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Bla Bla: An Arcade Fire collaborator gets into baby talk
GUY DIXON
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Jul. 22, 2011 5:00PM EDT
"Bla Bla, a new interactive animation piece by Montreal film director Vincent Morisset, defies easy description. There’s no dialogue, but it's about language and communication. It’s made for adults, but it’s one of the best recent works of media art for children.
Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, Bla Bla (blabla.nfb.ca) focuses on an animated boy with a large, pancake-like head. Everything he does is a surprise: In one chapter of the approximately six-minute work, the boy says babyish abstract words when you feed him little coloured discs, as if you are feeding him ideas. In another, a mouse click makes the boy butt heads with his mirror image, sending colourfully drawn epiphanies shooting from their joined heads, along with harmonious tones that they say in unison; other segments have the boy falling through the air and being struck by ideas like lightning bolts, depending on where you click your mouse on the computer screen.
And none of the above really does the plot or feel of the film justice.
“It feels like something intended for kids. Kids were part of the public I was aiming for, but never the centre of it,” Morisset says. He adds that he stayed clear of making it too cluttered, like many interactive games for children, or too dark and stylized like those for adults. “I wanted something a bit bland.”...
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