boiled cop Barthélémy Karas is assigned to solve a convoluted case in which nothing is what it seems, and soon, he will find out it’s not only the scientist’s life which is at stake, but the fate of the whole human race.

Sure, character development is thin, and relationships feel rushed and an even a bit cheeky. But the huge merit of Renaissance is to achieve an incredibly singular vision of the future that hasn’t been done before it. Simply put, there is no other film out there like this.

Fantastic Planet (1973)

Society has achieved a state of peace and prosperity where there is little trace of social classes. Democracy has proven to be the most efficient system to keep the balance of power and discrepancies are solved through arduous but civil argumentation.

Thanks to incredible technological progress, basic needs are satisfied and citizens have the leeway to spend the majority of their time fostering their intellect and spiritual wellbeing.

Wait, this doesn’t sound like a dystopia at all you’d say. And well, yeah, this wouldn’t be a dystopia, if it wasn’t because what I’m describing is not Earth, but planet “Ygam” and their inhabitants, the “Draags” have brutally enslaved the human race, treating us like a pest akin to rats, or in the best of cases, like pets.

The Draags dress us up in the most ridiculous outfits, put us to fight against each other for their amusement, and discipline us when they seem fit.

Fantastic Planet inverts our relationship with animals and extrapolates it to this technologically advanced planet ruled by a race of giant blue bipeds. They use humans for their enjoyment in ways we feel shocking and perverse at first until we realize that’s exactly what we’ve been doing to animals since time immemorial.

An international co-production between France and Czechoslovakia, the film was a huge critical hit on its release in 1973, snatching the Grand Prix special jury prize at that year’s Cannes Film Festival and a myriad of other accolades all over the world. Curiously, its prominence faded shortly afterward and “La Planète Sauvage” was largely forgotten for almost thirty years until it was re-released in DVD in the early aughts, allowing it to be discovered by a new generation that fell captivated by its trippiness and turned it into a cult hit. The film has gained such a renewed interest that in 2016, Rolling Stone ranked it as the 36th greatest animated movie ever made.

To render this incisive allegory, director René Laloux resorted to the cutout animation technique, which is a form of stop-motion animation in which every element in the frame—characters, backgrounds, props—is not a three-dimensional figure or a sculpt, but a “cut out” of a drawing or a photograph. Each layer can be made from basically any material, with paper, cardboard and stiff fabric being the most used.

Cutout animation is probably the very first animated technique to appear in cinema, and although today computers have mostly replaced the process of physically cutting each element, the technique is still used, most famously in the popular comedy South Park.

Disquieting, psychedelic and vastly imaginative, Fantastic Planet depicts the Draags as a highly developed and intellectually driven civilization. Yet they are so self-assured of their superiority, they fail to recognize “inferior” species as thinking beings with their very own intelligence and emotions. Despite the sophistication of their culture, the Draags end up being as savage, or even more, than those creatures they consider as vermin.

Rings a bell?

The Sky Crawlers (2008)

Based on Hiroshi Mori’s highly successful novel of the same name, the movie focuses on the lives of a group of teenage fighter pilots who blast off into the skies every single day to battle against a mysterious and powerful enemy.

Events can be a bit confusing at first, as the film doesn’t spell out in one go the whole scope of the story. It doesn’t set up the conflict nor the character’s motivations from the outset, instead, it opts to throw one by one, little pieces of the puzzle for the audience to put together.

The first time I ever watched The Sky Crawlers was one night after a long day at work, in one of those moments when you know all your energy reserves have been depleted, every single hair on your head hurts, and the only thing you really want is to disappear into the mattress.

After 10 minutes it was impossible for me to take my eyes off the screen.

The movie is set in a hypothetical future where the world has achieved peace, yet happenings are very similar to our days. There’s political tensions, dangerous chemicals found in crops and ferocious international trade disputes.

Interestingly, worldbuilding is never spelled out directly, and there’s no obvious signs or grand establishing shots of megacities to illustrate the state of affairs. Context is executed throughout the headlines of newspapers or shots of TV screens covering the news, and it’s only through these subtle hints that you get to know what’s happening in the world of The Sky Crawlers.

In this dystopian society, although countries have achieved peace, warfare still exists, but in a very different incarnation from what we’re used to. Blood is spilled not in the name of ideologies, religion or nationality, but in the name of entertainment and collective sanity.

The world has found that conflict is an inherent necessity in human society, a nefarious affair that gives a sense of tension and reality essential for civilization to hold together.

The film argues that it’s only through the horrors of war that we are able to grasp the meaning of peace and value it. Reading the stats of war casualties in textbooks is not enough, we need to know that someone, somewhere is being killed or is killing in the name of an ideal.

As radical as this premise sounds, it reminds me of a weird phenomenon that’s appearing in our current times. Most of the people who went through the atrocities of WWI and WWII have gone, and the memory of these Earth-shattering events is slowly fading.

In the absence of tangible reminders of those nightmarish times, we’re seeing among younger generations the rebirth of ideologies that from a platform of hate and intolerance seem eager to push society into a brand new conflict, ignoring the lessons from the past, and lightheartedly taking warfare as if it was a videogame.

In The Sky Crawlers, these staged wars are held not between countries, but between private corporations that breed genetically modified children called “kildren”; expendable clones whose sole purpose is to fight.

The whole movie is structured around a series of spectacular dog fights interspersed with sequences of deep character development and existential pondering, which makes of The Sky Crawlers an appealing romp both to lovers of action-packed anime as well as those who prefer their stories with a healthy dose of existential angst.

If there is such a thing as a film capable of uniting the fans of Dragon Ball and Ingmar Bergman under the same turf, well, this might be it.

Not only is the film an exploration of military conflict in society, but a reflection of identity and fate. As these “kildren” grow aware of the cruel purpose behind their existence, an inevitable question starts to brew in their minds. Do they have a choice? Can their free will revert the purpose for what they were born?

“Even if it’s always the same road we walk, we can still step onto different places. Even if it’s always the same road we walk, the scenery is not the same.” muses at one point one of the main characters.

Another critically acclaimed work from Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii, this mix of 3D and 2D animation was one of the absolute festival darlings of 2008, winning accolades at the Toronto film festival, Sitges, Mainichi and Venice, plus a heap of nominations all around the globe.

The Sky Crawlers is one of those works that can either go over your head or become one of your favorite films of all time.

The post Top 5: Mindbending Dystopias in Animation appeared first on Submarine Channel.

By Benjamin Pineros

Since the dawn of time, humanity has always tried to build a paradise on Earth. From the construction of the very first wheel to the invention of the microchip, human ingenuity has raised the possibility of these ideal scenarios becoming a reality. And undoubtedly, we’ve come a long way.

But it feels like for every step we take forward, we take two steps back. The darkest aspects of human nature always come to taint our dreams of progress, impeding that ideal promised land to ever come to fruition.

Kings were replaced by industrial tycoons, more than 2 billion people live in poverty and most of us spend half of our waking life devoted to making money for someone else.

And damn, where’s my flying Delorean?

Purposely or tangentially, artists have always played the role of aesthetic-obsessed historians capable of rendering a distinctive snapshot of the world around them. They document the anxieties of the present and warns us about the dark traps hidden in those promises of a bright future.

In times when Amazon employees have to pee in water bottles in fear of losing their jobs and workers grind their tendons away building iPhones, the genre of dystopia seems as relevant as ever.

As part of the release of the dystopian motion comic Ascent from Akeron, Submarine Channel looks at the best dystopian stories in popular culture.

Children of Men (2006)

Global political instability. Refugee crises popping in every continent. World leaders resorting to anti-immigrant rhetoric. All these are real news right now, symptoms of an exploding malaise that has been brewing in the shadows for a couple of decades. “Children of Men” spotted the signs back in the early aughts and created a vision of the near future that today, unfortunately, feels too close to home.

There are segments in this film that we can easily mistake as current day news clips. Set in 2027, two decades of global infertility have left society on the verge of collapse. Massive migrations are spreading all over Europe, paired with terrorist attacks in every capital. To address the overwhelming crisis, the U.K. has veered towards an authoritarian government that has closed the country’s borders and herds its people with a discourse of Nationalism and “security first”.

Sounds familiar?

Theo Faron (Clive Owen) is a minor bureaucrat who hasn’t been able to recover after losing his child to a flu pandemic in 2008. The tragedy has turned him into this broken, cynical alcoholic with very few things to look forward in life. Theo basically is just burning his days away at a dull desk job.

Meanwhile, his ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore) has opted to deal with the loss of their child by immersing herself in political activism, becoming the leader of “The Fishes”, a militant human rights group outlawed and hunted by the government.

Everything changes after Julian asks Theo for a favor, on the surface just a minor errand that will eventually prove to be crucial for the survival of the entire human race.

This is a bleak, aging world with an ever-present sense of despair; in “Children of Men”, there’s no hope, no future, and everything is depressing as fuck.

You won’t find here any spectacular shots depicting mammoth cityscapes full of flying cars and cyborgs jaywalking down the streets. And it’s precisely the lack of emphasis on technology, — explicitly choosing not to focus on phones, computers or “The Internet” — that makes this film timeless. This is science fiction that opts to explore the socio-political dynamics of the future instead of showcasing flashy gadgets, and that is why Children of Men is one of those films that just like fine wine — or Converse sneakers — ages very well.

Curiously, underneath all the layers of thoughtful, heady themes, Children of Men is in essence an unorthodox, gripping chase flick. Particularly, there are two crucial moments that Alfonso Cuarón and his partner in crime, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, chose to portray in long uninterrupted takes that could well rank among the most jaw-dropping action sequences in the history of cinema. And no, I’m not exaggerating. True technical and artistic wonders result of an elaborate choreography, new camera rig technology specifically created for the film, clever editing and a bit of CGI; the long shots in Children of Men don’t have anything to envy those in Welles’ “Touch of Evil” and Tarkovsky’s “The Sacrifice”.

I remember that when I saw the film in the theater for the very first time, I could hear people in the audience gasping and puffing in awe. When you talk about this movie with anyone, chances are those two shots are probably the first thing to come up in the conversation.

Although based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel “The Children of Men”, the movie adaptation strays away ostensibly and purposely from the source material. Director Alfonso Cuarón has famously stated that he didn’t want to read the novel during the screenwriting process; he and writer Timothy J. Sexton threw away most of the book’s plot out of the window and turned the film into a very different beast.

P.D. James’ book focuses on the political intrigue, reflects over the corruption of power, and serves as a lengthy exploration on how the world willingly surrenders to totalitarianism in the face of a crisis. The film, on the other hand, is a much tighter tale of redemption and hope.

Although critics raved about it at the moment of its release, — I recall one mainstream critic so impressed he said it was the best movie of all time, only to retract later after the backlash and media scorn — the movie was a complete commercial failure. Universal chose to release it on Christmas, — probably the worst time of the year to premiere a film about the downfall of civilization — and promoted it with what is possibly the worst trailer in the history of trailers. Like, really, the trailer for Children of Men is absolutely awful.

Costing around $80 million dollars to make, it managed to gross less than $70 million and was painfully shunned at the Oscars, receiving only three nominations for best-adapted screenplay, best cinematography, and best editing, winning none.

Incredibly unsuccessful at the time of its release, Children of Men has slowly become a cult classic, earning the appreciation it deserves and certainly standing as one of the most realistic portrayals of the future ever done in film.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Life is tough already, why make it worse with art?

Novels are cruel inventions devised only to inflate the writer’s ego and make people unhappy. They make us think and feel and bring us the uncertainty of freedom. Books provide fictions that lead society to long for a life that is unattainable, they sell impossible dreams that only result in heartbreak

In the government’s search to cut out all of that which brings unrest, firefighters are not assigned to put out fires, but to start them. Their sole responsibility is to burn books out of existence, and if necessary, burn the readers with them.

As over-the-top and ludicrous as this oppressive future might sound at first, the world described in Fahrenheit 451 is a throwback to real dark periods in human history where books have been thrown into bonfires and art has been considered as politically inconvenient.

François Truffaut was introduced to international mainstream audiences just until 1977 when he played French scientist Claude Lacombe in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but at that point, he’d already earned himself a place among one of the most important directors of all time.

Since his debut in 1959 with “The 400 Blows”, Truffaut spearheaded what is known as “La Nouvelle Vague”, a French movement that lasted almost two decades and produced some of the most influential titles in the history of cinema. The introduction of improvised dialogue and naturalistic acting, jump cuts, non-linear narratives, long tracking shots and a preference to shoot on location, revolutionized the world of filmmaking in its time and permeates the works of everyone from Francis Ford Coppola to Spike Jonze.

In the mid 60’s Truffaut was one of the sensations of the European scene, with all of his three films to that point being lauded by critics and having enjoyed very successful runs in the festival circuit. In 1966, he was entrusted to his first big-budget project, the British produced adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s sci-fi classic Fahrenheit 451 from 1953.

It was the first time Truffaut shot outside France, his first time handling a cast of international stars, his first color film and his first time dealing with the pressures that come with big budget filmmaking.

A troubled production with a mixed reception in its day, the film turned out to be the oddest entry in Truffaut’s filmography. It’s a movie that despite displaying most of his stylistic traits doesn’t quite feel like the rest of his body of work.

In comparison, Fahrenheit 451 feels stiff and lacks the freshness of Truffaut’s other movies, but in a sense, it’s his most far-reaching and universal work.

Amidst a world where people are numbed by mindless escapist entertainment via TV shows and drugs, — cough, cough — the story follows Guy Montag, a dedicated firefighter who starts to feel interested in the books he burns. After meeting a neighbor that slowly introduces him to a different worldview, this once loyal enforcer of the ideals of the government begins to question his job, his life, and his marriage.

Contrary to HBO’s terrible adaptation from 2018, Truffaut’s version is very faithful to Bradbury’s novel. Some events are compressed and slightly changed, and an important character is omitted, but overall the screenplay respects the central premise and plot structure of Bradbury’s groundbreaking novel.

Truffaut understands the nerve of the book so well, the film even starts with a narrator reciting the credits instead of rendering them on screen, in an allusion to a culture that doesn’t know how to read anymore.

The novel serves as a commentary on how new forms of mass media can degrade our culture, reduce our attention span, and kill society’s interest in literature. Truffaut’s version, on the other hand, is a critique on bureaucracy, totalitarianism, and the 50s family lifestyle. But both share the same objective, to bring into the spotlight the dangers of censorship.

Fahrenheit 451 is more than fifty years old already, and you could think that the menace of government censorship was defeated with the arrival of the Internet, where the flow of information is so vast no institution could ever control it.

But sadly, it’s a dirty move governments of today still have in their playbook.

The Trump administration has taken a proactive stance to tone down or eliminate completely the threat of climate change in EPA’s documentation, editing out as far as they can stretch it words like “greenhouse gases”, “fossil fuels” and “global warming”.

Meanwhile, China has set in place what is known as “The Great Firewall of China”, a monstrous apparatus of control that allows authorities to monitor the online activity of individuals and block any content they deem as inappropriate.

Do you know that almost 200 journalists — that’s enough people to fill a Boeing 727 — have been killed in Colombia since the 1980s because their reporting was deemed as “inconvenient”? Or that pornography featuring female ejaculation is censored in the UK?

Unfortunately, in a world where science and art are still being declared as political adversaries, saying the truth can cost your life, and government boards decide what kind of porn you should watch, the message of Fahrenheit 451 continues to be frighteningly relevant.

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Juvenile delinquency, brutal beatings, corruption, murder, pederasty and gang rape. It’s difficult to think of another movie that has depicted such a long list of heinous acts, and even harder to find one that had managed to stylize these grotesque expressions of violence to the point of turning them into artistic abstraction.

Yeah, prepare yourselves my little droogies, this trip to the filmdrome will be a real horrorshow.

Set in a cold, gray and gloomy dystopian version of Britain in the near future, the story follows the exploits of a charismatic teen called Alex DeLarge. He lives with his parents, goes to school and on the surface, appears to have the normal life of any adolescent. But in reality, Alex is the leader of a dangerous small gang of thugs that terrorizes the city every night in a deranged, criminal frenzy.

Alex is a witty, sophisticated teenager in love with Beethoven’s music, who exhibits a complete detachment to everything and everyone. Lacking any sense of empathy, compassion or responsibility, he’s capable of the most gruesome and depraved acts you can possibly imagine of. Even more frightening, he perpetrates these horrific crimes with the naiveté of a little child who pulls the wings from a butterfly out of boredom. It’s this absolute desensitization that makes of Alex probably one of the most frightening villains in the history of cinema.

True back in 1971 and valid still today, general audiences have become less and less responsive to violence on screen. It seldom produces any deep emotional impact because we are accustomed to seeing it everywhere.

But A Clockwork Orange works your brain differently. In time you can sure lose some of the plot details and whatnot, but no matter how many years pass, you will never forget the film’s most brutal scenes.

The images are so shocking not because the movie is particularly graphic or gory, but because of the film’s meticulous aestheticization of violence.

Dramatic, well-timed zooms, slow motion, impeccable symmetrical compositions, fluid Steadicam shots; all the traits that make of Kubrick one of the most distinctive directors of all time are in full display.

But it’s not “just” it’s formal exuberance what makes it so enduring. Underneath its heavy stylization lays an irreverent satire with multiple layers of political and social commentary.

On one hand, it’s a blunt critique of all notion of authority; a systematic takedown of family, church, and state.

On another, it’s a warning over how technology — and psychological conditioning specifically — can be used by totalitarian governments to strip people from their free will and exert social control.

It might sound crazy, but that concern is actually very real. Since the apparition of Behaviorism during the 1930s, many governments and private institutions have been rubbing their hands over the very wicked possibility of being able to effectively condition an individual’s actions.

Just to name one example, the CIA ran between 1953 and the late 70s the very illegal Project MKUltra, a secret program that experimented on human subjects with the intention of developing drugs that allowed mind control.

The 1970s sounds too far for you? Ok, let us revise a little happening much closer to home.

In 2012, Facebook manipulated the feeds of nearly 700,000 users without their consent, in an experiment directed to affect their emotions. Yup. Over the course of one week, Zuckerberg and Co. hid “a small percentage” of emotional words from people’s news feeds to test how that would affect on statuses and the number of “Likes” that people give out.

In a Clockwork Orange, Alex’s crime spree ultimately gets him captured by the government and he becomes the subject of a brutal behavioral experiment — not that dissimilar in principle to those of the CIA and Facebook — to change his personality.

The original novel by Anthony Burgess from 1962 was ultimately a tale of redemption. Alex ends up outgrowing his violent impulses and pursuing a peaceful life as a normal “productive” member of society. This ending was omitted from all American editions of the book prior to 1986 because publishers in the U.S. thought it was not a credible evolution of the character.

Although Kubrick respects the general plot structure of the book, he also decided to omit this redeeming finale, picking a dark, much more cynical end to wrap up Alex’s character arch.

Incredibly divisive from its release, A Clockwork Orange was either lauded as a masterpiece or derided for being nothing more than pornography. Blamed for a short wave of teen crime in Britain in the early 70s, censored by the government and disowned by Burgess himself, time has been kind to the movie, with academics, artists and critics referencing it again and again as one of the most influential films ever made.

It has become such an icon you can see it referenced everywhere today in popular culture, from frequent apparitions in The Simpsons to nods in Rihanna’s “You Da One” music video.

1984 (1984)

“There is truth and there is untruth. Freedom is the freedom to say two plus two equals four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

I work as a journalist and a big part of my job is to have my eyes on the newswires all the time. And I kid you not when I say, I’m reminded of 1984 every single day. The parallels between Orwell’s vision of the future and our current times is nothing short of astonishing, and needless to say, incredibly frightening.

Both the novel and the faithful film adaptation from Michael Radford (Il Postino, The Merchant of Venice) centers around Winston Smith, a low-ranking civil servant who works in a tiny office cubicle at the Ministry of Truth.

The world has suffered a series of catastrophic grand scale military conflicts that have resulted in a complete geopolitical re-organization of the globe. This new world is now composed of three totalitarian superstates — Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia — that seem to be engaged in perpetual war against each other.

Winston lives in Oceania, — integrated by the Americas, Australasia, the British Isles, Polynesia and Southern Africa — a territory ruled by The English Socialist Party, known as “Ingsoc”.

A combination of the worse elements from Nazism and Communism, the Party rules society with a very strong hierarchical structure based on fear in which total submission is demanded under threat of being tortured, or “disappeared”.

Although most of the population lives in precarious conditions, a big part of the state-run news is dedicated to constantly repeating record-breaking statistics of economic growth. 

The Party is led by “Big Brother”, a fifty-something year old man with a stern appearance that attracts an extreme cult of personality.

Big Brother is omnipresent in society. Cities are ridden with posters with his image, he addresses the citizens in a daily telecast, and all round he’s revered almost as a god.

Propaganda constantly reminds people that Big Brother is always watching every move, his vigilant eyes looking for those who incur in what is called “thought crime”, the illegal act of having unfavorable opinions towards the Party… in your mind.

To capture “thought criminals” the government has instituted the “Thought Police”, a secret enforcement agency tasked with spotting and punishing these unspoken infractions.

Telescreens are ubiquitous in this dark dystopia and play a significant part in surveilling the population. It’s through these home appliances that authorities monitor people’s facial expressions and general behavior to detect their level of loyalty to the Party.

In their pursuit to control every aspect of society, the Party even went to redesign language, creating a simplified version of English called “Newspeak”. For Ingsoc, language is a political weapon, a tool to limit self-expression, personal identity, and ultimately, free will. How can you ever start a revolution if the word “dissent” doesn’t exist in the dictionary?

In Oceania, reality is whatever the Party wants it to be. They continually revise history, changing events, dates, and names to steer the narrative at convenience. “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” says one of Ingsoc’s slogans.

Newspeak also incorporates the ultimate instrument to control the masses, the concept of “doublethink”; the possibility of an idea to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously, both of them being “true”.

Distorting the very fabric of language makes of reality a malleable concept, allowing Big Brother the ultimate level of control, to fuck with people’s minds.

If you can make people believe in lies or disregard the truth at will, it’s only then that you have achieved complete control. “Doublethink” allows the Party to spout deliberate falsehoods as truths only to pick up the facts again when it becomes convenient. It practically allows them to do anything.

“Doublethink” is prominent in the Party’s toolbox, one notorious example the way they named their ministries. Each name is the exact opposite of their true functions. The Ministry of Truth deals with fabricating lies, the Ministry of Peace is in charge of warfare, the Ministry of Plenty is in charge of overseeing food rationing and the Ministry of Love is dedicated to processing and torturing those captured by the “Thought Police”.

Winston’s job in the Ministry of Truth is to review news clips and historical records and tweak them to conform to Ingsoc’s ever-shifting version of history. While he is diligent at his job, he has reservations about the Party’s methods and writes his feelings in a secret diary.

In this bleak world, sex is only reserved for procreation, but Winston gets involved in a torrid affair with a fellow party worker called Julia, a relationship that exacerbates his subversive ideas and loathing towards the Party.

The somber world that Orwell created for his novel was mainly molded after the modus operandi of the Nazi and Communist Parties of the time. The novel was not devised as a realistic or prophetic imagining of the future, but as a warning based on Orwell’s concerns over the rise of Nationalism, censorship and the advancement of technology.

Ironically, what was originally written as a cautionary tale seems to have been embraced by some as a step-by-step tutorial.

China definitively is one of those countries that has taken Orwell’s vision to heart. Their government has been implementing for decades now what’s probably the biggest state surveillance apparatus in history. There are more than 200 million CCTV cameras across the country, many equipped with facial recognition software. They also have spy drones that look and act like real birds and their police force is being equipped with smart “Terminator” like glasses.

Sum to that their nationwide credit system, which gives each citizen a “social score” that will reward citizens for doing volunteer work or donating blood, and will punish for things like cheating in video games or loitering. In China, if your social score is low, you won’t be eligible for public universities, you will be banned from flights with national carriers, and the government might even freeze your assets.

But it’s not just China. Last year, Taylor Swift’s concert entourage installed stealth cameras with facial recognition in their Rose Bowl gig to capture pictures of her fans and cross-reference them with a database of the pop star’s known stalkers.

Even scarier than all this technology is the rising adoption of the most malicious and destructive instrument in Ingsoc’s arsenal; Doublethink and the manipulation of truth.

Just last April, Brasil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro went on to claim with a straight face that the Nazi Party was a leftist movement, and to make things even more contradictory, he did it just after visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and museum.

Furthermore, Bolsonaro’s Minister of Education is pushing to edit school textbooks to redefine the military coup of 1964 — which lasted 21 years and left more than 400 people disappeared and thousands more tortured, — as a period of “democratic regime by force”

Particularly Orwellian is the political climate in the US now. Trump has made up more than 9000 lies in his first 773 days in office and the president’s advisor, Kellyanne Conway, has famously coined the phrase “alternative facts”.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group, the largest television station operator in the United States by number of stations, was the center of world indignation in April 2018 when Deadspin Video Director Timothy Burke created a clip that exposed how the company enforces its newscasters to read a scripted promo that parrots Trump’s cultural war against the media.

Veteran journalist and former news anchor Dan Rather wrote about the exposé at the time: “News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn’t journalism. It’s propaganda. It’s Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses.”

1984 is one of those seminal works that has managed to both describe and change the real world at the same time. Most of its concepts, ideas and terminology has embedded into popular culture, making its way into art, film, social sciences and politics. We’ve seen it referenced in all sorts of media, from Apple Commercials to rock albums by Alan Parsons and David Bowie. 1984 is probably the most influential artwork of the XXth century, and to be honest, I wish it wasn’t.

Blade Runner (1982)

What can I say that hasn’t been said already? Blade Runner is probably one of the most studied films of all time, being the topic of countless college courses, essays, documentaries, and books.

Mentioned in practically every critics poll out there, Time Magazine included it in their list of ALL-TIME 100 best films, in 2017 Empire Magazine placed at 13th in their list of “100 Greatest Movies” and IGN ranked it in second place behind Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in their countdown of the “Top 25 Sci-Fi Movies of All Time”.

If that wasn’t enough, the movie was even named as the best science fiction film ever made by a panel only comprised of scientists organized by The Guardian in 2004.

Despite it being a commercial flop and suffering serious critical backlash at the time of its release, Blade Runner has become an omnipresent cultural icon, inspiring the look and themes of science fiction for the last three decades.

It has also become the film everybody says they’ve watched, but actually haven’t. Yeah, I know you’re smirking right now. How many times have you fallen asleep when trying the hardest to “watch it until the end this time”?

Visually, it’s absolutely stunning and the music is truly mesmerizing, but it lacks the emphasis on traditional narrative and sensible drama that mainstream audiences are accustomed to expect in a blockbuster film.

It was one of the most expensive movies of its time, with a budget of almost $30 million — In comparison, The Empire Strikes Back from 1980 cost $18 million — and was headlined by none other than Harrison Ford, who was probably the biggest name in entertainment at the moment after the successes of Star Wars and Indiana Jones.

Ticket buyers went into the theater expecting an action film full of frantic shootouts, furious explosions, and flying car chases. Instead, they were greeted with an excruciatingly slow-paced, two-hour long exploration of what it means to be human.

Blade Runner is set in the early 21st century, in a time when robots are almost indistinguishable from normal humans.

These synthetic beings — called “Replicants”, but commonly referred to as “skin jobs” — are usually entasked to hard slave labor or are enlisted as soldiers, and have a vital role in the colonization of other planets.

Replicants are declared illegal after a combat team in an off-world colony revolts in a bloody insurrection, leading the Police to form a new special unit called “Blade Runners” to hunt them down.

The story kicks-off after a worn-out cop — Rick Deckard, played by Ford — is assigned to find and execute a small group of fugitive replicants that has escaped to Earth and have hidden in Los Angeles.

Although it borrows elements from the neo-noir comic book from 1975 “The Long Tomorrow” written by Alien scribe Dan O’Bannon and illustrated by Moebius, the film is, in essence, a loose adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel from 1968 “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”.

While a lot of details were changed, and the very terms “Blade Runner” and “replicant” are never mentioned in the book, both works take “posthumanism” as one of its core premises; a world in which humankind has gone beyond its biological constraints and is being replaced by synthetic constructs.

The philosophical concept of “brain in a vat” tackled by other subsequent films like “Ghost in the Shell” and “Ex Machina” is explored and taken here to the extreme. Can I be a human even if the only human thing about me are my memories? Can I be “real” if my brain is just a mass-produced assembly of silicon chips and plastic cables?

The world of Blade Runner is one of vast landscapes of towering, dark buildings with massive chimney-like exhausts expelling flamboyant fireballs. It’s the epitome of industrialization gone mad, with glamorous, gigantic neon advertisements reigning above a grim, decaying megalopolis where it never stops raining. This is a world with no green, presented as the ultimate orgy of technology and artificiality, probably as a presage of a future that has lost its soul.

Ironically, the only character in the film to display a glimpse of humanity is the most feared and brutal of replicants — portrayed brilliantly by Rutger Hauer — who delivers at the end of the movie a poetic monologue in what could well be the best single scene in the history of cinema.

Curiously, the movie is set in November 2019. It’s true we don’t have flying cars or off-planet colonies yet, but bioengineering, artificial intelligence, and the rise of mega-corporations are very real elements of today’s society.

Software has already influenced elections. Artificial beings have been found to be infiltrating the cultural discourse on social media. Robots are being victims of discrimination. Google is very close to perfecting an AI capable of talking over the phone and fooling real people. Consumer trends indicate we’re on the verge of a sex bot craze. Private companies are jumping on the race to provide commercial flights to space.

We are just starting to scratch the surface of the ethical dilemmas, philosophical implications and practical challenges these new technologies will introduce to our daily lives. Blade Runner works as a prescient, far-reaching, beautiful exploration of how technology could change the very essence of our species.

If there could be something as “the mother of all films” this might probably be the closest thing to it. So, next time, grab a Red Bull and watch it until the end. I promise you won’t regret it.

The post Best Dystopian Movies based on Literature appeared first on Submarine Channel.

By Benjamin Piñeros

Still from Shamed

The words “googling”, “tweeting” and “hashtag” are just a handful of terms taken from social media that have become part of our everyday lexicon. The advent of the internet and the omnipresence of mobile phones have changed every aspect of the human condition, from the way we work and spend our money to the way we talk and have sex.

Since the adoption of agriculture, to the development of medicine, technology has always helped shape human evolution, and we’re just realizing the impact the digital age is having on our species.

Even something as innocuous as an emoji is leaving its imprint. According to a 2013 study published in the journal Social Neuroscience, the human brain has adapted in the last couple of decades to react with the same neurological response to emojis as it does to real facial expressions.

Art, as our most sophisticated means of expression, is of course also deeply affected by technological advancement. The rules of cinema, for example, have gone through a gradual and constant revolution tied to our progress in the fields of optics, mechanics, electronics, and chemistry. From black-and-white photography to digital cinematography, from bulky, heavy cameras to slick devices you can carry in your pocket, the art form has suffered a shakeup almost every decade.

We never get to see the gadget itself, or cut to the outside world, the whole thing happens on a screen

Not every new technology pushes the medium orward though. Does anyone remember Smell-O-Vision or Interfilm? The line between a legitimate game-changing invention and a gimmick is a fine one to walk, and among all the technological progress there has been a fair share of flops.

The “computer screen film” or “desktop film” is a new kind of movie, one that takes place entirely inside the margins of a software interface. We never get to see the gadget itself, or cut to the outside world, the whole thing happens on a screen, cursor movements, typing sounds, and notifications included.

The art of cinema was born with the short film. The lack of commercial pressure and the lower costs in comparison to features have always allowed artists to experiment with new techniques and break the barriers of film form. 2D and 3D animation, color photography and countless other advancements we now consider essential elements of cinema all appeared for the first time in short films.

Today, shorts are the vehicle where artists are perfecting the language of the “desktop film”. Here are five of the most well-executed examples of this new technique. What do you think, legitimate revolution or a fad worse than Astrocolor?

*Disclaimer. All of these films contain NSFW content. Four out of five films are optimized for viewing on mobile phones.

MarkyMark87 (2018)

Written and directed by Kurt Platvoet and produced by Dutch broadcaster VPRO, the short is a very accurate portrayal of contemporary life. Mark is on a boring commute after work and we get a glimpse of his life through his interactions on iMessages, Instagram and Happn. It shows both how frenetic and deceiving digital socializing can be. 

Kidder (2017)

Produced and directed by Louise Thornton, Kidder depicts 12 minutes in the life of “Kidder” as he texts and talks to friends through a flurry of social platforms. What seems like an innocuous slice of his life actually reveals a tonne of his personality and his current state of mind. The film effectively explores love, the fear of growing up, the current job crisis and some existential angst for good measure. Excellent use of the technique to render character development.

Noah (2013)

Written and directed by Walter Woodman and Patrick Cederberg as a class project when they were film students at Ryerson University, Noah tells the story of the very millennial breakup between Noah and his girlfriend Amy through Facebook. It’s an exploration of how technology can influence our social life and affect communication with the people around us. Funny, relatable and poignant. The film was also one of the inspirations for the Modern Family episode “Connection Lost.”

Shamed (2018)

Produced and directed by Gill Davies for BBC’s The Social digital platform in Glasgow, this short film tells the cautionary tale of a young teen shamed after a night of heavy drinking. Written by Cat Hepburn, the story plays out from the perspective of a woman, which sadly, still at this day and age is a rare occurrence in entertainment.

Pocket (2019)

Directed by Mishka Kornai and Zach Wechter for production company Pickpocket TV, the film follows the everyday trials and tribulations of an ordinary teen in high school. Classes, bullying, partying, having their first intimate experience, Pocket is a meditation on how much of young people’s lives happen inside their mobile phones in the digital age.

The post 5 Shorts Made with Mobile Phone Screencaps appeared first on Submarine Channel.

By Benjamin Pineros

Ever since the genesis of cinema, there has been a curiosity to explore the possibilities of the art form beyond the realm of narrative structure. William K.L. Dickson’s Annabelle Serpentine Dance from 1895 depicts American broadway actress Annabelle Moore performing vividly as she flows and creates kinetic patterns with her skirt. Each frame was hand-tinted in violets, yellows, and oranges, giving to her movements this mesmerizing, dreamlike illusion.

The short — which in reality was a series of shorts — lacks any sense of narrative, and it’s not quite fiction, nor documentary in nature. Its appeal lies in its plasticity and visual beauty rather than in the tradition of storytelling. It becomes the unintentional precursor of what two decades afterward will conform to a new branch of cinema, the experimental or avant-garde film pioneered by artists like René Clair and Walter Ruttmann.

Of all experimental techniques and appropriation of new technology we’ve seen throughout history, one cannot find a more extreme and subversive example of abstraction than the “cameraless” film.

If we strip down film form to its most primitive concept, we could argue that cinema is nothing more than light and sound. Just as a painter has the spectrum of colors at his disposal, and a myriad of brushes to apply them, filmmakers in the most basic sense just have a camera and a sound recorder to render moving pictures. But what happens if you take away the camera? Is it still cinema?

1) La Jetée (1962)

French artist Chris Marker did in 1962 probably one of the weirdest films to ever end up in a mainstream TV show in the US. This sci-fi featurette is set in a post-apocalyptic future after the globe has been devastated by World War III. Amidst this grim scenario, a group of scientists is developing time travel in the hopes of altering the past and future to fix their present timeline. The movie is made of voice-over narration and a musical score over black & white still photographs. It’s intricate plot and ingenious time-travel mechanics inspired both Terry Gilliam’s 1995 science fiction film 12 Monkeys and the 12 Monkeys television series aired on Syfy in 2015.

2) Blue (1993)

During his career, English artist Derek Jarman mostly sailed through the waters of independent and underground cinema, although he grazed the mainstream with films like Caravaggio and several music videos for The Smiths, Pet Shop Boys, and Bryan Ferry.

Blue is his twelfth and final feature film, released four months before his death from AIDS-related complications. During the time of the film’s production, Jarman’s illness had rendered him partially blind, being able only to see in shades of blue.

The film consists of the entire frame filled by a saturated blue color accompanied by a soundtrack of some of Jarman’s long-time collaborators reciting half true, half surreal recollections of his life and career.

3) Mothlight (1963)

Stan Brakhage’s work stretched the definitions of film form probably as no other author has done before or since. His films are the complete opposite of a narrative experience, something closer to a dream or a drug-induced state. To achieve his painterly, surreal images he used countless unorthodox techniques like hand scratching celluloid strips frame by frame, puncturing holes through them, using pre-existing footage to make ghostly superimpositions, ingenious in-camera effects, and crazy post-chemical postprocessing.

To produce Mothlight, Brakhage collected flower petals, leaves, moth wings, and other detritus and “sandwiched” them between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The unusual collage was then contact-printed at a lab for it to be able to be projected and copied.

“Here is a film that I made out of a deep grief. The grief is my business in a way, but the grief was helpful in squeezing the little film out of me, that I said ‘these crazy moths are flying into the candlelight, and burning themselves to death, and that’s what’s happening to me,’” said the filmmaker in his commentary track on the Criterion Collection DVD By Brakhage: An Anthology, Volume 1, “I don’t have enough money to make these films, and … I’m not feeding my children properly, because of these damn films, you know. And I’m burning up here … What can I do?” I’m feeling the full horror of some kind of immolation, in a way.”

4) A Boy and His Atom (2013)

Now I promise, if you still have at least a pinch left of that wondrous capacity of amazement we had when we were kids, this film will absolutely blow your mind.

These days the Internet generates more than 2 quintillion bytes of data each day, — that’s a 2 followed by 18 zeros! — have you ever thought about how on Earth are we going to store all our accumulated trash in the future? As our data creation and consumption becomes bigger, we need to find smaller physical units to be able to store such an insane amount of information.

IBM’s atomic research team is exploring the possibilities of storing data at an atomic scale, which will be the most sustainable and efficient path to solving all our storage needs in the future. In 2012, the company announced they had found a way to store a single bit of data on 12 atoms, and to promote their insane achievement they decided to show off their atom slaying skills by creating a film entirely made by moving carbon monoxide molecules. Yup, this is the smallest set in the history of cinema.

A Boy and His Atom was made with two scanning tunneling microscopes and 5000 atoms, and the final product renders our little atom movie set magnified about 100 million times. The movie shows a boy playing with a wayward atom for one minute.

5) What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966)

Ok, this might be a bit cheating but it’s worth it because it’s the most hilarious movie on the list. Did you know that Woody Allen didn’t shoot a single frame for his feature-length directorial debut?

The iconic filmmaker took a Japanese action film titled International Secret Police: Key of Keys, re-edited it and overdubbed it with dialogue diametrically opposed to that of the original film. While the original movie deals with Bond-type spy infiltrating a dangerous anti-government guerrilla to steal a large amount of money, Allen’s film is about the misadventures of a secret agent in search of the world’s best egg salad recipe.

The post “No cameras were harmed during production”: 5 films done without a camera appeared first on Submarine Channel.

Opening ceremony of the 14th Busan International Film Festival (Credit: Injeongwon/Wikipedia)

Festivals constitute an important part of the life of a filmmaker’s career because they offer new creators a chance not only to put their work in front of audiences but to present their own persona to talent agencies, producers, studio heads, and other like-minded artists. A film festival is the convergence point of every vector in the industry, a place where films are sold and new projects get off the ground.

Just overnight, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the entire industry to rethink itself. With production halted and theatrical exhibition in limbo, the traditional film festival seems to be one of the first aspects forced to evolve or die.

Taking a festival to the virtual realm is something that many have attempted with various degrees of success since the late ’90s. Top Shorts, Short of the Week, Omeleto and The Monthly Film Festival are initiatives that have already become institutions in the filmmaking world, especially among upcoming filmmakers on a tight budget. Taking a film online is the most effective route to test one’s work against a huge audience and against other creators without the huge costs implicated in going to a presential festival.

But there are many valuable aspects of the festival experience that are lost in translation when taken to the online realm. Competingin an online festival might get your film to a much bigger audience, but you will lack the face-to-face networking aspect of the “real” thing. Film festivals are usually the ideal setting to meet with that amazing composer that will take your future project to the next level, or with that talent agent that will help you get that dream gig with Adidas.

But the current health crisis is forcing the scene to change very rapidly. At the moment, the Venice Film Festival is one of the very few top festivals that has doubled down on their intention to go ahead as planned, still on track to kick off its 77th edition in the first week of September.

In response to a global festival scene in tatters, Youtube, in association with a lot of the most prestigious festivals on the planet, launched We Are One: A Global Film Festival, an online event set to run from May 29 to June 7 this year, offering a host of feature films, shorts, documentaries, music, comedy and panel discussions free with no ads.

Amidst this highly uncertain scenario, these five festivals have decided to go entirely online, in a move that might prove to be not just an experiment, but the new normal.

1) Playgrounds

For more than ten years, the Dutch-based celebration has been one of the most vibrant industry events in all of Europe. What makes them special among the festival scene is a multidisciplinary approach that covers almost every color of the spectrum of visual arts, from film to video games. The initiative is especially famous for hosting workshops, masterclasses, and conferences held in The Netherlands and Germany that connect budding artists and the general public with the most established names in the scene.

This geek celebration has several spin-off events throughout the year, like “Playgrounds Blend” in the spring, which focuses on cutting edge developments in the creative arena, and “Playgrounds The Art Department” in the autumn, which concentrates on showcasing the design process behind film, animation, and video game projects.

In early March they announced they would move their events online, with the “Art Department” being held last April 16th with a virtual attendance of over 30.000.

Their “Blend” celebration, where they present creators who collaborate with scientists and other fields not directly associated with design, film, animation, or illustration, will be held this May 15th completely free to watch. “Expect vanguard artist talks, an insight into their work progress via demo’s, panel discussions. All online, all live,” organizers state in their official invitation.

2) Aspen Shortfest

Festival Passes & Access Codes are available for #Shortfest2020. Until the end of April 5th, enjoy the world’s best short films from the comfort of your own home! https://t.co/gzUJb1np3C @indiewire @thewrap @bdisgusting @variety @ew @nytimesarts @thr @deadline @moviemakermag pic.twitter.com/dNxY0d13br

— Aspen Film (@aspenfilm) April 2, 2020

Taking place since 1979 in Aspen, Colorado, the internationally-recognized festival is one of the most coveted destinations for short filmmakers in the world. Aside from its unique locale and impeccable selection, taking home one of its five prize categories constitutes direct qualification for Oscar consideration. The festival has been known for launching the careers of Damien Chazelle, Jason Reitman, Sarah Polley, and Taika Waititi.

Instead of canceling the competition due to the pandemic, the festival decided to move it entirely online through the Paris-based platform Festival Scope, being the first major festival to be held on the platform in its entirety.

Films that screen to the general public on platforms like Youtube are not eligible for an Academy Award, so in order to keep the Oscar-qualifying status, the festival had to keep its screenings private with jury members reuniting virtually to cast their votes and decide the winners. The event functioned as close as possible to its traditional version, running during its intended festival dates, with ticket-holders receiving a unique link valid for one-time viewing only. Even the number of virtual tickets put on sale was the same amount they would’ve made available for the physical event.

3) Doc Edge Festival New Zealand

“Sod you coronavirus, we’re going online and nationwide for the first time ever!” proudly states their official site. Curiously, New Zealand was one of the quickest nations to take decisive action to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, and they also were one of the first to fully bet on a virtual festival.

Launched in 2005 and previously known as DOCNZ, Doc Edge is another international Academy Award qualifying fest focused on celebrating the best documentary filmmaking around the world.

Originally set to be held in Auckland and Wellington between May 28th and June 21st, organizers decided to turn it this year into an online-only event instead of cancelling it.

Now set to kick-off on the 12th of June, the event will move online not only its screenings but all of its industry programmes, including Doc Edge Clinics, Forum, Pitch, and Date-a-Doco. Local and international film financiers, sales agents, and industry players will attempt to imitate the “real” life experience as close as possible with panels and meetings in the virtual space.

Edge executive director Alex Lee says to Variety, “When life throws us lemons, we make gin and tonics.”

4) Edinburgh International Television Festival

The Edinburgh International Television Festival is the biggest media event in the United Kingdom, a massive soirée that attracts thousands of delegates from every major network and production company in the world. Established in 1976, the festival is renowned for its highly entertaining panels, masterclasses, and keynotes featuring lauded personalities of the industry. Everybody from Sir David Attenborough to Louis Theroux has made an appearance here.

Moving such a massive festival to the virtual arena sounds insane, but organizers are taking the brave plunge into the unknown. “Due to the ongoing Covid-19 crisis, we have decided that in the best interests of everyone we would seek to bring together, educate and support that we will not be staging the usual TV Festival we’ve all come to know in Edinburgh this August – but instead a reimagined digital alternative,” they announced on their official website.

The 2020 edition will host virtually every traditional key component of the event, like the highly anticipated MacTaggart Lecture (probably the most important single annual presentation in the world of TV), the Controller Sessions (exclusive interviews with programme controllers from main national broadcasters), and more. To support the creative community hit during the crisis, all material this year will be free for freelancers.

5) Vilnius International Film Festival

https://www.instagram.com/p/B97JrEbpAaO

The Vilnius International Film Festival is the largest cinema gathering in Lithuania and one of the biggest in all of Eastern Europe, with more than 100.000 attendants last year alone.

The festival was one of the first if not the first in all of Europe to move its activities online, a move they quickly instituted just after the government called for the cancellation of all public events due to the pandemic in early March. It was a decision that came easy, as organizers had held in previous editions some of the festival’s activities online, so they already had the know-how to do the transition successfully. All films streamed during the festival are still scheduled to play in the Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre when the crisis is over.

Held between March 19 and April 2, jury members judged nominees virtually and audiences were able to enjoy from home the festival’s selection, that included titles like Parasite,  Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and Corpus Christi.

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Mes pasiruošę festivaliui namuose. #kinopavasaris2020 #festivalisnamuose

A post shared by Richardas Jonaitis (@richardasjonaitis) on Mar 19, 2020 at 10:02am PDT

Even the opening ceremony was held online, with guests invited to take pics at home and share them on social media with the hashtag #festivalisnamais and #kinopavasaris2020.

The post 5 Film Festivals That Went Online appeared first on Submarine Channel.