Put your hand up if you like cartoons. Put your hand up if you experience a surge of happy childhood memories whenever you hear the famous Looney Tunes intro music. Put your hand up if you felt particularly cool and sophisticated while watching a Japanese anime like Akira or the kink-fest Legend of the Overfiend. Put your hand up if you ever defaced an important schoolbook by drawing pictures in the top right-hand corner to create your own flipbook animation because for a brief while you fancied becoming a cartoonist. Put your hand up if you want to spend your Friday Night at the V & A reliving these experiences and more.
It's the last Friday of the month so the traditional outing for the thrifty Lonodn-based thrill-seeker is to head to the V & A for their monthly Friday Late. These Friday Late nights are always a big hit and we can see why: free entry and the lure of a bar in museum surroundings, the attendance of some very cool VJs and DJs and the chance to see the V & A collections in a completely different light, possibly through the bottom of a glass and through a wall of sound...
Tonight's offering is Friday Late Animate, a celebration of all things that can be considered "animation." From obscure, scratchy, stop-motion short films to the feature-length opulence of Disney classics, it's all been brought together for one night only.
This evening's theme lends itself to some cutely named events such as PixiLate and the slightly sinister sounding Butcher's Manipulation Disco. It sounds like a very broad event that will incorporate everything and anything that is vaguely animation, from dubious but hot alien boy-on-boy yaoi action of the Japanese manga canon to adorable and innocent antique flipbooks, with a few diversions into the brightly coloured, super-slick world of computer generated imagery.
Workshops... screenings... a cartoon based on Raphael's masterpieces that will be created and shown in the same evening by graduates of the Cenral St Martin's animation course... and, curiouser and curiouser, the promise of a "live science-fiction jazz band" that will play a soundtrack to a story of your own creation. Bring pen, paper and a willingness to be animated.
Friday Late Animate at the Victoria and Albert Museum, tonight from 6.30pm, free. For more information go to the website here.
