June 12, 2002

11:52 PM

Broken Saints is a beautifully done flash animation. A little anime in feel with some strange sonic diversions every once in a while. The pacing is a little slow for my highly Americanized tastes, but it's gorgeous all the same.
posted by willnot (11 comments total)

What I find really interesting is that I found it hosted as a smaller, ad surrounded version on Wired in something they call Animation Express. It looks like they've been featuring animations for a while. At least the page shows 1 of 31 pages. I can't get past page 1 without crashing my browser though so...

By the way, Broken Saints was linked once within a MeFi Thread about a year ago, but more as a this too, and nobody seems to have commented.
posted by willnot at 11:52 PM on June 12, 2002

hm. goth for goth's sake.
posted by crunchland at 3:23 AM on June 13, 2002

Yeah, crunchland. All that talent and labor and marshalling of great beauty -- for what?
posted by Faze at 6:22 AM on June 13, 2002

If* it is beautiful, that's enough. Don't want art to have a purpose beyond that.

* I haven't seen it yet.
posted by pracowity at 6:37 AM on June 13, 2002

Broken Saints also won the "Cartoon" and "People's Choice" categories at the Flash Film Festival in San Fran earlier this year.
posted by rex at 7:01 AM on June 13, 2002

You really think it's Goth? I guess there were some horror elements in it, but there seemed to be more of Gibson than the Grave about it.

Four strangers, A San Francisco Programmer, A Japanese Monk, A Soldier and An Innocent Island Girl are called to some unknown purpose. Those motifs are almost cliche cyberpunk. I've only been able to watch episode 1 of 18 (soon to be 19). And at 20 minutes a pop give or take, it will take me a while to catch up to the current story line. Still, it feels more SciFi than Horror to me right now.
posted by willnot at 8:57 AM on June 13, 2002

This is gorgeous. Obviously a lot of work went into this. The music is appropriately eerie and strange. I'm going to have to make time to see them all. Thanks, willnot.
posted by vacapinta at 10:14 AM on June 13, 2002

dont mind crunchland, he's special.
posted by Satapher at 11:31 AM on June 13, 2002

Goth? Not hardly! If you want goth go skim SubKultures.net. See how many goth/punk/rivitheads you can spot.

The BS crew uses way too many colors to even approach goth.
posted by Apoch at 2:10 PM on June 13, 2002

hm. goth for goth's sake.

a comment for comment's sake? or a troll who can't get it up?

This work is awesome- the superb composition of the motion graphics, use of conventional illustration, and the soundscape arrangements make this more than just an "animated comic book".

IMHO All the shit *swf left lying around on the web is redeemed with dedicated displays of creativity like this.

Work of a more ambiguous nature but on par in excellence can be found at The Lair of The Marrow Monkey.
posted by elphTeq at 7:19 PM on June 13, 2002

Despite the now cliché Goth-y/Darkwave/Downtempo/Moody atmosphere of it all, I was pretty impressed with the execution of the site. The sound effects were powerful without being over the top, and the cinematic feel was used eloquently, not excessively.

And isn't all art for its own sake? Why should anyone express themselves if it would just be seen as self-indulgent? Sheesh.
posted by Down10 at 9:45 PM on June 13, 2002