For my World of Animation presentation the animated short my group were given to analyse was “The Pink Sword of Bibu”. When we were given the names of who would be in our group, we created a group chat on discord with each of our members so that we could discuss our work and how we would go about creating the PowerPoint presentation for our assessment. We concluded that we would each analyse the video on our own for the most part and create our individual slides which we could then pick and choose which slides we thought analysed the short best then splice them together in a group PowerPoint.
With that I got to work watching the animated short by myself in the house. At first I got too distracted with watching it that I couldn’t really pick out things to analyse but with a little sleep on it and enough watches I began to notice how the colours were used in specific ways that seemed to emphasise the playful nature of the animated short. For example when the Main Character [MC] is playing the game at the start of the video, everything is very bright. The MC himself has very saturated colours in his design and overall the scene is quite colourful. This bright and cheerful colouring creates this fun, joyful sense as well as giving off an underlying feeling of cheerfulness which is reminiscent of the joy children feel when they play video games like what the MC is playing. Colour is also used to convey the opposite feeling as well, such as when the MC receives a “game over” card after being defeated by the second big boss character. The colours in his bedroom are all very dull and dark compared to the previous scenes and this gives off a very bored and depressed tone which again can again add to that relatable feeling of how kids would feel if they had been playing a game they enjoy and get a game over screen. The last part of colour analysis I noticed was that the power of the Bibu sword contrasted a lot with the otherwise earthy/neutral tones of the environment and therefore this emphasised that this was an important part of the short as if what a very saturated hot pink while the rest of the colours in the scene were greens, whites, blues and the primary colours used on the MC.
I also began to notice the use of non-diegetic sounds to support the thought of this being a short themed around kids video games. examples of this include the scene when the MC receives the sword of Bibu for the first time. Non-diegetic music is played as the MC seems to mimic transformation cycles often used in anime or children’s adventure/hero games (An example of this sort of thing would be the hero transformations in Miraculous Ladybug). It is also used to create a dramatic feeling or danger when the first boss/antagonist appears, accentuating this feeling of the video being something like a boss battle in a fun kids game. Diegetic sound is also effectively used as well with the beep from the app which is used to progress the short along.
After that I began to look closer at the actual character designs and how they have been made. The first thing I noticed was that all of the character designs were actually quite stylised and they each fit in with the bright saturated world. They also all have a very low poly feel to them which mimics olden adventure games. The antagonists however are what drew my attention the most however as I realized that both of them had a very limited colour palette which was much darker than the colour palette they used for the MC. This also further extenuates that the MC is our protagonist and these opposing characters act as our antagonists. They are also linked together by the fact that they both have very similar- if not the exact same colour palette as each other, this similarity makes it easy for the viewer to visually pick up that they are the antagonists of the short film. Shape language is also used to support this as the bosses are made with very spiky shapes, such as triangles being used predominately throughout the designs to convey that these characters are meant to impose a threat for our MC.
I also looked at the use of cinematography throughout it, such as the extreme longshot which moves to a close up, then an extreme close up during the first fight scene. These shots build up the tension of the scene and give a sense of drama as the characters grow closer to impact. Cinematography is also utilised in many other ways however one other good scene for this is the scene which the MC is sitting in his room across from the computer. A low angle is used in this shot to give a sense of defeat and the computer is framed in a way which makes it feel like it dominates the shot and therefore increases that feeling that the MC has been defeated and is feeling hopeless in this moment.
Finally this lead to the lighting manipulation used through the short. The short opens with the sky being a bright saturated blue, the scene is very well lit and it can be assumed that this scene takes place either in the morning or around mid day when the sun is still high in the sky. Later however after the MC has been defeated we see that the Sky has changed from the bright blue before, to now being a pale orange gradient. The lighting also has a more orange tint to it now and it can be concluded that this takes place far later in the day. In conclusion this lighting manipulation shows that there has been a very clear passage of time throughout the entire animated short.