No Joy picks 4 movies to pair with ‘Bugland’
In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
No Joy is a shoegaze band from Montreal led by Jasamine White-Gluz. Started in 2009, their latest release Bugland was named Best New Music by Pitchfork. We asked Jasamine to pick 4 movies that best pair with Bugland.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
The scene where Bob Hoskins is driving into Toon Town was part of the inspiration behind the “Bugland” video. The idea of escaping one dark world and entering another that is vibrant. This movie is singular—it isn’t a cartoon and it isn’t live action, it isn’t comedy and it isn’t a crime thriller. It’s super demented, and I wanted to make a record that sounded equally as big and strange and incomparable to anything else.
The Hugga Bunch
This movie lived deep in my psyche after seeing it as a small child. A film trend at the time was to make children’s movies that had dark undertones. (I’m looking at you, The Land Before Time and Return to Oz.) I love that because as an adult you can rewatch them and see things you didn’t catch when you were younger. Either way, this movie is terrifying, and made no less frightening by the insanely weird Hugga Bunch characters that are deranged pseudo-Henson puppets living on the other side of a mirror. Totally psycho dreamworld stuff and I love it.
The Wizard of Oz
Is it cheesy to include a classic like this? The moment where Dorothy opens the door and enters Oz, leaving from black-and-white into technicolor, is a feeling I wanted to express with these songs. Seeing and hearing things more vividly than before. Escapism, fantasy, loyalty, home—these are all themes on Bugland and appear throughout Oz. When I was younger my favorite characters in the movie were the apple trees that threw apples at Dorothy and Scarecrow after Dorothy picked apples off of them. Don’t mess with nature!
Microcosmos
I discovered this movie after the album artwork was done, ironically. While writing Bugland, I was really focusing on zooming into all the small details around me in the plants, bugs, trees. Microcosmos is all of those things. This film is so beautifully shot, and the sound design is incredible.