DIGITIAL L.A. : NEW APPRECIATION FOR ANIMATION; NUANCES OF JAPANESE STYLE EXPLAINED IN TEXT.

Byline: David Bloom 

If you or a family member has recently become enamored of Japanese animation, known as anime, chances are that some odd cultural references have sailed right over your heads.

``The Anime Companion'' by Gilles Poitras (Stone Bridge Press) aims to explain these details, with more than 500 short entries explaining everything from Aichi province to zori thonged sandals, along with citations from various anime movies where those details figure in the plot.

Poitras runs a popular Web site devoted to anime that is the basis for this fun book that's made for browsing. Learn tidbits about Japanese culture, food, politics and more, and see how anime has used that.

Poetry in motion: The type hovers over the screen, first in Portuguese then slowly dissolving into English. Pictures fade in to view, and a poem evanesces into form, a lovely tone poem to a magical couple of days in the tiny town of Evora, Portugal.

It's one of the highlights of the just-completed California Digital Arts Workshop, held last week at the American Film Institute's campus in Los Feliz. The workshop brought in more than a dozen artists with little or no experience creating online art, taught them such basic tools as HTML and Macromedia's Flash Generator, then turned them loose to create.

One felicitous product is ``Evora A Doce,'' the online amalgam of type, poetry, pictures and, soon, music put together by Northern California poet Theresa Whitehill.

It began with a trip Whitehill took last year with her husband, Lisbon-born artist Paulo Ferreira, to research a magazine story about fado, the somewhat melancholic urban folk music of Portugal.

Burned out by weeks of interviews and research, Whitehill and Ferreira went to unwind in Evora, an ancient town most notable for a series of religious sites from vastly different eras, including a Neolithic contemporary of Stonehenge, a shrine to the Roman goddess Diana, and a chapel made entirely of human bones and constructed by a Catholic priest.

``We were walking on the streets and the poem started happening, and I was writing it down on napkins,'' Whitehill said. They went into a tiny cafe on a side street to eat. ``We were talking about how you can't remember a flavor.''

Suffused with fado and the peculiar vibe that has drawn people for centuries to Evora, Whitehill ``took a bite of something and started to cry. It was just incredible. (The bar owner) knew something was happening and asked us. He said a lot of people come in here and don't really know what's going on.''

She couldn't interest poetry reviews in the piece, then got a chance to go to the workshop, where she knew the poem could be at the center of a work of art that would be far richer.

The resulting piece includes a couple of paintings by Ferreira, pictures she took and more. Assuming she can get the singer's permission, she will include some fado accompaniment as well.

As with other workshop participants, the experience was bracing for Whitehill, opening her eyes to the Web's artistic possibilities, particularly using the Flash technology.

``It's very cinematic,'' said Whitehill. ``The transitions are very soft, the ability to fade in and out. I'm trained in letterpress work and the Web has always been so ugly to me typographically. (But Flash) lends itself well to this kind of work.''

Wendy Furman, a Laurel Canyon artist, also used Flash for her still-incomplete piece on Martha Stewart's impact on women's sense of self and place in society.

``You have to look at this woman who's creating all this beauty around her while most families are struggling to survive,'' Furman said. ``Part of the project is asking people to submit their own stories, anecdotes, observations about her. Everyone has opinions about her. Is she a Donna Karan or Mrs. Fields, or is she a Leona Helmsley?''

Like Whitehill, Furman is enthused about the technology's possibilities for creating distinctive new kinds of art, and for making it available even to people who are uncomfortable with galleries and museums.

``I like the immediacy of it, the ephemeral qualities of it,'' Furman said. ``I can see why photographers love it.''

Other projects include a retired Jet Propulsion Lab scientist's site for a manned mission to Mars in 2030; a Venice video artist's extended set of images of childhood toys and reactions to them; and a faux genetic research lab's site, said Maija Beeton, AFI's director of advanced technology programs.The Evora poem can be seen temporarily at www.eriktek.com/cdaw/sites/theresa, and others' work can be found elsewhere in the sites parent directory.

Ultimately, all the work will move from the eriktek.com temporary home to www.californiaculture.net, a statewide version of the Los Angeles Web site connecting museums and other cultural facilities that has been run by the Getty Center, said Beeton.

Too late to list: Try as we might, the holiday game and gear guide the Daily News just published can't possibly cover all the cool stuff coming out this season. Over the next few weeks of the Digital L.A. column, I'll highlight some of the later-arriving goodies of note.

First is Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP-300, a nifty, tiny piece of technology whose talents led the Recording Industry Association of America to sue (so far unsuccessfully) to stop its production. The player copies songs from your computer in the compact MP-3 file format. The Rio comes with a computer connecting cable, superb MusicMatch software to create and manage your MP-3 library and earphones. Get it while it's hot, before the RIAA kills it. About $200.

The Tonka Workshop CD-ROM Playset is an interesting hybrid of real-world and virtual toy. A workbench of plastic tools fits over your computer's keyboard, allowing your toddler to make like a carpenter while controlling on-screen activities through the workbench, and ``building'' dozens of projects.

And if you're itching to make use of that DVD-ROM drive on your new computer, IBM has come out with World Book Discoveries, based on the World Book encyclopedia. The multimedia title focuses on cultural, scientific and other developments throughout history, and comes loaded with about seven hours of video, 5,400 images and more than 900 animations.

Redjack: Revenge of the Brethren is a handsome hybrid Windows/Macintosh role-playing game of pirates and adventure set a couple of hundred years ago. Its 3-D look and extensive narrative make for a more movie-like experience.

Speaking of movielike experiences, ``I'm Your Man'' is a just-released interactive movie on DVD-ROM, a perfect gift for people who want to use the DVD-ROM drive in their new computer for more than playing CDs. Your decisions help shape the direction of the movie's narrative.

Fashion Magic's HairWear 'n' Charms is a Mac/PC disk from Mattel that allows children to create jewelry on screen, then print the pieces on plastic sheets that shrink into tough, attractive jewelry once they are baked in an oven. Comes with plastic sheets, decorative accessories, and even an corrugated baking sheet. This title is part of a really terrific set of girl-oriented titles from Mattel that combines computerized creativity with real-world crafts like jewelry.

WWF War Zone has been perched in the Top 10 lists all fall for both the Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation, with all the World Wrestling Federation's stars and even federation owner Vince McMahon doing play-by-play. Plus you can create your own wrestlers, something McMahon has yet to quite pull off.

Turok 2: Seeds of Evil is the much-awaited N64 dinosaur hunting first-person shooter. Unlike most N64 games, this one is definitely for more mature players, given its gore, but the opponents are smart and the graphics great.

``A Bug's Life'' is hitting not only the theaters and home computers, but also the PlayStation. Gather grain, beat bad bugs and free the colony from its oppressors as you move through 3-D environments.

Cool Boarders III is the latest sequel to a fun series of Playstation snowboarding games. Good, but it can't quite keep up with 1080 on the N64. Then again, most other games can't either.

Future Cop: LAPD has nothing to do with our favorite folks in blue, but is an engaging if moderately bloody PlayStation action game where you play a cop in a robotic anti-crime machine, cleaning up the streets of a Blade Runner-esque L.A. Electronic Arts also just announced a PC/Mac version with more levels and network capabilities. If the computer version is as fun as the PlayStation one, look out.

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) A Bug's Life for PlayStation has 3-D environments, bad bugs, menial chores and a chance to be a hero, like Flik.

(2) no caption (California Digital Arts Workshop)