Tom Waits looks animated

Alan Trotter — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 22:57:07 +0000

Okay, so NASA bombed the moon recently, and I think we can all agree that’s kind of cool, in the same way that slapping Lenin’s corpse in the face would be kind of cool: it’s intuitively a good idea, but once you’d done it, it would be hard to be too proud or say exactly what you’d really accomplished.

But N.A.S.A. the music project (standing for North America South America, and fronted by Squeak E. Clean and DJ Zegon) have been turning out some of the best music videos ever made, so it’s hard to say which is now my favourite NASA. Oh wait, did the National Aeronautics and Space Administration ever do a song with Tom Waits? No? Then fuck them.

And it turns out Tom’s been animated before – he was rotoscoped for a 1978 short called Tom Waits for No One, singing ‘The One that Got Away’ (the film even won an Oscar for Scientific and Technical Achievement).

And there’s some of the original footage on YouTube, before the animators drew over it:

And! here’s a video directed by Anders Lövgren that animates the lyrics to the Waits’ song ‘Come On Up to the House’ in hand-drawn type. Stick with it – it’s a simple idea, but so well done it becomes hypnotic instead of tedious. (It doesn’t hurt that it’s a great song.)

(Thanks to my friend Stephen for letting me know about Tom Waits for No One; ‘Come On Up to the House’ video via The Font Feed. It should be noted that despite his being a figure of beer-slurring cigarette-smoking louche male disintegration, I feel for Tom Waits roughly what six-year-old girls feel for pink.)

Greater Than Or Equal To » animation

Tom Waits looks animated