dave mckean

Every now and then YouTube disappoints me. Today is one of those days. I was looking for a Guinness ad – one of my favourite TV adverts ever – that makes great use of that song from South Pacific, “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair”, a feminist quip and surreal imagery. There’s fish in there – Dave McKean would’ve liked it.

Why did I want to blog on a Guinness ad anyway? I’ve been re-watching the final cut of Bladerunner, this time with the commentary track. (Ridley Scott commentaries are sometimes interesting but often frustrating; the guy is a great craftsman, but he doesn’t really have much to say that is very interesting, intelligent or enlightening, and he comes across as somewhat arrogant. And the Thelma & Louise commentary is one of the worst I’ve ever forced myself to sit through.) Watching ’80s Rutger Hauer on screen, quite logically I thought of the Guinness ads he did a few years later (ah, the glorious days of Sky Channel), and from that I moved on to a Rutger-less, more fishy ad.

However, since I didn’t find that one, here’s one of the Hauerian adverts – short and sweet, at a point where the pretentiousness had already turned to irony. Enjoy! (And tomorrow I might post something on Buffy or on a comic series I liked rather more than Preacher.)

Okay, today’s going to be short on words by me – and long on irony/hypocrisy/YouTube videos! (Well, I did say I loved YouTube, I don’t just hate it…) I’ve been looking at my book of Sandman dustcovers, and I remembered how much I like Dave McKean’s work. Not all of it – I was less than keen (yes, I did misspell that as ‘kean’ first) on Mirrormask, for instance – but much of it is beautiful and disturbing to me. Most of all his illustrations for Neil Gaiman’s Mr. Punch, probably.

The man himself - Mr Punch

So this is where I shut up and give you two YouTube videos. One is by McKean himself, and it combines my love of his work and of Shakespeare’s writing; the other is by Jan Svankmajer, an obvious influence on McKean. Don’t watch the latter if you’re easily freaked out – or if you like your animation quick and frantic.