Komposition in Blau

"Composition in Blue" truly struck me. This was Fischinger's first film in colour, and you can tell. By the way he uses the colour, you would think that they were all going to disappear tomorrow, and the world would be left in black and white, with this film the only remaining evidence of its coloured past. One moment that I particularly remember is from the beginning. A group of red and blue blocks pile on top of each other. I've always liked the bizarre, wavy effect that happens when you combine blue and red. The way Fischinger does that here, with the blocks moving closer to the screen, had a hypnotic effect on me. It was truly beautiful.

Have you seen Fell in Love with a Girl, a video by The White Stripes, with all the Legos & stuff? It is called Brickfilm Animation & is considered a new type of Animation Technique, which is true, but the concept surprisingly similar to it can be found in COMPOSITION IN BLUE a Fischinger cartoon, which is made like 70 years ago. I mean this guy has multicolored bricks too (not Lego though) & he too animates them. Impressive, isn't it? But nevertheless the main advantage of COMPOSITION IN BLUE is in its use of colors & their composition. Blue is dominating (see the title) & red & yellow are extensively used with some other strange colors, the effect is very bright, lucent & bricky, what makes it look like some old arcade game. I wonder if Fischinger had a time machine & used his time-traveling experience in making this cartoon.

I watched the short film Blinkity Blink recently and the idea is similar as here – animated figures and shapes moving roughly in time to music but unlike the jazz of that film, here we have a classic piece and it is done some decades before that film. The strength of this film is on several levels but the first to me is that it really accurately replicates the way you would move your hand if you were listening to this piece yourself; you lift your hand on the up notes, glide it sideways when moving across the musical range and down when down, the speed and abruptness of the hand movement all the time matching the music. As you would so does the film and the movement of the animated shapes really matches the piece very well indeed.

It helps of course that the animation is very pleasing to watch. Nearly 80 years after it was made, the colors still make an impact and it is important to force yourself to remember that this was made at the very dawn of color film and it does indeed feel like the film is bursting forth with everything pent up during the black and white era. The animation is effect aside from maybe one or two rough edits in there, but otherwise it is smooth, totally matches the music and is incredibly pleasing to sit back and watch.

This is a truly amazing film, very early full color work. It is not Fischinger's first in color, Kreise (1933) a.k.a Circles and Muratti Greift Ein (1934) a.k.a Muratti Marches On (a cigarette commercial) were both in color, but the color may not have been as full as in this film. The music is from the overture to The Merry Wives of Windsor by Otto Nicolai. His wife, Elfreide did a short segment in the middle. The film is mostly colored boxes moving in tight synchronization to the music, at the climax there is some striking painted work that foreshadows some of his great work to come, like Allegretto. This film was a sensation in Germany and the attention brought him a contract with Paramount which allowed him to escape Nazi Germany.

This film just makes you HAPPY! Completely 3D animated using solidly coloured geometric shapes and flat cut-outs (real ones, not CGI), and precisely synched with a bubbly, orchestrated sound track, COMPOSITION IN BLUE not only stands as a definite high- point in the career of Oscar Fischinger, but still stands out amongst anything in the history of animation itself. Brilliant, fun, technically perfect (and I mean PERFECT!), and wildly imaginative, it not only serves up a completely unique vision, but succeeds in creating a "world" where that vision lives in the eye and mind of the viewer long after it has ended. Stunning! 10/10!