'Blade Runner' Remade in Watercolor. No, Seriously, Watch This.

By Alexander Joenks | Videos | November 25, 2013 |

By Alexander Joenks | Videos | November 25, 2013 |

I have Norwegian blood, and as such, was raised on stories of great-great-grandparents who indulged in racial snark against the rest of Scandinavia: a thousand Swedes jumped out of the weeds, chased by one Norwegian. So I have been trained in the cauldron of Scandinavian race wars since the youngest of ages, and therefore have little predisposition for liking things that come out of those lesser Nordic regions.

I also have very little patience for cutesy pseudo-hipster art crap like making watercolor paintings of sci-fi movies and setting them to the audio soundtrack of the film. That description? I want to print it out and light it on fire.

So with all those caveats, I present to you anyway this 35 minute rendering of ‘Blade Runner’ as a series of a particular type of semi-transparent watercolor called Aquarela, put together by Swedish artist Anders Ramsell.

It is absolutely gorgeous:

It’s like a ghost of a movie, the way that the watercolors only suggest the hint of the scene we’ve already seen, lurching from one to another with nothing approaching seamlessness. It’s something that could really only have meaning to someone who has seen the movies so many times that they’ve committed the visuals almost to memory. Because that’s what ghosts are, memories we let walk.