Reading
Starting off I have to get my Animation Studies blog articles in, and I chose the following based on my own interest of the film and how they can be broken down. Both of these are very insightful for different reasons, one as a commentary on if ‘pure’ genres exist and the other is an analysis on the use of colour, linework and detail to reinforce ideas of family, emotion and intelligence.
Anime, or the Issue of Genre Classification with Transnational Audiences
Then I finished off this weeks reading by covering the ‘Disney’s New Aesthetic’ chapter of Animation The Global History.
Watching- Canada
I wanted to try and get through all of the Canadian films from the watchlist this week!
https://www.nfb.ca/film/wild_life/
I didn’t expect the story that came with Wild Life, I expected some tale of animals and whimsy, instead I received a beautifully animated tragedy of a man who dreamed too big and hid his struggles from his family. The style this is done is absolutely wonderful, the painterly strokes that accompany almost every frame adds nice texture to the otherwise simplistic style. It cuts between a couple genres and effects like the real video to the cartoony style, from a documentary style to a drama. Overall this was an interesting film presented in an interesting way.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/neighbours_voisins/
Neighbours is the first short film that I have seen that has used Pixelation, animating real life people like you would inanimate objects for stop motion. This was a very strange3 film, and I’m not sure I can say that I enjoyed it. It had a very video game-esque sound track that worked with the actions of the characters, and most importantly not everything was animated smoothly, some objects snapped together, others carried fast paced with no anticipation. This was a very cool and experimental piece of film with a very strange story.
Hunger was not my film at all, thought I will give it credit for how far out and experimental it was. It plays a lot with perspective and lives and changing shapes which results in this weird floaty feeling and questioning what is and isn’t real in this strange world. When paired with the strange ambient sound it all just creates this warped reality and I just couldn’t get into it unfortunately, but I do enjoy how far they pushed the boundaries of the screen.
This was quite a heart-warming story to me. I love the whiteboard/paint medium used and how u can see where they would wipe away elements to animate the moving elements. The best part for me was probably the mother going about her daily chores as time passed, and how smoothly elements connected together to portray this. The narration was charming and it made the whole piece come across as nostalgic and fun.
https://www.nfb.ca/film/sand_castle/
Sand Castle was a very fun film, I really liked it. The use of stop motions is very smooth here and it carries along this childlike, carefree and nostalgic attitude throughout. I think the use of sand and the playful creates really brings this nostalgia, like playing on the beach as a child creating these little pictures and castles, with the soundtrack echoing their strange but unique qualities and the movements were really seamless, it was interesting watching them evolve and grow.
The first time I was shown this short film in class by Ryan, I didn’t like this film. This is my second watch and I found myself enjoying it a lot more, the way the character’s have been caricatured and how a simple interview has been translated to the audience- honestly, it is kind of amazing. There is a lot of subtext within this film that I could spend days talking about each little piece. Instead I will just say that I really enjoy the mix of styles, the intersperses of characters and hearing their voices and seeing the effect they have on our characters, and the different ways that everyone is displayed. Overall, it is a very strange, disturbing yet insightful animation about an artist that I wish to learn more about after watching it.
From watching these set of Canadian films from our watchlist I can understand that the idea was to play with how storytelling and animation could create unique effects. Everyone of these films had a unique medium, live action or not, a unique story to tell and a unique style that they presented it in. Canadian animation really broke away from other films and pushed the boundaries of communicating through animation.