During research for our article I knew that I wanted to focus mainly on the strengths and weaknesses of the actual article itself. The article we had chosen to analyse was the carefully constructed yet curiously real: how major American animation studios generate empathy through a shared style of character design. Our group mainly collaborated a lot throughout the project, all of us pitching in with points we had realised about the article or found interesting about what the article was saying. I volunteered to read the introduction to our PowerPoint as well as reading out for the strengths and weaknesses of the article as that was the point I had the most interest in. For example, One of the huge weaknesses we noted for the article was it’s lack of fact checking due to the article referring to the 2009 film Princess and the Frog as a 3D film which as I said during the presentation, even just a google search will tell you this information is false. I had also pitched in by suggesting we used Disney’s Wish movie for an example of how this article doesn’t really stand the test of time. As Wish is a 3D movie which the characters themselves LOOK interesting and follow the same sort of look as other films like “Raya and the Last Dragon” for example however due to the lack of a very well thought out story for this movie many people seem to say that they can’t empathize with the characters of it.
My mum who is a huge Disney nerd in herself actually said that she didn’t like the Wish movie because she couldn’t really care about the characters, due to not knowing anything about them. This mentality also seems to translate to a lot of people who had viewed the movie and made analysis of them on YouTube. While I know these aren’t actually acceptable references I knew there would be information if I looked hard enough in the research. I also knew that the article had no evidence for it’s argument it made on 2D animation character design not having as much of an impact on viewers empathy as 3D character design does. So I went through and tried to find some sort of evidence to dispute this claim of the article and I came across news posts that claimed the scene from “The Lion King” the original animation version, the one when Mufasa dies was voted as the saddest animation scene on a site called ranker, which when I went to find the poll myself I found that it had shifted into second place but was also beaten by another scene from a 2D animation which I believe proves that people do feel empathy for 2D character designs as it’s well known fact that many people spent their childhoods crying over Mufasa dying or were traumatized by this scene.
Other than this I mainly just helped with making the PowerPoint for our presentation, wrote the scripts for the slides that I would be talking for and generating suggestions for points we could have in our PowerPoint that we could elaborate on when we had the time to research it. Personally I struggled with this project due to time constraints between balancing my game project for the other module as well as trying to balance my time with my job which has been proving to be very difficult this semester… as seen by the late submission here as I had forgotten all about the submission on Friday after I had came home from work….