Grizzly Bear – Ready, Able
2009 · Directed by Allison Schulnik
59K Likes
Best comments
1.“My teacher pulled this up in class as an example of stop-motion. We watched about a minute, then she turned it off. The room was dead silent. 'That was weird,' she said.”
More comments
- 2.“Grizzly Bear is your favorite band's favorite band.”
- 3.“Radiohead recommended this.”
The story
Allison Schulnik paints in thick, gooey globs of oil, so it makes sense that her animation looks like one of her paintings got up and wandered off the canvas. A CalArts experimental animation grad, she made this stop-motion claymation video for Grizzly Bear completely by hand, out of lumpy, smeared, rainbow-colored clay.
The stars are a pair of rainbow monsters (one writer called the main one an amorphous claymation Yeti) who melt from melancholy, oozing and morphing into new shapes, until a plexiglass spaceship turns up and beams one of them away. Creepy, sad and gorgeous at the same time. A good fit for a band that already had a habit of strange videos.
Ready, Able comes from Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear's 2009 album on Warp, named for a tiny island off Cape Cod near Ed Droste's grandmother's house. The record went to number eight on the Billboard 200. Ready, Able wasn't even one of its singles. It got a clay monster opera anyway.
