Mar 24, 2010

A long drawn・out journey by Gerald Scarf

The Lost Continent is a real treasure of a blog and has introduced me to lots of great British animation over the past few months, some of which I should have already known about. One such film is Long Drawn-Out Trip: Sketches from Los Angeles by Gerald Scarfe. The eighteen-minute film was shown on TV only once in its entirety and that occurred 1973 on the BBC. It has a stream-of-conscious flavor as evidenced by this tantalizing four-minute clip.

The film's lack of distribution is largely due to the fact that Scarfe didn't obtain clearances to the music he used, which included everything from Jimi Hendrix to Neil Diamond. (Shades of Nina Paley's problems with Sita Sings the Blues). It's unlikely he would have ever been able to make the film either had he pursued legitimate channels. Try asking Disney for permission to use “When You Wish upon a Star” when your film has an extended sequence of Mickey smoking a spliff.

In this interview, Scarfe spoke about how the film came about:

The entire film doesn't appear to be online, but there are plenty of frame grabs available on the Lost Continent blog.