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LOS
ANGELES—It’s almost unbelievable that Trembled Blossoms,
the four-minute animated film that has taken on a life
of its own on the Prada web site and arty comic sites,
has its roots in a tiny piece of decoration—an art
nouveau-themed flower-and-nymph drawing that Los Angeles
illustrator James Jean did for the wall of a store.
Miuccia Prada was so taken with the piece that it
informed her runway collection—the lolling organza
dirndl skirts with Jean’s tendrily drawings, the
romantic flared pajama pants and tunic tops with
petal-shaped collars, the painted tulip heels—and the
entire spring fashion season. Then came the idea to
produce an animated short based on the illustration,
which is another LA story.
In the
erotically charged film, a hummingbird punctures the
center of a flower. A nymph emerges from the blanket of
winter to begin her journey through a lush forest. Then,
out of this dreamy, Dali-esque imagery comes something
totally commercial—a pair of crabs morph into those
tulip-heeled shoes, a fish transforms into a striped
handbag, and the blank canvas of the nymph’s body is
covered in a sinuous dress.
The film
has received more than 200,000 hits on the Prada web
site since it was released last month and has been
posted on YouTube and art blogs, crossing the worlds of
film, fashion and fine arts.
True to
the designer’s outsider spirit, there is much about the
film that is unconventional, including the four-minute
format and the relaxed pace, a breath of fresh air in
the age of quick cuts. The film combines cutting-edge
motion capture technology with classic animation,
achieving a dreamlike quality that recalls Destino, the
unfinished animated short Salvador Dalí made for Disney
in the 1940s, which recently was completed and shown at
the Dalí exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of
Art.
Trembled
Blossoms was released first on the Internet and later
was transferred to film stock to be shown at parties at
the Prada epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills, and
next month in Tokyo.
The
film, directed by
Pasadena
Arts Center
graduate James Lima, was produced in Los Angeles. But it had its origins at the
Soho
store. Early last year, design company and frequent
Prada collaborator 2x4 commissioned Jean to create an
illustration for wallpaper there, based on the idea of a
graphic novel.
“We
wanted to do some comics and thought we would do
something noir, but it was too violent,” Prada told me
in
Paris
last month.
She
rejected his first submission, asking for something more
fantasy-like. Jean obliged. The designer liked the nymph
and flower landscape so much, she wanted to use it in
her collection.
“Journalists are getting more and more difficult,” Prada
said, commenting on the demand for blockbuster runway
collections. “They want to be entertained. You have to
tell a story.”
After
the September runway show was a hit, Prada got back in
touch with Jean and asked him to draft a treatment for a
short film based on his drawings. She hired a producer,
Max Brun, who turned to Lima to direct.
Lima is a conceptual artist and special-effects supervisor
for film who has worked on big-budget projects with
Steven Spielberg, James Cameron and others, as well as
on commercials. Strangely, he never met Prada (they
communicated through others and via e-mail) but says he
found her ideas appealing, because they were so
anti-Hollywood.
“I
assumed we were looking at 30 seconds or one minute of
animation, because I have been conditioned to accept
that format, based on radio from 70 years ago,” he said
over breakfast in
Beverly Hills
recently. “But this was four minutes, and it couldn’t be
any more or any less.”
Prada
wanted to use motion-capture technology to create
three-dimensional space, but without being imprisoned by
photo realism. She asked the animators to tweak the
nymph, making her move like a runway model and gesture
grandly like a Disney character.
“The
film is real and fake, and that is one of my obsessions
in my work at the moment,” the designer said. “In
photographs, there is so much retouching, reality
doesn’t exist anymore. Perhaps it only exists for people
on film.”
Lima completed the film in two months last winter. “It is a
commercial, but it doesn’t put the brand in people’s
faces,” he says.
And yet,
you can’t open a fashion magazine without seeing Jean’s
ink drawings in advertisements and editorials. The first
shipment of the $2,290 fairy bags sold out in days. More
than anything before it, this collection has blurred the
lines between art and fashion. Some might argue it’s
confused them.
“They
are two separate fields,” Prada maintains. “But
creativity is in demand, because people are bored of
everything. They want excitement.” n |
