Hazel is one of those artists who make a very specific type of art that is transliterated from one format to the other. Watching Hazel’s videos is like reading a magazine, lots of disjointed-but-still-connected segments that come together into a fun way to spend an hour. She is incredibly forward about how she draws inspiration from the magazines she read as a child and it is such a pleasant experience to see that experience put into a visual/audio format that I have never seen anywhere else.
Every single video she releases is a different experience, wholly unique in layout, content, framing, and atmosphere. Some are more personal narratives that incorporate her childhood experiences like her FLCL video where she talks about how the way she watched the series impacted the way she understood the story. Some are more factual and distanced like her ratings of every single anime Denny’s according the menu items of American Denny’s. though even that video had personal anecdotes that added to the charm.
If I am being entirely honest, a large inspiration for how I want to run my website is inspired by her videos and the ways that she just puts stories about whatever she wants on there. One that I found incredibly interesting was her deep dive into an advertising campaign for tinned beer whose characters were used to make a deeply emotional animated movie about a penguin suffering with the realties of being a soldier. She also spent ages editing herself into the channel awesome movies, why?, because she wanted to. The self absorbed and esoteric way hazel approaches art and sharing art is one I truly admire, it’s such a relic of how the world used to operate, before everything became algorithm based.
Hazel is also the co-host of a podcast called second time virgins where they talk about pink films, Japanese sexploitation and erotic movies. This podcast tickles something in the back of my mind that is only really tickled when I talk to kinksters about kink. It’s almost like everything Hazel makes in laser targeted towards me.
If there is anything you enjoyed about my website you should check out Hazel’s work, here’s her youtube channel for you to start perusing.
https://www.youtube.com/@hhhazel