Tuned In

Best Picture: Logorama's Brandscape Painting

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Just so you know we’re not all about Oscar complaints here this morning, last night’s awards got one thing 100% right: the award for Best Animated Short went to Logorama, one of the most spectacular things you’re likely to see in quite a while. The 15-plus-minute film tells a hardboiled action-disaster story in a Los Angeles built entirely out of, and populated entirely by, corporate logos.

The first great thing about Logorama is noticing all the creative uses of corporate symbols: not just Ronald McDonald as a villain, or Michelin Men trading Tarantino-esque banter, but the VAIO logo turned into the graceful curves of a road, or the Enron, AIG and Freddie Mac logos fittingly crashing to Earth.

But the second great thing about Logorama are all the uses of corporate symbols that you don’t notice. Using brand images to create the big-box stores, high-rises and other images of a modern metropolis is so organic it takes work to see how many brands the French filmmakers used (without permission), and how elegantly they worked them in. It’s a breathtaking and entertaining way of letting us see with new eyes something we observe without noticing every day: branded logos are literally the landscape, and the mindscape, we live in.

You can watch it as a comment on modern consumerist society. Or you can watch it to see someone bust a cap in Mr. Peanut. Either way, watch it: it’s available for download on iTunes, and here’s a trailer:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uRJlbZO8OI]