Phelim mcdermott biography of abraham lincoln

This is not classic Glass, but some plastic imitation. Walt Disney’s life would make fantastic drama.

Abraham Lincoln - Wikipedia

Phelim McDermott and Improbable give us wonderful visual images. But Glass and his librettist Rudy Wurlitzer seem to have lost the plot. The Perfect American should have been a silent movie.
As Disney discovered, cartoon characters come alive when they tell a good story. Cartoons are static images, thousands of frames meticulously drawn by hand.

They only come alive when a machine runs them in sequence. Movement is illusion. Glass’s music can work as drama. His whirring repetitions suggest the mechanical processes used in film. We can “hear” whirring of the camera, and imagine the way individual cells of film are transformed when the projector rolls.

The Perfect American - Wikipedia

Glass makes the connection between cartoons and trains. Both run on tracks, both are inanimates transformed by machine. Thousands of illustrators worked on Disney’s films but their work only became art w Philip Glass’s Akhnaten has its Met premiere November 8 HATEC