That a video game may have real artistic value is, by now, mostly accepted. However, there are as many styles as there are titles, including games that don’t look like the stereotypical ones with their fully rendered 3D environments and realistic characters. We selected five independent video games that reference art and animation history, something that even those who are not fully plugged into the video-game universe can appreciate.

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Gris
For fans of art nouveau, fashion illustration, and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty

If anyone could capture the look of early modernism in video-game form, it would be Studio Nomada, whose Gris is definitely a title to check out. Not much happens in terms of plot: A girl meanders through different realms after an unspecified traumatic event has caused her to lose her voice and turned her world into a grayscale wasteland. The farther she proceeds in her journey, the more colors are added to the game’s visuals. Gris’s environments, with their stylized buildings and delicate line work, have echoes of art nouveau and also hint at Miyazaki’s animations and Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The design is by Conrad Roset, an artist who specializes in fashion illustration and whose signature color palette of reds, blues, and yellows is also found in Gris. Even if your skills as a gamer leave a lot to be desired, you can enjoy Gris; think of it as the visual equivalent of a symphonic poem, in which not much happens in terms of action but in which the senses are delighted. Available on macOS, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, iOS, PlayStation 4, and Android.

Bound
For fans of abstract art, ballet, and M. C. Escher

Poland-based Plastic Studio, which got its start in the demoscene environment in 1997 and now mainly creates virtual-reality and interactive content for museums, has created a 3D platformer that pays tribute to both the visual and the performing arts. I know, I said I would to sidestep games that looked like videogames, avoiding standard 3D environments and pixel art. Yet the 3D environment in which Bound takes place only resembles Super Mario 64 on a surface level. Its abstract shapes, its convoluted line of action, and its psychedelic patterns make it nothing short of Escher-like. Here again we have a girl on a quest to overcome past trauma, but instead of climbing mountains and digging for hidden treasure, Bound’s main character moves in space like a dancer: When she has to jump, she performs a grand-jeté; when she glides along a runway that unfurls like a ribbon, she performs a figure-skating-inspired twirl; to dodge an attack, she may do a cartwheel. Honestly, one could spend hours making this character prance around. Available on PlayStation 4.

Genesis Noir
For fans of film noir, jazz, and trivia.

The movies Alphaville, Metropolis, and The Big Sleep, and Italo Calvino’s short-story collection Cosmicomics, are only a few of the references that can come to mind when playing Genesis Noir, a visual narration by the Brooklyn-based Feral Cat Den that is set at the end or the beginning of the world as we know it. In it, you control a watch salesman living in a seedy metropolis who has an affair with a jazz singer and eventually gets found out. The gunshot that is supposed to end his life is actually what sets the events in motion, and, as you travel through time and space, you encounter a plethora of allusions and tributes to art history: An overview of the main hub town has a diner that looks a lot like that in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks; the antagonist wears his hair in a pompadour with a curl that looks toward the Fibonacci spiral; a sequence at the bottom of the ocean sees the protagonist adopt the pose of William Blake’s Newton. All of these impressive artistic feats are rendered in a black-and-white palette, with occasional splashes of yellow. It is sometimes said that the more constraints you have, the more creative you can be, and Genesis Noir definitely proves this to be true. Available on: macOS, Microsoft Windows, Nintendo Switch, Xbox One.

Cuphead
For fans of early animation, body horror, and Creepy Kawaii

If you find yourself obsessing over early Disney cartoons and Warner Bros. shorts, marveling at the detailed line work, the vaguely uncanny rubber-hose shapes of the characters’ limbs, and the tips of the hat to surrealism, then we suggest you try Cuphead from Studio MDHR. The vintage feel is ubiquitous; even the soundtrack was recorded by a live jazz orchestra. Yet, despite its retro appearance evocative of Saturday morning children’s cartoons, it rests on a dark premise: The characters Cuphead and Mugman have lost a bet with the Devil, who tricked them into gambling away their souls. Playing it requires actual skills, which drew the ire of some crowds, who felt the game was trying to exclude unskilled players. Nevertheless, Cuphead has now garnered mainstream success: More than 4 million units have been sold since its release, and there’s a Netflix animated series too. Available on Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, macOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4.

Sable
For fans of 1970s-’80s sci-fi and Studio Ghibli

A girl on a desertlike planet is looking for artifacts. No, it’s not Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, nor Star Wars The Force Awakens, nor is it the world of the first adaptation of Dune. This is Sable, a game from Shedworks in which the eponymous heroine embarks on a coming-of-age task: She has to find a mask that will reflect her job and purpose before she can return to her nomadic clan. It’s an open-world exploration, where dinosaur bones alternate with palm groves and ruins of great civilizations past, and where the color palette changes according to location and time of day. The style is reminiscent of both Moebius and early Miyazaki (for one thing, the glider the heroine uses bears some resemblance to the one seen in Nausicaä) while the open world and the focus on exploration and puzzle solving is a tribute to Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.The soundtrack is by indie-pop band Japanese Breakfast, and the game has an overall indie-pop feel, something rarely found in a video game. Film and TV adaptations are on the way. Available on: Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5.

The graphic novel is a powerful way to tell a tale—but graphic works also lend themselves well to artist biographies, with each graphic artist using his or her own style to interpret another artist’s work and life. Here are five graphic biographies of women artists that combine stunning visuals with clever narrative devices.

The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint, by Phillip Deines and Julia Voss
The 2018 Hilma af Klint show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was the most visited exhibition in the museum’s history. Julia Voss and Philipp Deines have been obsessively studying the early 20th-century abstractionist since Deines stumbled upon one of her works in the mid 2000s, with the couple’s children learning her name before they even learned who Picasso or Matisse were. For this graphic novel based on Voss’s new biography of af Klint, illustrator Deines uses a saturated color palette and lively drawings to tell the artist’s story. On top of dispelling a few myths regarding af Klint’s life (such as the notion that none of her abstract work was ever shown in her lifetime—a false narrative), the book takes the reader on a journey through fin-de-siècle Europe, showing intellectual salons, spiritualism, and contrasting art movements across the continent. Af Klint’s visions and presumed clairvoyance dominate the narrative: Curiously, she predicted her work would find the largest accolades in a spiral-shaped temple—and, lo and behold, it wound up at the Guggenheim.

Buy: The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint $18.67

Georgia O’Keeffe, by Maria Herreros
Last year, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid hosted the first retrospective in Spain of Georgia O’Keeffe’s work. As a tie-in, Spanish illustrator Maria Herreros was asked to create a graphic biography of the artist. Herreros covers the years 1915–1986 (from the time O’Keeffe was around 28 until her death), with a particular focus on the artist’s relationship with the desert. Depictions of O’Keeffe and her art take over the page, with sparse text written in cursive. Herreros’s muted color palette and attenuated line work perfectly suit her portrayal of the artist herself.

Buy: Georgia O’Keeffe $17.59

Kusama: The Graphic Novel, by Elisa Macellari
Every time one of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s immersive “Infinity Rooms” opens, good luck securing tickets: These trippy mirrored environments are the pinnacle of what we (alas) think of as social media–friendly art—hardly what you would deem the work of a provocateur. But through Elisa Macellari’s graphic biography of Kusama, which focuses on the late 1950s and 60s, when Kusama lived in New York, we get to understand why her early works were so radical: For example, she started making smooth spheres, which became a trademark of her work, to sell for pennies at the Venice Biennale, a jape at the commodification of art. Other provocations included having her models pose as naked sculptures in the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden and staging the “first homosexual wedding,” in a downtown loft dubbed the Church of Self-Obliteration. Like Herrero, Macellari remains faithful to her own very distinct style and color palette of faded reds, teal, and gray.

Buy: Kusama: The Graphic Novel $18.49

Frida Kahlo: The Story of Her Life, by Vanna Vinci
Vanna Vinci is one of Italy’s most acclaimed graphic artists and cartoonists, specializing in biographies of extraordinary women, among them Maria Callas, Tamara de Lempicka, and the Marquise Luisa Casati, a patron of the arts, and this one of Frida Kahlo. In Vinci’s graphic retelling of Kahlo’s life, we see the Mexican artist engaged in a dialogue with Death, decked in Santa Muerte regalia, as the two retrace her history. When Kahlo relates the story of the accident that maimed her, she asks Death to recite the list of her injuries, and as Death rattles them off, we see her wounded body parts hanging on a thread, like laundry left to dry. Particular attention is devoted to the artist’s traditional Tehuana dresses and accessories, which Vinci presents as a declaration, but also as a screen. The dialogue between Frida and Death proves to be a clever visual device, as they meander through the places that defined her as if they were actors standing in front of a stage set, and the author does not shield us from Frida’s flaws, fully exposing and celebrating her humanity.

Buy: Frida Kahlo: The Story of Her Life $19.99

I Know What I Am: The Life and Time of Artemisia Gentileschi, by Gina Siciliano
This stunning graphic biography of Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi is rendered entirely in black ballpoint pen. Author Gina Siciliano balances historical fact with what is known of Gentileschi, who was known for her depictions of women from myths and the Bible and has lately become something of a feminist icon. To help the reader make sense of the world Gentileschi lived in, Siciliano starts with a lengthy introduction to the realities of the late-16th and 17th centuries in Europe: Forget the idealized world of Botticelli and instead observe Caravaggio’s violence, the Counter-Reformation’s rigorous agenda for the arts, the exploration of new lands, and the scientific discoveries making people question their long-held beliefs. The book is divided into three parts (or acts): Gentileschi’s early life; her rape and the ensuing trial of her rapist; and the rest of her life, covering 50 years. This will be a delight for art history aficionados: Following the narration are 40 pages of bibliographical and historical annotations.

Buy: I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi $34.29

The retro trend is fueling a renewed appreciation for earlier photographic technologies, from Brownie cameras and SLRs to Polaroid SX70s and even the first smartphones. Want to give your iPhone photos a favorite look from the past? There’s probably an app for that. Here are our favorites; with one exception, we’ve prioritized apps that let you shoot with your choice of filter from the get-go rather than sending you down a postproduction rabbit hole. To find the one that works best for you, read on.

Hipstamatic

The app that started it all still has one of the strongest games in terms of effects. Hipstamatic’s interface is designed to look like an analog camera with swappable lenses, films, and flashes, each producing a different look. While the company has added a state-of-the-art postproduction editing suite you can use to fix balance, contrast, noise, and so on, the app is at its best when you equip its camera before shooting and leave whatever happens unretouched. There’s also a shuffle function that will load randomized gear when you shake your phone; it’s hit or miss, sure, but it yields combinations of effects that might have never have occurred to you otherwise. Hipstamatic releases upgrades regularly, and its offerings run the gamut from 1970s-inspired effects to a look best described as “1990s anime lighting.” Extra components are sold separately so you can create your own personalized suite of filters.
Get Hipstamatic: $2.99+in-app purchases

VSCO

VSCO is a photo-editing app that offers more than 200 presets, some of them developed by Kodak, Agfa, and Ilford. It is not strictly a retro-inspired app, as it has plenty of options for those who want a cleaner, more “editorial.” look. That said, retro photography fans will enjoy options like M4-6 (“Subtle Fade”), meant to evoke the vintage hues of the 1970s, and  P 1-3 (“Instant-Warm”), which pays homage to instant film and its signature creamy overtones. VSCO also has the Film X Library, which replicates the look of films made by Kodak, Fuji, Agfa, and Ilford. For example, KCP2, with its low contrast and saturation and slightly warmer tones, pays homage to Kodak’s 1970s-era film Color Plus 200. While that film is still available today, it’s fun to have a digital version handy.
Get VSCO: Free download; monthly membership starts at $7.99

Huji Cam

Around 2018, people started declaring the Instagram aesthetic dead. It was too perfect, too polished, too contrived. Enter Huji Cam, an app whose premise is to help you shoot pictures like it’s the 1990s. The interface has the look and feel of a disposable camera, with buttons on the screen for the flash and the shutter. There is also a makeshift keyhole viewfinder that you’re supposed to peer into in order to magnify it. Once you shoot, expect distorted colors, light leaks, blurs, and a digital timestamp that takes you back to the year 1998. You can’t tinker with the effects, but if you feel overwhelmed by the options offered by other retro apps, Huji Cam’s simplicity is refreshing.
Get Huji Cam: Free download+in-app purchases

NOMO CAM

NOMO combines Hipstamatic’s plethora of options with an interface similar to Huji Cam’s. It allows you to virtually swap cameras: For example, if you shoot with a preset called FR2, which was developed with the eponymous Japanese fashion brand, you’ll get color and grain similar to pictures made with Fujifilm’s disposable cameras. A more playful option is “Cam Boy,” a throwback to Nintendo’s Game Boy camera and printer that yields 2-bit photos in four shades of gray. Another is “2007,” which, as the name suggests, replicates the low resolution of the first iPhone cameras; it was originally released as an April Fool’s Day prank  in 2019, but, three years later, it’s still around. It would not be surprising if it became a breakout trend itself! Funnily enough, every time you install new gear, you have to pretend you’re physically unpacking it.
Get NOMO CAM: Free download+in-app purchases

Argentum

Argentum focuses solely on black-and-white photography and offers nothing but six filters (each one sold separately) named after and inspired by photographers Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn, Garry Winogrand, Yousuf Karsh, and Dorothea Lange. The Adams filter, for example, gives images higher contrast, darkens blues and lightens greens and reds, and is recommended for landscape photography. In contrast, the Henri Cartier-Bresson filter softens the images, lightening both blues and skin tones. For those who want a little bit of everything, the Winogrand filter has high contrast; lighter red, yellow, and orange tones; and darker blues.
Get Argentum: Free download+first filter free

One such pixel enthusiast is Pacific Northwest-based artist Jubilee, who goes professionally by her first name only. Though she’s best known for her serene landscapes, their clouds reflecting magical sunsets and moonlight, I came to her work through her Instagrammed “tea studies,” artworks depicting beverages in mugs, cups, or tumblers. “I honestly started [making them] because I saw the original photographs online, and thought they just felt so warm,” says Jubilee, with whom I spoke recently by phone. “I really like making people feel things whenever they look at my art.”

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Around 2014, she recalls, she started seeing a lot of pixel art on Tumblr, including work by Waneella, best known for detail-rich cityscapes, and 1041uuu, who specializes in serene, pictorial-like landscapes—two artists who became catalysts for her to more thoroughly explore the medium. “They make a lot of cityscapes and stuff like that, and really intricate lights, stars, and moons. And they always animated their works,” Jubilee says. And while she hasn’t yet gotten around to animating her own art, by 2018 she’d gained enough of a following and workload to be able to quit her day job in retail. She now combines her individual art practice with commissions from the likes of Microsoft, Magic: The Gathering, and Paris Fashion Week.

“My inspiration is mainly the 2000s handheld games for Game Boy Advance, like Kirby and Fire Emblem,” Jubilee says. “I actually find myself going back to Kirby a lot for inspiration, because of the colors.”

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Jubilee now photographs most of what she’ll turn into pixel art works, after which she proceeds to sketching. “I usually do that with actual pencil and paper,” she explains. “So I’ll look at the image just to get my own proportions.” She then photographs the sketch and traces it in Photoshop, to start the piece with a digital line drawing. Throughout the process, she uses a drawing tablet and Photoshop’s 1-pixel-wide “pencil” tool. The original image always lies next to the working canvas—she generally uses a 135×135 or 175×230 canvas—for reference. “It really just depends on how many pixels you want to have in the piece; so you can detail them, but too many pixels also means that you lose seeing actual pixels.”

Next, Jubilee looks for “mood colors”—a palette to set the mood for each artwork. “If I want a happy sunset, or I want it to feel like the sunrise of a new day or something like that,” she says, “I’ll think bright blues, yellows… If you’re making a moonscape or something in the middle of the night, it’s going to be blues for a solemn, melancholic reflective mood; so you want to choose darker blues into purples. I always think those are magical.”

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“Then I always work from background colors to foreground, shadows to light, just because I think it’s easier that way,” Jubilee continues, adding that the main challenge in a pixel art work is trying to block out the main colors. “You want to lay them out into a similar pattern,” she says. “And then once you get a similar pattern of colors, you can just kind of do your own thing and make it look better. It doesn’t necessarily have to look realistic—it just has to look good.”

What makes Jubilee’s art pop is the way highlights are rendered, whether flickers of light reflected from a glass surface, the moonlight, or sunlight peering from clouds. “I think contrast is definitely key. You can’t have muddy colors, because white—the ultimate visual representation of light—isn’t muddy,” she says. “As you’re blocking out colors, you want to make sure you’re keeping light in mind. When I first started [making] art, I would only work in grayscale, so I’d focus only on lighting, making sure the lighting was right, and then I’d go to color.”

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Once the color is blocked out and the light pattern is set, it’s time to deal with texture. “The way you do different textures [depends on] the way you want to interpret it,” Jubilee explains. One of her tea studies, for example, features a glass with a diamond pattern. “I just did diamond patterning, and then you want to fill in the diamonds as you go.”

Next, to render the light so it harmonizes with the rest of the piece, it’s important to make sure there’s some curve in it, Jubilee says. Yet there’s no hard-and-fast rule, other than observation: “It’s a lot easier when you’re looking at a reference—I couldn’t do this without a reference.”

How does one decide when a pixel art work is done? “With pixel, it’s really hard to stop, because you can literally stare at one pixel and just keep going back over and over it, because it looks wrong,” she says. “But as I’ve gotten better and made more art, I’ve realized that I just need to get to a stopping point. It’s not about being perfect, it’s about getting it done.”

Yau graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in sculpture, and Wwake’s core collection started as small-scale artworks. “I didn’t really ever imagine [jewelry making] for myself, to be honest,” she recalls. “I was really just interested in manipulating materials and exploring different textures. And then the pieces that felt most like jewelry were of course the ones that took off.” She launched Wwake in 2013.

Yau, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who was born and raised in Vancouver, has never been interested in making fine jewelry in the traditional sense. One of her innovations was to apply art-world concepts like seriality to her work, adding one element at a time to a single form, resulting in two-step, three-step, four-step pieces. Another was to incorporate craft processes like weaving, in series that riff on the textile art of Sheila Hicks.

When she started making rings, she thought about what an anti-ring might look like. Could she avoid having a center stone? Or, if there was a center stone, could she make it look like it was floating away from the setting?

Working with precious stones didn’t particularly appeal to Yau either. Opals, most often considered semiprecious, proved to be an ideal starting point. The opal is “a little bit understated, it’s not flashy, but it has an iridescent glimmer,” she says. “Plus, every opal is different.” And it bears mentioning that opalescence is trending in the work of younger fine artists and designers. “My generation is the one of holographic stickers,” Yau says. “Kids had color-changing T-shirts, spoons.”

Though Yau now also uses diamonds, sapphires, moonstones, tourmalines, citrines, sunstones, and pearls in her jewelry, opals remain her signature stone. A lot of designers are identified by a single style or motif—think Elsa Peretti’s biomorphic forms—but to Yau, trained as a fine artist, that seems stifling. “To have a stone as a signature is a dream for me as a designer and as an artist,” she says, “because that really gives me a lot of room to explore.”

Hendry is known for hyperrealist drawings, executed in pen or (since 2017) colored pencil, that she posts and sells on Instagram. Operating without a gallery, she organizes and finances her own exhibitions, usually in nontraditional environments. “Rorschach,” for instance, a show of images one might encounter when taking a psychological test, was held in a bouncy castle made to look like a padded room in a mental hospital; “Monochrome,” an exhibition of drawings of crumpled Pantone chips, was hung in a series of rooms made of modular plastic bricks, each decorated in a different color. And her most recent solo show, of drawings of wigs, opened this past December in a pop-up chocolate shop.

Cj Hendry, Ralph. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Each of Hendry’s pieces starts with a photograph. (“A lot of people ask me if I can send them my reference images,” she says. “And I’m, like, take your own! So much effort goes into securing each object.”) The photograph is printed on paper at half the size of the finished piece—Hendry’s drawings are usually quite large—at which point the artist uses a traditional grid technique to scale up the image on her drawing paper.

Hendry works in series, her subjects—among them high-end fashion items like designer sneakers and Gucci bags, giant daubs of paint, flowers, and seafood—reflecting a fascination with colors and textures as well as the social meaning of objects. Wigs, for example, interested her because of their ability to transform the wearer. “You can become your own character,” she says. But also, she adds, “the trans community uses them; cancer patients use them.”

Cj Hendry, Nathan. Photo courtesy of the artist.

As far as the drawing itself goes, for Hendry it’s less about line than about lights and darks. “I really work on depth, and the coloring is generally way darker than you think.” She realized this when learning to draw with colored pencils, starting with YouTube tutorials. “There was someone drawing a [green] apple, and it didn’t look real,” she recalls, “because they were using lime green.” In reality, an apple has “a lot of brown and maybe a bit of burgundy—it isn’t bright green.” To create highlights and shadows, she applies different amounts of pressure. She can’t say how many layers of color there are in each drawing, but she has noted that for every color we see, she has used 20 different shades.

Hendry puts great stock in good materials. When she set out to turn her art into a career, she sold her collection of luxury goods—acquired while working at a Chanel boutique—to finance the purchase of quality art supplies. “I wasn’t brought up with a lot of money, but I’d rather have fewer things that are really nice than an abundance of shit,” she says. “So when I started out, I didn’t just want to make art on printer paper with a ballpoint pen. I thought, I want beautiful Japanese pens, I want beautiful cotton paper.”

Cj Hendry, Rodney. Photo courtesy of the artist.

For her colored pencil drawings, Hendry usually sticks to the same brand of pencil: Caran d’Ache. “I really like how smooth they are,” she says. “But because colored pencils only have a certain number of shades, I do bring different brands in just to fill the holes” in Caran d’Ache’s palette. For this she favors Prismacolor and Winsor & Newton. “When I first started, I only used Prismacolor pencils, but they are quite waxy and I couldn’t get enough detail,” she says. “So I switched to Caran d’Ache, because it has the Pablo line, which is hard and good for detail, and the softer Luminance line for covering more area.” Her studio has a shelving system made up of tiny crates, each devoted to one or two colors of pencil.

Despite her attention to process and materials, Hendry refers to her art as basic. “I am very literal,” she contends. “You can look at one of my drawings and you won’t be, like, I wonder what that could be. It’s a fucking wig.”

Cj Hendry, Peter in progress. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Welcome to Genesis Noir, a video game that recently won a grand prize for Excellence in Visual Art and Audio at the Independent Games Festival. The moody, monochrome world of the game, complete with a diner modeled after the one in Edward Hopper’s iconic 1942 painting Nighthawks, is a product of the design studio Feral Cat Den, run by developers Evan Anthony and Jeremy Abel. Players take on the role of the watch salesman and travel across time and space, from Pompeii to feudal Japan, to prevent that fateful gunshot.

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The narrative is rooted in the works of Italian postmodern novelist Italo Calvino. “I heard about his work on NPR’s Radiolab in an episode where Liev Schreiber was reading ‘The Distance of the Moon,’ says Anthony. It was part of Calvino’s short story collection Cosmicomics, which combines fiction, history, and science.

Genesis Noir was almost a decade in the making. “Making a video game, that’s a lot of work,” Anthony admits. “It’s very difficult.” He and his partner met as students in the New Media Design program at Rochester Institute of Technology. They began their collaboration in 2013 while still in school and extended it after graduation, working as freelance animators and creative developers for, in Anthony’s words, “interactive promotional sites for major movies and advertising experiences.”

After a few years of working on projects that would live for a couple of months at most, they yearned to create a long-form narrative. A video game, they decided, was the ideal medium. Between freelance gigs they would work on outlining characters, building scenarios, and honing the storyline.

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In 2016 the duo established Feral Cat Den and went full time on the project. This meant constant pitching to publishers to get support. “We created a vertical slice, which is a 15-minute kind of prototype or demonstration of your game that, like a slice of cake, shows every kind of piece of the game,” explains Abel. A Kickstarter campaign launched in early 2018 helped them raise more than $40,000 to finance the project; it also gave them a sense of their potential audience and which elements of their work resonated most. The game came out in the spring of 2021.

Having distinct visuals “is pretty key, especially just to get people’s eyes on it,” says Abel. “There are so many games being made now that you have to get noticed by any means.” In fact, their unique style is steeped in art and film references, reminiscent not only of early Disney shorts (“Skeleton Dance” comes to mind) and classic movies but also scenes depicted on Grecian vases and in Japanese woodblock prints.

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For their building blocks, the collaborators adapted an industry standard, Unreal Engine, which is associated with rich textures and smoothly lit 3-D games. But it had its limitations. “When you’re making a game in Unreal Engine,” Abel notes, “you have to worry about lights and the performance of how many lights you have . . . but we didn’t use any.” Unreal emphasizes realistic lighting and textures, he explains, but the creators didn’t want the software to dictate the overall look of the game. “We had to turn all the features of the engine off and modify the source code to allow us to get into some special effects.”

“I think it’s very important for developers to try to use tools in imaginative ways and to utilize the constraints of their project to find interesting solutions,” says Anthony.

Their years using Adobe Flash in their day jobs paid off in their 3-D animation. “A special plug-in that we wrote allows us to export to Flash as vector animation,” says Abel, likening their plug-in to Turtle, a way to teach programming to kids.

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The game’s noirish visuals and plot came to Anthony as he was walking across New York’s Williamsburg Bridge to work. “I was looking at the skyline and just thinking about what an amazing piece of art it was, and the idea of a film noir popped into my mind,” he says. “I realized that ‘the Big Bang’”—a central element of the story line—“already sounds like the title of the classic noir film The Big Sleep.”

The movie Alphaville provided another inspiration, for how it adapted noir tropes to a sci-fi story taking place in the future. “They didn’t create crazy sets or new science fiction props,” Anthony points out. “They photographed modernist architecture in Paris in a way that made it feel abstract and let the viewer imagine a science-fiction story while using the contemporary environment. . . . Particularly for video games made with a small team, you have to be very deliberate and conscious about your constraints and limitations. So Alphaville is really a beautiful example of a story that you can tell just using the environment around you.”

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These are hardly the game’s only artistic references. The hairdo of the character Golden Boy (who looks like a B-tier Elvis Presley) is actually symbolic of the golden ratio or the Fibonacci spiral. A sequence in which the watch salesman, named No Man, is crouched at the bottom of the ocean pays homage to William Blake’s painting Newton (1795–c. 1805), which depicts a young Isaac Newton drawing with a compass. “William Blake, he deals with these kinds of existential themes, like a dialogue between faith, spirituality, and science,” says Anthony. “We feel like William Blake is kind of an indie artist or indie comic book illustrator. I think if he was around in our time, he would be radically independent and be making this kind of visionary art form.”

Set in the late 1960s, it tells the story of cryptozoologist Lauren Grey, a former army brat who’s been hired to maintain a wealthy woman’s collection of cryptids—mythological creatures such as unicorns, griffins, and the like—and keep them safe from those who would use them as weapons. This endeavor, though, comes at a price: In order to raise funds and gain support for its mission, the sanctuary has been converted into a ticketed theme park called the Cryptozoo.

A scene from Cryptozoo, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The graphic style of the film is eclectic. Human characters are rendered in fine pencil lines filled in with watercolor, the endearing cryptids feature vaguely skeuomorphic chiaroscuro, and the backgrounds recall Paul Gauguin’s lush tropical landscapes. “Part of it was in response to our previous film, which had this huge, thick, wobbly black line that overtook all the characters,” Samborski told me on a Zoom call that also included Shaw. She was referring to their 2016 feature, My Entire High School Is Sinking Into the Sea, which was done in a more abstract style. “Pencil was a natural choice [for the humans in the new film] because both of us have a deep love of figure drawing, and watercolor [seemed] natural too,” she continued. “Watercolor is a medium I love to work in; I like that water has a little bit of a mind of its own, and I thought it complemented the delicacy of the pencil.”

Shaw and Samborski wanted to rely on watercolors for the cryptids as well, but to use a style entirely different from that employed for the human figures; hence the creatures’ greater dimensionality. As for the backgrounds, Shaw said, many were inspired by painters he knows from alternative comics. “Something I learned from [animated filmmaker] Ralph Bakshi is that, instead of making a style guide and asking the animators to all draw or paint in a particular way, you cast [the artistic talent] the way you would cast actors. And so, ultimately, the movie becomes the orchestration of these different elements.”

Samborski praises Shaw’s clarity of storytelling and his storyboarding, which comes from his background as a graphic novelist. For his part, Shaw says that Samborski’s talent as an animator lies at the core of their successful collaboration, combining fluidity with old-school clunkiness (a desired effect here) as she brings to life the action that ties one storyboard to the next.

A scene from Cryptozoo, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

Regarding their influences, the two name Czech illustrator Heinz Edelmann’s silhouette-like ink drawings for Yellow Submarine and for the cover of a German edition of Lord of the Rings; the postapocalyptic eco-horror film Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki, whose moral relativism they admire; and the dystopian cyberpunk feature animation Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo.

The creatures were partly inspired, as well, by The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges. Shaw noted “that joy of just seeing all of these different beings, like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. You just love seeing what all these creatures look like.”

I asked the duo to choose one scene that illustrates their creative style, and they picked a sequence featuring Lauren, Phoebe (a Medusa-like being passing for human) and the park’s keepers. The first part of this scene unfolds at a beach. “The beach itself was inspired by paintings by Odilon Redon,” said Shaw, and “the water was inspired by a 1980s anime called Gogo 13 that has a very specific water-glistening effect that’s been glued to my brain from watching anime.”

A scene from Cryptozoo, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

The second part of this scene consists of a running sequence, as a group of characters are chased by a mega-worm called a kamudi. The trope is well known to anyone who has ever played a side-scrolling platform video game or watched an episode of Tom and Jerry, Scooby Doo, or even The Silly Symphonies. “Something that’s cool about this kind of limited animation—and videogames too—is how to depict space with flat pieces,” explained Shaw. “We have the snake rushing toward us, the trees are moving side to side—spatially, it doesn’t make any sense, but somehow, optically, it communicates that it’s coming toward us.” For this effect, they looked to another 1980s anime, Vampire Hunter D, in which a character’s legs are walking toward us but the grass is moving left to right. Shaw said it was “like a magic trick communicating space with these nonsensical movements.”

The scene gave Samborski the chance to fully indulge her inner nerd, too. Since the film’s creatures are all based on mythological animals that have long appeared in human storytelling, she looked to images of these creatures from different cultures. Her design of the kamudi “was inspired by South American stone carving,” she said. “It’s one of the places in the movie where that angularity that you see in the original source material was able to really come through in the animation, as well as the design of the creature itself.”

On the other hand, the way the beast moves, Shaw adds, “Is [based on] the creature from Snake, the early Nokia computer game.”

A scene from Cryptozoo, a Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures.

As to the animated humans, “I completely believe Lauren is an action hero,” said Samborski. “She’s got these enormous boobs and that tiny waist, but she still has a masculinity in her body,” which makes her an ultimately tough, non-doll-like character along the lines of Lara Croft. “It was very fun to animate because it’s not super typical,” Samborski added. “It was exciting to work with that.”

At the same time, the pair does not mind descending into tongue-in-cheek moments. In the kamudi scene, a male character takes of his shirt to reveal a well-muscled chest, the way the typical heartthrob in an ’80s action movie might. “I really like that moment,” said Shaw. I did all the frames on that and, to me, it’s this moment where a random guy takes off his shirt—and we’re, like, See? The way he’s rendered is like a figure drawing.”

And how would Shaw sum up the film more broadly? “It’s half Saturday-morning cartoon, half [experimental filmmaker] Stan Brakhage,” he said. “If that frequency is exciting for you, then the last half hour is a total joyride.”

Cryptozoo is available on Amazon Prime Video.

His latest endeavor is a series of animated films called Life After BOB, whose first episode, “The Chalice Study,” is on view at The Shed in NYC through December. The 48-minute piece is set in a near-future world where the internet extends into our bodies, with AI entities cohabiting human minds and psychotropic foods unifying physical and psychic realities. A neural engineer named Dr. Wong has installed an experimental AI named BOB (Bag of Beliefs)—something Cheng actually created in 2018—in the nervous system of his daughter, Chalice. BOB was intended to act as a guide to young Chalice, but as she grows, the entity takes over more and more of her life. Intersecting with BOB’s modus operandi is a demo called “1000 Lives,” designed by someone aptly named Z (for Zoroaster), which is meant to show different life paths. “The Chalice Study” focuses on Chalice’s and her father’s actions and the consequences of his conflation of his work and his love for his daughter.

Unlike Cheng’s previous work, which had a markedly choral dimension, Life After BOB features characters with a strong sense of individuality. “I did a little bit of that with the Emissaries trilogy, but that was more like a backstory just for me to understand what I was making,” he says. “It was maybe a little bit illegible to the viewer, and certainly the stories weren’t foregrounded; they were more like scaffolding for the building. This is the first time we’re just full-on trying to tell a story with characters.”

Ian Cheng, Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021, installation view, The Shed, New York, September 10–December 19, 2021.

To create the Life After BOB universe, Cheng relied on a video-game engine called Unity, which is used mainly by indie developers and video artists. “I’ve used Unity to make simulations for almost 10 years, and more and more, I started seeing the potential of real-time cinema happening in it,” he says. He also found a thriving community of artists creating indie anime-like productions in Unity; #indie_anime and #realtimevfx on Twitter are two of the ways to find them.

“There’s something that can be quite beautiful in the process of making something in Unity because once we make a simulation, I can make changes up until the very last minute, all the time, and those changes don’t have to go through a whole chain of people. I can make them,” he continues. “Days before the Shed opening I was changing sets, I was changing details on the characters, I was changing shots, changing lighting. In traditional animation, man, you can’t do that unless you’re willing to pay millions to reshoot, and you just can’t do it quickly.” Life After Bob plays live in the game engine, which means that what you’re seeing is the program running right there in front of you. And thanks to a Wiki, users can make little changes over time that will affect some of the details in the background and some of the artifacts that the characters encounter.

Style-wise, the closest comparison that comes to mind is the 2017 Nintendo game Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, whose sprawling 3D environments are offset by cel-shading—that is, the use of flat shades as opposed to gradients, which provides more of a comic-book feel. “One thing I was fighting just from the get-go was a very reactive thing,” says Cheng, the idea that “everything that comes out of the Unity video game engine looks like Unity. I said, ‘No, we have to seduce the viewer to not think of a video game engine. I want this to be more cinematic,’” To give his 3D environments a more two-dimensional feel, Cheng and his team took some lessons from the 2018 animated movie Spiderverse, in which characters were animated on twos and threes, rather than on one (these numbers refer to how long a single image holds on camera in relation to frames per second). “Things were less smooth but simulated the choppier style of hand-drawn animations,” Cheng explains. “When animations were done by hand, you had to draw fewer frames because it was so labor intensive, but it had this beautiful, crunchy quality.”

Ian Cheng, Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021, installation view, The Shed, New York, September 10–December 19, 2021.

One might notice that Life After BOB’s backdrops are more detailed than the stylized characters. That’s because Cheng took to heart some lessons found in the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. “He talks about how especially in manga and anime, they have this very beautiful principle for what is you and what is the world, and when something is the world, it’s inherently more detailed. The trees and the shrubbery are much more detailed, and the characters are almost like printed on top and it feels much more simple and cartoony,” notes Cheng. “But you identify with the character because it feels more iconic . . . and then you observe the world as the world because it feels more fractal and detailed. We really played with this principle to make the background more detailed and the characters a little more simple, and then when the objects transfer from the world into your subjective domain, they simplify themselves a little bit.”

George Lucas is a long-standing source of inspiration. “You can see in every frame that he really loves the world,” Cheng says, referring to the world-building that undergirds the director’s Star Wars saga. “He loves the culture, the ecology, the creatures.” When it comes to characters, Cheng looks up to Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. “Miyazaki is thinking much more in terms of how people are themselves an extension of an evolving ecology,” he adds, “so if you back a person into a corner, put a lot of social and environmental pressure on them, they might turn a little evil, and then if you release or give them a little opportunity, they might become more optimistic and good.”

Yet the biggest pop-cultural influence on Life After BOB is Showtime’s Couples Therapy. “It’s just so interesting to see how, with very different kinds of couples, the host [Dr. Orna Guralnik] brings out essentially their life script, which is something I’ve been very interested in,” Cheng says. “Right in front of your eyes, as couples come in with very different problems, she immediately figures out what their life script is,” he continues. “Carl Jung says a very beautiful thing: Everyone plays out a myth. But more often than not, the person doesn’t know what their myth is and you’d better figure out what that myth is because it could be a tragedy, and you might want to change it,” he said. “Maybe the lesson of psychotherapy is to really get your story straight and really know your story”

Ian Cheng, Life After BOB: The Chalice Study, 2021, live animation, color, sound, 48 min. Courtesy the artist.

The story of the Life After BOB universe is still being written. “I want to make more episodes that take place in the same world with those characters, but perhaps each episode centers on a different character,” says Cheng. “Maybe the next episode will be, like, on Z or Dr. Wong or any of the other characters, as a way to maybe explore other near-future issues that I’m interested in: What’s the future of aging? What’s the future of stupidity? What’s the future of hive minds? What’s the future of psychedelics?”

In the same vein, Barcelona-based artist Sergio Roger crafts stuffed fabric sculptures that pay tribute to iconic classical artworks. A selection of these sculptures will be on view at the Rossana Orlandi Gallery in Milan during Milan Design Week, September 4–7.

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Roger says his work comes out of how subjective archaeology can be, referring to such misconceptions as the belief—dating back to archaeology’s beginnings in 15th- and 16th-century Europe, when Greek and Roman art was collected by Italian noblemen and Renaissance artists looked to it for inspiration—that classical marble sculptures were pure white. (In fact, it was finally proved in the 1980s that they had been painted.) As Roger notes, such assumptions reflect a cultural bias toward whiteness rather than color. “Archaeology is based on Western, European ideas,” he says. “There are many examples of its interpretations supporting a Western white male narrative.”

In a quiet subversion of these interpretations, Roger renders his copies of marble and bronze originals in fabric, a medium often associated with women’s work. He generally employs 100-year-old antique linen. “I tried other materials, but this fabric has a history, it has soul,” he says. Furthermore, he adds, textiles are used not only for practical purposes, but also for rituals connected to birth and death. “In almost every culture around the globe, when a child is born it is wrapped in cloth, and when a person dies, they are wrapped in cloth again, this time a shroud.”

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The rough weave of the linen helps Roger create the appearance of stone, and he treats each roll as unique. “I try to make each sculpture from one piece of fabric,” he says. He purchases most of his antique fabric from a local store in Barcelona: “They have an amazing staff, and I also like to support them, especially now [post-Covid] that they’re going through a hard time.” Plus, relying on a brick-and-mortar store as opposed to online sources such as Etsy (which Roger praises for its selection of antique fabrics) allows him to get a sense of the material and what it will look like when quilted or draped.

After creating flat patterns reminiscent of garment patterns, Roger embellishes the linen with stitching. To indicate hair and beards in his busts, he first draws the curls or waves on the linen, then erases the lines once he has worked them in thread. Jupiter (2020), for example, exudes masculinity thanks to his beard, while clean-shaven Augusto (2019), based on images of the first Roman emperor, sports a head of closely cropped curls. Roger then relies on an upholsterer to piece the sculpture together and fill it.

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When a sculpture needs to be clothed, Roger starches pieces of linen, then drapes them over the figure. Starching gives the folds definition, similar to the clarity of folds carved in marble by the Greek and Roman sculptors. His sculpture Cyrene (2021), named after a Thessalian princess who was notable for her bravery, wears an intricately pleated gown fitted at the waist. “I’m very bonded to the fashion world,” says Roger, “because my techniques are related to clothing production.” Ultimately, he credits his assistant, a fashion designer, for how wearable Cyrene’s garb looks even in 2021.

Roger’s sculptures are often displayed on mounts, mimicking the way archaeological finds are displayed in museum settings (and reminding viewers that, just like their marble and bronze counterparts, they’re not meant to be touched.) “Soft sculpture always has this sort of meaning attached to it: ‘We’re going to reproduce the world using fabric; we’ll make it soft and then it’s going to be funny,’” he says. “My work has humor, but I want to walk that very fine line between classical beauty and irony,” he says. “I don’t want to make it too funny or sweet.”

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