by Rollin Bishop

I love commentaries. I recognize that I've solidified my place as the nostalgic physical media guy here at re:frame, but commentaries really do feel largely like a bygone artifact of a previous age. Anything that dives into creation and craft will always hold a special place in my heart, but animation commentaries have their own secret compartment.

One of my very first pitches while bandying about the creation of this newsletter, before it even had a name, picked the Invader Zim DVD commentaries as essential. My decades-old Invader Zim DVDs have come along with me during every move, and in every place I've ever lived I have listened to creator Jhonen Vasquez wax lyrical about radioactive rubber pants and the voice of Zim, Richard Horvitz, doing Bob Hope impressions in his character's voice.

I religiously watched the show when it aired, then watched it religiously in dubiously legal ways — shout out to Room With a Moose, IYKYK — and immediately bought the Media Blasters DVDs when they became available in 2004. This obsession extended to listening to the episodes with dialogue recordings but no animation, so it should come as no surprise that the DVD's episodic commentaries became repeat viewing.

While the Invader Zim commentaries have plenty of jokes and goofs, there are genuine peeks behind the curtain that reveal the truth of animation industry mysteries. For example, Vasquez reveals in the "Walk of Doom" commentary that the team sent the animation back to Korea for multiple takes, but one of the bank's guards kept coming back much larger than intended, so they ultimately added sound effects to make his footsteps sound gigantic rather than trying to fix the mistake again.

But the reason I'm writing about this now is twofold: I recently purchased the Scott Pilgrim Takes Off Blu-ray, which I was surprised to discover includes episodic commentary from Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O'Malley and Scott Pilgrim Takes Off co-creator (alongside O'Malley) BenDavid Grabinski. It's an absolutely fascinating deep dive on how the anime's premise came together, how Science Saru got involved, details on the voice cast's performance — Chris Evans is apparently a professional's professional, and Kieran Culkin didn't have time to read ahead due to the success of, er, Succession — and more.

Watching the Scott Pilgrim Takes Off commentary tracks (I'd seen it without multiple times on Netflix already) reminded me of the Invader Zim pitch, and then our pals at Animation Obsessive's recent send crystallized something for me: the process is the art. It details the idea that any finished product and especially animation only exists because of the struggle between concept and execution.

"What saved these projects was the long, slow, painful, confusing process of their creation, as endless decisions were made and problems solved," writes Animation Obsessive about Pixar's process, specifically. "The films grew out of the time and effort itself."

Often, that time and effort is invisible. You watch the movie or show, and you see what's been neatly trimmed and packaged and presented. Commentaries, on the other hand, are entirely about process and therefore art. The hows and whys and whens, sometimes sandwiched between gags and asides. So, I love commentaries; I love art.

/out of frame

🤖 Rollin: After much scuttlebutt, Netflix has officially announced the live-action Gundam cast. It includes, but is not limited to: Sydney Sweeney, Noah Centineo, and Jason Isaacs. I just thought that if I had to know this, you had to know this.

📼 Toussaint: Last week, notoriously reclusive IDM maestros Boards of Canada released "Tape 05," their first piece of new music in nearly 13 years. I've been listening to that over, and over, and over again in anticipation for what I can only assume is the release of their impending fifth studio album. Also, I've listened to Lana Del Rey's Bond Theme for IO Interactive's upcoming spy-action game 007 First Light, which is… fine! Not as good as, say, Phantom Liberty's Bond-inspired theme, but fine!

📷 Kambole: I'm in a little bit of a slump at the moment – freelance writing comes with a lot of highs and lows in terms of ideas and commissions. So between pitches I've been watching a lot of Person of Interest, an old favorite created by Jonathan Nolan which recently hit Netflix (in the UK anyway). The sci-fi procedural show has always boasted some level of foresight, like a famous first season episode which anticipated Edward Snowden, but watching its cool and paranoid takes on the post 9/11 surveillance state feels truer all the time. If anything, the main thing which makes it feel like an artifact is its embrace of the case-of-the-week structure and how it ties that into an ongoing story, and how an incredibly well-acted, well-crafted show began and finished within 5 years.