Dan Kanemoto's "Whale Song"

Dan Kanemoto’s Whale Song, was a fun short cartoon (at least I think that’s what we’ll call it). I’m really glad he continued to use the similar style of stop motion animation with drawings as a medium. It’s very refreshing to watch good material in a new way. I thought the writing was very good. It was short, brief, and minimalist, almost dummied down so much that it made it funny. Which is a reflection of the overall idea that the best way to take care of a beached whale is to blow it up. I think that this topic would not have been as entertaining had it been done in any other format. If the same story was shot with real actors, the humor wouldn’t have been there, and you couldn’t have done the explosion in any comical way. And if it was done with a smooth motion cartoon, some of the punch lines wouldn’t have worked.

I’m glad that MTV picked up the short to air on TV. For some reason I feel like I’ve seen it before, but it could just be a strange sense of déjà vu. I really enjoyed it, and I would like to see more programming of that material, it opens our minds to new possibilities of creativity, and keeps advancing new media in art forms.