FAIRY-TALE VISION
It’s almost unbelievable that “Trembled Blossoms,” the four-minute animated film that has taken on a life of its own on the Prada website 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 L.A. 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 website since it was released last month and has also 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 Dali made for Disney in the 1940s, which was recently completed and shown at the Dali exhibit at the L.A. County Museum of Art.
“Trembled Blossoms” was released first on the Internet and was later transferred to film stock to be shown at parties at the Prada epicenters in New York, Beverly Hills, and next month in Tokyo. Now, the Internet release is making it difficult for producers to enter the piece in traditional film festivals.
The film, directed by Pasadena Arts Center grad James Lima, was produced in Los Angeles. But it had its origins at the Soho store. Early last year, design firm 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 his 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 worked with a dancer at the House of Moves motion capture studio in Marina del Rey to create the movements of the nymph, and animators at Sight Effects in L.A.
“We got photographs of all the accessories and replicated them right down to the color and the texture,” he said of the animation process. “On top of that, the shoes and purse and dress had to have the feeling of sketches.”
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.”
As for Jean, he has been in the background, unlike other, higher-profile artists who have collaborated with luxury brands. A cover artist for DC Comics and a “rock star” in the illustration world, according to some fan sites, Jean has done commercial work for Target, Playboy and Atlantic Records.
“It would have been great if they had put my name out there more prominently,” said Jean, who now wants to focus more on painting. “But I’m not of the same stature of Takashi Murakami or Richard Prince.” (Both have collaborated with Louis Vuitton.) “I’m 28, and I’ve mostly done illustrations. They caught me while I was a small fish.”
And that small fish morphed into a $2,290 handbag.
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