Animation: Hard to Find Films

Evolution of Soviet Sports Cartoons

2012-01-19T17:21:00.000-08:00

Russian sports cartoons seem to be intermittent for a while. The first, A Calm Forest Meadow, is in a very Disney-like mold, like a Silly Symphony in its forest setting and initially meandering pace before it goes into a happenstance sports game between rabbits and unsuspecting bears. The second, The Champion, is about a skiing race with an amateur dog who practices and ends up in a race with other youngster-like animals and a cocky wolf. Again, there's quite a bit of pre-action, still much like a Western cartoon, even if there's not a Western sports cartoon with such a focused plot. The third, Who is the First?, involves four young bicyclists who race through a forest, more event focused than the earlier cartoons, though the race meanders quite a bit. It's a more focused race.

Skip ahead five years after that, and there's Unusual Match where soft toys play against professional rugby wooden figurines. This one focuses on the home team aspect and in its longer time, about 20 minutes, shows how the participants practice and prepare for the game. In the sequel, the game is water polo. Both of these shorts show sophisticated competition, the first more than the second. In dramatic play and style, I think these show many strengths over co-director Boris Dezhkin's later solo films.

The skiing film isn't really a sports cartoon, it just has prototypes to the characters in Shaybu! Shaybu!, the next hockey film. Shaybu! Shaybu! is a hockey cartoon. It's about two teams, both human players this time, a blue home team and a red visiting team of pushy horseplayers, Dezhkin's usual formula. The main character is the person who apparently tends the rink where the game is played. It's an atmospheric trip through the game, the pre-game, the reactions of the crowd, and a comic while tense version of the game itself.

From what I can tell, few of the characters have any identities beyond what's shown on screen, most of them appearing to be nameless. There's the generic forest animals in the early cartoons. After that, it's dolls and then people with no names. There's nameless major characters in US sports cartoons as well, but they seem to flow in reverse, nameless knockoffs of well known characters. This happens frequently in Goofy cartoons.

Does seeing these give you any ideas for future sports animations? I'd like to see some rocket races to Mars, or any number of things so long as they're good with real, dynamic competition.

Two Unsubtitled Hungarian Films on Youtube

2011-12-30T18:30:00.000-08:00

Habfurdo(Foam Bath) and Dalias Idok(Heroic Times) are now on YouTube, though unfortunately without subtitles. This should delight Hungarian speakers and for non-speakers, it will wetten your appetite.

Click on Youtube for more parts.

Cartoon Faces

2011-12-11T21:50:00.000-08:00

I'm going to describe a couple of cartoon faces for human and anthropomorphic characters.

Black Dot Face

Character has black dot pupirises. These change into other graphic shapes to represent shifted eyes, or they may appear within outlined eyes. The thin eyebrow lines may also indicate the eyes or the brow due to the lack of actual mass.

Early Mickey Mouse, like many Disney characters has an especially tricky one. He has dot eyes, outlined eyes, and a blackened hair-like brow that suggests eyes by creating negative space. When eyes are used, they may also include optional eyelids. Sometimes there's even an outline close to the brow on the upper part. This joker outline allows for the perceptions of the eyes to be widened without drawing the full eyes, taking up too much room on the face. Additional features may be added for effect, like eyelashes or defined lips.

This fades out as the eyes become set. The fleshy cartoon skin obsoletes the purpose of shifty graphic brows. Once the character's looks become set, they become more specific, concrete things rather than amalgamations of shifting parts. They become locked in more and more to specific shapes. Then we see solid forms with fluidity.

This clever face gets replaced by the noodlebean cartoon face. There's fully defined features, with some cartoon obsoletions. The eyes are set, the cartoon skin is loose in order to put it into the right shape. The brow(generalizing here) is exaggerated, a fleshy thing, and it has taken the place of eyebrows and graphic brows. Eyebrows are now exaggerated merely as eyebrows and eyes as eyes. The new forehead brow will still make advancements over graphicized eyes for emotional effect.

The only other formula I can think of is in anime. There's a generic set of facial features which transcend a lot of designs. I'll focus on one variant that seems especially popular at Ghibli.

The lipped mouth and nose are only fully shown in side views. They're otherwise graphicized, the mouth as a line and the nose only partially shown in line. A thick line on the top of the eye suggests the top of the eye cavity, and the pupirises/pupils-in-irises are vertically stretched into ovals. The graphicized features again allow for additions to be made while keeping the characters relatable by not showing certain less appealing, commonly shared traits. Features are sometimes drawn especially vaguely in further views.

These all take on the idea of adding facial details from a standard template that has less detail than a real person's face. Perhaps soon this will flip towards starting with all the normal features and then removing them for effect. This would be much easier to do with computer animation. In animation, there's always the possibility of getting rid of people in favor of transhumanoids who look different. Those poor suckers in live action might have to put up with the boredom of real people, but that's not true in animation. I'm rather perplexed as to why most animated films aren't set on other planets with creatures that have their own unique systems of communication or in the fourth dimension. When you sit down and think about it, they would be if animation explored its possibilities.

Banya (Bath) 1962

2011-07-19T22:54:00.000-07:00

I discovered a raw torrent for a Soviet stop motion film from 1962. It's directed by Anatoliy Karanovich and Sergei Yutkevich. It's the sort of enveloping satire you've come to expect from the USSR, beauracrats, stagnancy and ignorance. Broad characters on a very social theme with nationalistic overtones. That's the description on Animator.ru. I can't comment on it too much, not knowing the language. I'd downloaded the first part to see what the film was like.

http://www.gervic.ru/exussr/17368-banya-1962-tvrip.html
There's the link. I wasn't able to rip the photo I wanted off the web. I'll have to do that tomorrow.

realism analysis

2011-07-15T21:14:00.000-07:00

It seems that with visually realistic animation, there's two high points. There's the technical high point and the creative high point, which usually comes after the technical high point. Looking at anime, I'm beginning to realize that there's a certain point where realism began getting overrun. There hasn't been any progress in reality for reality's sake visuals after Jin Roh. I'm going to mention directors here, keeping in mind that they're not the only source of inspiration in a work.

Some filmmakers seem to have found their niche with a more realistic style, like Mamoru Oshii, Otomo, and Anatoly Petrov. Petrov started with all sorts of other styles but really found his niche in realism. Oshii was an even rarer case, because for all the films where he had enough creative input, he ended up being realist throughout.

Petrov did some short films in other styles, one in a Picasso-like style, one in a dry children's cartoon style, and one that has cartoony characters in front of realistic backgrounds. He just seemed to lose interest in styles like those and continued towards reality until he peaked with Hercules Visits Admetus and kept going after that with more artistic styles.

For nearly everyone else, however, reality's more of a stopping point. Tarasov, Miyazaki, and it seems even Kon with his ill fated death, seem to have reality more in mind as a stopping point. Kon seems influenced by Otomo, who, while on the surface is a grand realist, has some clear cartoony impulses which escape in his robot carnival segments and his segment of Memories. Tarasov starts out in simpler cartoony styles, spends a large portion of his career in realism with much of his cartoony impulses intact, then works on a very cartoony film, Underwater Berets where he's one of numerous directors.

Miyazaki is a very complex character with his long career in the industry. He starts out between stale proto-realism and cartoony characters, brings out the stale realism directorially in Nausicaa, and then refines that to some degree while putting cartoony traits over the rest of the characters. That's probably too general of a statement, as you can see that Miyazaki has a way of going back and forth in complex ways with a general forward progression. With Ponyo he goes towards an especially cartoony aesthetic where he abandons most of the more realistic characters.

Ohira's an interesting case. He's spent most of his career in the animation department, but from time to time he directs a work and he's a bombshell who'll try absolutely anything. He's directed what's arguably the most visually successful realistic work, Hakkenden 10, and he's also directed Wanwa the Doggy from Genius Party Beyond, which is the polar opposite but seems to spring from the same creative well.

When you look at the US, you see that there's a point where there has ceased to be any success. I've opted not to show many gut wrenchingly awful saturday morning cartoons which are positively disgusting in every way possible. Nobody's really surpassed the Disney realism in the mainstream. I didn't show Tangled because it seems like a 3D pastiche on hand drawn films. Paul Fierlinger's work is probably the biggest progression. Plympton's no realist, not by a long shot, but he does have an illustrative style and he's absorbed enough of human anatomy to be on the margins of it. If you see some animation he did for a Shay's Rebellion segment on the History Channel, you'll see how close he can get to an artistic, non-comedic style.

Here's the point which I think animators ought to be able to reach: Every animator ought to be able to animate a proto-realistic person. Starting with the idea of joint complexity, I think that every animator should be able to draw out people with a bone complexity that allows them to animate a character to the degree that the character can be somewhat analogous to the real thing with unique observations.

This doesn't mean that they'll learn every small bone in the ear necessarily, but I think that everybody ought to be able to create a character with the following traits in mind: specific form for each part of the body drawn(each finger is different and sides are not symmetrical), adequately full torso movement, hands with 4 distinct three level fingers and one two level thumb on each hand, eyes with four layers of complexity(depending on if it's visible), varying abstraction on complex features like hair and rows of teeth, and so on. I don't expect that many animators could manage full, active control over a realistic number of facial muscles at any point in time. There wouldn't be any sort of realistic pacing, because it's too complex to pull off all the subtle nuances, but so long as you give features enough usage that the viewer doesn't get the impression that character's incapable of certain things, and draw/animate the character well, it'll look fine. This is about the competence level that seems to have been reached in 101 Dalmatians, and one can notice that with an adjustment to the eyes, the adjustment is intuitive.

This criteria I think should hold for just about any animal. I don't mean that people and animals should all or even primarily be animated this particular way, but I think it's important to have a high but achievable standard to work towards. This particular standard is set at the point where you'll understand the basics of what you're drawing, but aren't too caught up in the details to explore other alternatives. From this point you can exploit the fundamental anatomy to make your own characters and don't have to get bogged down with all the small flawed details of real people and creatures.

Outside of characters, there's a number of basic standards to meet, standards that cannot necessarily be met all at once. One is the realism of continuous change, rivers where the water's always flowing, and never exactly the way it was the moment before, trees blowing in continually varying wind. Cinematography imposes its own standards, one standard being shading in place of outlined drawings, as an outline cannot adequately represent all sorts of forms within the context of a single still. Fully immersive environmental sounds haven't been used enough. I've found very few animated shorts that are fully carried by sound effects.

One thing that bugs me about animation is that the tendency is to simplify reality. I think more people ought to strive for precisely the opposite. There are many ways to go simpler than real things. There's only one way I know of to outcomplicate reality, and that is by observing forms and overdoing them to find where reality falls short. The former seems to be an exercise in abstraction and oversimplification, the latter a manner of attaching your imagery to something real in order to ensure that it's more complex than the real thing. It has to be a recognizable shape or it won't work.

Animation's long had the infamy of adopting artistic philosophies in whatever order's easiest. But I don't mind this. The truth is that animation is evolving as a format at a rate no faster than any previous artform and that many have become fed up with the inability to make quick progress in the course of their lifetime. If animation creators wish to expand their creativity the way sculptors did in the time of the Greeks, they'll have to wait a long time as well. Hercules Visits Admetus had a ways to go, yet. The only motion shots were straight paths.

From there you could branch into motion shown from any number of paths. Then you could progress towards casual motion of different speeds and end up eliminating the feeling of still paintings altogether. But this still wouldn't take care of the still photography feeling, there'd have to be a progression towards more subtle motions within the frame first.

I'd intended to type in a few more things, but like usual this post isn't being saved by Blogger.

The Turn of the World of the Sweethearts of Peynet

2011-04-02T11:24:00.000-07:00

A youtube user from Japan, Pecohara, uploaded the English dub to this Italian/French co-production directed by Cesare Perfetto.

Once you've seen it, if you have an IMDb account, please rate it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0178501/

This is the English dubbed version. I recommend this film more for the creativity than for the actual plot line which is basically a tour through various places in time, more worthy of a television special than a film. However, you get an interesting tour through dictatorial Greece which isn't the sort of thing you'd see on Wacky Races.

Enjoy the film. It doesn't seem to have any release, even with Italian or French amazon.

realism 2

2011-03-31T17:48:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be about 3 different realism traditions in different countries, focusing yet again on superficial visual character realism, primarily among people. These are arbitrarily chosen examples and you might personally disagree with calling them realistic. I'm embedding links to a variety of clips from The U.S., Japan and Russia. There's important works of this sort from elsewhere as well but I've decided to cover these. They're mostly focused on people, the biggest point of disagreement among most animation fans and industry workers. I tried to focus on styles as they progress from one another or fail to progress. That's not to say that every film is an improvement from all those that came before, that's far from true, but that every film breaks new ground with a different version. Sometimes there's only a handful of characters which look more realistic, surrounded by more cartoony ones.

Some of them are good, some are downright awful, and some have good and poor aspects. Please keep in mind that the order is done to the nearest year and considering the volume of videos, I probably got at least one wrong. There's other examples worth exploring from elsewhere, and I don't claim to have all the good examples for each country represented here. There are a few examples I omitted which will raise controversy, particularly 80's and 90's Disney films which I find to be quite stylistically regressive, perhaps a shaky stance considering that I allowed some poor anime television series as examples as they led to better things later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8uF_Hsef2Q&feature=related

Russia

Japan

(Benkei and Ushikawa)

For the next post, I'll be back on topic. There will be clips from a film that you might have heard of before. This will be the last 8 page eyeball burning post for a while. Hopefully it gives you a little perspective that you may not have had before. It's certainly made me think.

Comparison between Ballparks of Cartooning

2011-03-24T23:01:00.000-07:00

My idea for comparing Russian and Japanese animation hasn't exactly worked out, and I've realized it's much too large of a subject for any adequate comparison to be made. I'm going to keep thinking on those themes and in this post, I'm going to compare two different ballparks of simpler styled cartoons, one general area that's more American, with notable sources elsewhere, in culture and one that's more Eastern European. The first is from around the middle of the 30's before it totally takes root and where the cartoony style hasn't quite been honed in and made more sophisticated. Both are very streamlined, and in some ways primitive and that's what makes them so interesting.

The uniquely Eastern European variants seem to emerge after functional cartoon designs were being thrown out right and left in the United States and it's incredibly amusing to see how these sorts of designs are both forward and backward looking. It's tough, as always, to generalize, as different features appear in different cartoons. I don't know how much the individual European styles were influenced by those from the US, especially as compared to other sources.

I'm going to show aesthetics which were prominent in hand drawn animation and their stylistic counterparts in stop motion.

First, I'll show the less familiar side of the equation. Russian animation's spins off of Western tradition, a trend which grows distinct around the early 60's. You'll notice that there's comparatively little emphasis on facial expression, aside from Maria Mirabella which was made in Romania in the 80's, which is common in Eastern European animation tradition though it's hardly an overwhelming trend. A complex mixture for sure. There's an emphasis on more solid color all the way throughout, which gives the characters a unified feeling in their environments. One thing you'll notice is the films take quite a number of queues from the more child-like sort of art styles you'd see in Constructivist Posters. Here are some examples, for those who aren't familiar with constructivism and those who are so familiar as to realize its variety:

I'm having trouble telling what's Constructivism influence and what's folk art influence as they both seem to converge like they were never apart to begin with. The examples are in order, Bolek and Lolek, Maria Mirabela, Great Troubles, Kolobok, and Dragonfly and Ant.

Here are some of the pear and sphere styles in the early 30's(late 30's for Pal), popular further West. There's generally an emphasis on more fully rendered backgrounds at this point in time, the early 30's, and the characters have yet to acquire more unique design traits. The best examples are probably in the Pluto cartoons, but I'll try to pick examples that won't bore you to death. Balloon Land, Cookie Carnival, King Neptune, Philips Broadcast, and The Grasshopper and the Ants. Balloon Land and The Grasshopper and the Ants are the more representative examples of the sort of style I'm trying to pin down. But I don't want to make things look simpler than they really were, so I'm showing numerous samples from around the same time period. There generally seems to be more influence from painters than other sorts of illustrators, but unlike in more Slavic areas, the influence seems to be more in backgrounds and is probably only superficially absorbed for the characters. It needs to be pointed out that earlier in the time, these earlier styles had their own versions in Europe, which you can tell by looking at Hans Fischerkoesen and Paul Grimault's work.

The relationship between characters and backgrounds is very different from later Slavic/Eastern European tendencies. Everything was drawn at first in cartoons like Felix the Cat. Then they seemed to start getting painted, maybe somewhere around the shift to color? When that happened, it started segregating background and foreground elements. I recall from a later Looney Tune with a dumb giant that the character was drawn both as a background and foreground element. The characters aren't given the subtler paint treatment outside of what I call the skin gap.

To this day, in the age of computer animation, it's still exists more or less and it's carried over into computer skin, a stock skin for every character. In one way or another it's still a predominant trend in hand drawn animation worldwide, technologically burnt in with computer animation and with the popularity of 3D printing in stop motion, it's spreading. It's the same old story of the two way gap between art and animation. You have to simplify your characters for animation or cut out their motion to focus on the art. With motion it leads to stupidly simple textures that make characters look alike and with art it's stock movements that belong in pre-film animation novelties like thaumatropes. That's a huge helping of generalization, however, and you can have the same character work better against one background than another, so I'll stop running my mouth.

http://www.silverscreenclassics.com/video_streaming.php?id=00910001

And a song for the present state of hand drawn animation, here's my poor, twisted rendition of Frosty the Snowman:

Slushy the snowman, is melting on the whole.
He's engaged in a fight and is held uptight by the same robotic bull.
Never mind that he took out the snow under other folks in town.
He made his own auto back scratcher now it's pushing him around.

The bull he can't do anything without Slushy around.
And it drains his drink to stay afloat, I think, with a big loud slurping sound.
That poor old cruel Slushy, woe, oh what is he to do?
"You've gobbled too much snow for yourself but I've grown attached to you."

Even good old puppet man has glazed himself with your digital coat.
And old puppet needs your replacement parts, so now who's left to rock the boat?
Disregard that better Painter Snowman who's somewhat attached to me.
I try to leave her in the dark so that no one else can see. (I have to cut out the part about the cutouts)

I'm a market killer always laughing , try to keep my figure round.
And if the robotic bull tries to kill them too, a childish whining sound.
And the mean live action tenant here we have but cannot trust.
He tries to get under our skins while helping make the progress we don't want to make but must.

Political thump thump
Political thump thump
You've sprouted a water jet man SANDDE you say?
And Rhonda and Traditional Flash have enough water splash to keep you on your way?

You've gathered some snow to help me get up and go? Well then,
I'm old and I'm ill, going over the hill, be back in form some day!
-end song

That's probably the lamest song ever written, but it takes some silly lyrics to convey the absurd present state of animation media. Sing it to the tune of Frosty and put in some conscious deviations and you'll have a rough idea of how it goes. If I feel like embarrassing myself, I'll sing it.

The pictures aren't mine and I got them from searching on the net. I'd better get this thing posted or I'll keep procrastinating. I feel like I could have done it a little bit better and probably stretched the balloon a little too much to make the comparison fit. While I didn't get to that post I'd wanted to on Russian and Japanese animation, you'll find a bit to compare between the two in the next post.

Review of Flatland and Archon Defender

2010-10-03T00:15:00.000-07:00

There's a large number of people praising independent animated features, but the 3D computer animated ones haven't gotten much attention. There's no excuse on Archcon Defender, which is available to watch for free right on YouTube.

A few notes before I begin. There's a new development of pixels which will likely undermine my idea of the computer being a color pinscreen.http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/06/smoothing-square-pixels/

There's a better article in Science News Magazine, but that's the best I could find on the web. It uses shapes other than squares to more effectively portray people's faces, and I suspect it could end up being used along with 2D computer drawing in some way. Time will tell.

Onto Flatland the film.

Flatland is based on a book by Edwin A. Abbot, directed and written by Ladd P. Ehlinger Jr. In the midst of conflict in Flatland, a land of flat shapes and lines, A Square is a defense lawyer caught up in an escalating conflict between shapes which do and don't have color, who gets whisked up into the Land of 3d by A Sphere, which is involved in a similar conflict to Flatland which lies below.

The film begins in Flatland, beginning with the politics of shapes. Males are two dimensional, and females are line segments in reference to the Victorian society satirized in the orginal book. The more angles a shape has, the better its social position, triangles being the social bottom, and circles being pinnacles of wisdom. A Sphere, who supports a family of shapes, is involved in a drama over certain shapes from a foreign country, Chromatists, having more color, and spreading their influence locally. Many of these shapes believe in a third dimension, but not A Square, until he's contacted by A Sphere who shows him Flatland from above and sends him into the Land of 3D. The Land of 3D is involved in a similar struggle, a 4th dimension substituted for a third, and there's the additional conflict over Flatland which the higher forms feel should be demolished.

Where the film gets interesting is when A Square dreams and visits a 1 dimensional lineland in a dream but none of the resident points on a line believes that he has two dimensions. Later in the film, as political controversy in Flatland picks up, he has an extradimensional encounter with A Sphere and gets to look on the controversy of Flatland from a three dimensional point of view as he's taken above Flatland. The transition from flatland to the land of 3D makes A Square a much more interesting character because he's no longer jammed into the same plane. The characters in The Land of 3D, as it turns out, are no wiser in their dimension than the Flatlanders are in theirs. There's disbelief over higher dimensions in each one of these arenas, and inherent disrespect for those who live in the lower ones.

The movie is filled with interesting contrasts. A Square, while in the land of 3D, is able to warn A Sphere of their foolishness against those who believe in a fourth dimension, but when he gets back to Flatland, he's unable to relate 3D to the native Flatlanders. There's a theme here of the inability of individuals to cope in their respective environments of differing complexities. You have to be better than the environment you live in. Then there's the ideological warnings that we shouldn't force our beliefs in others in a larger social context.

The film is a bit slow at the start, and picks up once the action gets going towards Flatland. The ending is a bit too incoherent, and detracts from the film a fair bit, but it's still quite good on the whole. The director's self conscious title cards in the Flatland sequences will likely turn off some viewers.

Archcon Defender is a very unusual independent film, directed by David T. Krupicz, an independent animator from Canada who also made some earlier lego films. Visually, it's quite simple, but manages to make beautiful use of its low budget. Dialogue-wise, the characters aren't very interesting, and the film is in the awkward position where the characterization depends on cliched dialogue to advance the characterization with the monotone computer(or computerish) voices. The amazing thing about the movie is how well it works even though the characters are so utterly lifeless. It keeps the movie somewhat interesting, but at the same time disallows it from being truly effective. Visually, it's slightly the same way. It benefits from it's computer toybox look, but its inexpressive characters don't get in the way as much as the voices.

It's a very cheesy fantasy plot, about a girl, Collete who's evacuated from a country due to her role in a supernatural war. She's taken to a country, Archcon, along with others like her, to be safe from the attacks from the kingdom of Echelon. She has magical powers and there's a magical shard, which she has magical powers from, which she learns during spiritual sessions with a priest. Corny stock material, but the director has a knack for this sort of thing that few others do. And it makes up for it by showing both sides of the story, characters on both sides of the war. The film blends 3D and 2D well, and it has a surprisingly successful low budget aesthetic. Unfortunately though, it's difficult to watch because you have to supply the character's motivations in your head as the voices of the characters don't quite work. The action scenes are very good, and the effects keep them from being monotonous.

It's the atmosphere which makes this movie. Krupicz has an uncanny ability to make cheap movies with atmosphere that higher budget films can't manage. And as cheesy as the plot is, it's unfortunately more complex than just about any similar plot in mainstream computer animation. The film is unified, largely it seems, due to Krupicz's work in every department, but ultimately it falls apart near the end because the plot just isn't interesting enough to get past the inexpressive characters.

I recommend Flatland the Film openly. Archcon Defender is free, so if you want to check it out, realizing it's an acquired taste, go ahead. I'd seen these films too long before writing these reviews, so I had to refresh a bit. A bit discombobulated, which I'll have to work on.

The next post will be about similarities between Russian and Japanese animation.

Stop Motion

2010-09-14T21:59:00.000-07:00

Stop motion is an area in animation which doesn't get criticized often enough for its biggest flaws. It's clear that there's very little thematic variety when productions get very large, to the point of a feature film. Odds are that a film will be: A, a heartwarming tale of old fashioned moral values with great respect to __ tradition, B, a wondrous out of this world fantasy journey which explores the wondrous nature of human life, C, a humorous look at this clearly screwed up world which dares to show it for what it really is, D A horrifying, likely surreal tale of the place of humankind in a screwed up world that nobody can make sense of.

But wait. You're a hip, original creator whose film doesn't fall under one of those categories. That's because you're E, a mixed blend of many attributes of all four.

So how many stop motion feature films are there that manage to duck these ugly, even silly stereotypes? So far, I've only found 2, Piotr Kamler's Chronopolis, and Kawamoto's Book of the Dead.

And goodness, has anybody else noticed how much of an aversion there is towards the area of serious science fiction? Stop motion seems to have a sort of odd fantasy version of the subject, whether it's the mice in Clangers who are visited by an astronaut or Wallace and Gromit going to the moon. They seem to enjoy some of the mechanical aspects alright, like fancy machines, but they have a strange hesitance to commit to it wholly.

I've seen one short film which I recall had an anthropmorphic alligator or crocodile in a spaceship. Clangers, the British television series has mice on a strange planet but avoids the topic for down home fantasy. Wallace and Gromit's first short has them going all the way to the moon, but ultimately it uses science fiction elements in more of a children's book sort of way. Then there's Trnka's short film Cybernetic Grandma. The brown faced inexpressive doll characters and the slow pace kept me from finishing it. Edison and Leo goes surprisingly far with a real inventor, but again, from what clips I've seen, stops short of real science fiction. It harks back to pre-50's science fiction/horror and monster movies the most from what I've seen.

So why has this subject matter so largely been avoided? You know the annoying tendency of animation filmmakers to retreat towards their roots and science fiction didn't gain popularity until the 50's, but that doesn't explain it entirely. Burton and Selick, big names from the U.S. are exploiting German expressionism for all it's worth. The medium has long drawn its roots from it's relationship with live action special effects, and there's no recent sci fi live action films I know of offhand which have used much in the way of stop motion effects. Maybe the efforts in that direction have failed.

So what is it that skews stop animators towards farmhouse villages, forests, old monster movies, child's toys incarnate, surreal experimental works, and fairy tale fantasies? Looking at the sort of themes they seem to skew towards, I get the impression that the puppets are playing with the animators. I sincerely hope that stop motion animators manage to expand on their set of typical themes and start letting their themes dictate what stop motion allows rather than the other way around. I'm aware of stop motion's spatial, material and economic limitations, but I have issues with it that go further.

I've realized that the most interesting stop motion isn't the most popular one of puppets, or even claymation, but replacement figurines. I've become obsessed with many of George Pal's Puppetoons, particularly his Philips Showcase. I wish that this sort of technique were applied to the environment surrounding the character and taken to extremes, with characters moving in unison with proportion changing landscapes. The technique is often compared to hand drawn animation, but I'm not sure how far this comparison should be taken. Sure, the models are renewed frame by frame, but a still figurine gives a very different, and it seems, much stronger impression than a still drawing. There are moments when Pal lets the puppets lapse into still modes and curved heads, but this really counters much of the momentum of the technique. That seems to be the biggest flaw of the medium, compared to puppet animation, figurines seem to fare worse while not in motion.

The comparison starts falling apart when you think of the possibilities of limited animation with drawings to limited animation with replacement puppets. You can look at puppets from different points of view, which means that you can look at different aspects of the puppet when it's not moving, unlike a still drawing(exception made for 3D computer drawings made with SANDDE). So in this sense, replacement figure animation is not so much a 3D equivalent of hand drawn animation as much of a form which becomes analogous to it if the filmmaker uses it similarly, and full animation essentially makes this more difficult. But even with full animation, you can repeat actions, showing them from different angles. There's an argument to be made for transparent puppets too, since you can see more of the puppet.

Sometimes I look at certain forms of animation with glaringly limited capabilities and think about how a filmmaker manages to create a beautiful work within their limitations. I swear that animators are like dancers sometimes, knowing how to make an interesting story in a limited setting. It's the cutout medium where this know how seems to be most useful. Anybody who can make a dynamic character with a couple pieces of paper moved on a screen and time shots so that the blatant faults of the medium don't handicap the events on screen deserves some major respect. Especially if there's very little in the way of replacement cutouts, using mostly hinged puppets.

One thing that I think that would help stop motion animators is to stop thinking in terms of reality as captured by the camera and start thinking in reality created using the superficial look of real objects arranged specifically for the camera. Stop motion animators aren't fools, and they've heard of forced perspective, but it seems to me that there needs to be a shift in perspective here. What if you made a house in stop motion that was deliberately covered in different materials at different points in time in order to express how it looks at the particular moment? So why not start rocking the boat? For example, a dark room as seen from an outside window is represented by a black piece of cutout paper. Then when you change the view, you see something inside the piece of cutout black paper which represents the darkness of the room to see an object that's actually inside the room. Keep playing back and forth between visual tricks and you make the viewer indifferent to what's real and what's not.

But I've done too much complaining. I haven't talked about some of my favorite experiments in stop motion. Too many people seem to take stop motion at face value. Here are some stop motion films which consider it more of an area of animation than a medium. It's interesting how stop motion comes off as a medium in its own right to some people and a general area to others. With claymation, there's the people who use it more transparently and those who revel in it like Misseri Studio often does, particularly in Red and Blue. Same with the whole idea of object animation. In hand drawn animation, there's the enormous divide between rubber hose and artistic characters and characters like Snow White. In computer animation, it's largely between those who embrace the computer aesthetic and those who treat it as though it were transparent. There's no shortage of media for stop motion at the moment, but the form doesn't have very many interesting complex characters who are as expressive as those in hand drawn animation. I don't think I've ever seen one genuinely attractive female character in stop motion for instance.

To finish off the post, here are three stop motion animated films which are more material oriented. One's a man made out of wire, the other two paper cutouts, one origami the other not. Back on topic in the next post, with two reviews of independent computer animated features and more thoughts about the area of computer animation in general.

http://mults.spb.ru/mults/?id=2934

http://mults.spb.ru/mults/?id=961

Films Missing from the List

2010-07-16T00:31:00.000-07:00

So what's missing from the list of most bizarre animated films?

There are plenty of obmissions that would have made it, some because I couldn't change the list, and others because I'll likely never be able to see them in their entirety.

There were a few Ralph Bakshi films that would probably have made it if I'd been able to see them sooner. Picha would certainly have gotten higher. Fimfarum 2 would have been added. I'd definitely be obliged to add both of the Genius Party films. Shooting near the top of the list would be Harry Smith's Heaven and Earth Magic. I'd probably have a place for Ladd Ehlinger's Flatland the Film. Klyuch, or the Key, is certainly bizarre enough to make the list. 1001 Nights, the film from Mushi Pro, would be on here as well. The Lost Letter would manage to squeak out a spot on the list.

A couple of films I omitted for being bizarre but not particularly good: Tamala 2010, We Are the Strange, Blood Tea and Red String, Book of the Dead

I'd been too hesitant to arrange for a copy of Heroic Times, so I might never get to see that film in its entirety. Kovasznai's Foam Bath will probably never be well known. Ra Path of the Sun God might make the list if I ever manage to track it down. Ubu and the Great Gidouille has a video copy floating around somewhere but I'll likely never see it, and Adam 2 is most likely lost. Larry Jordan's Sophie's Choice was pretty monotonous to me, and its cutout approach was too similar to Smith's for me to fully appreciate it. I suspect there's a few too many good apples from the same tree in that area of experimental and photo cutout animation. Go There, Don't know Where would get pretty high on the list I'd suspect, but I'm judging from still images. Jankovics might make it another time with Song of the Miraculous Hind.

I discovered Autumn while looking over Wikipedia. It might make the list, but it certainly depends heavily on dialogue, so I couldn't have scored it..

Here's one film with a really insane cult following. That's a little too crazy for me.

The Devil and Kaca lacks subtitles, but the plot seems pretty easy to follow in general. I'd say it has enough bizarre character to make the list.

Here's trailers to the Genius Party films, which are both for sale in Australia.

I won't forget Aachi and Ssipak which Brenan reminded me of in the previous topic.

I hadn't seen Fritz the Cat at the time and it is a criminal omission being such a prominent film.

So what other sorts of lists could be or have been made in a similar vein? Commercials? Short films? Music videos? Television series? Live action/animation combinations? A television series list would be difficult to create, but correspondingly very useful. A list of short films would be taxingly difficult, but very rewarding as it would certainly feature some strange work. I like a number of animated music videos, but they can quickly become too tacky and they're so dynamic that they become grating to watch after a while. And besides, making a bizarre music video is frankly a standard choice which takes away from much of the appeal.

Next time I might try out something wildly different and engage in a fantasy exercise. What animation mediums that you don't suspect exist would you like to see?

Here's what I'll do for this post. I'll leave it open for updates below for films you think ought to be mentioned and anything which I forgot.

And here are some films mentioned by Elchinodepelocrespo.

Resan Till Melonia

Strit og Stumme

Bennys badekar, which I'd mentioned previously but neglected to bring up here:

Realism in Animation

2010-07-11T01:50:00.000-07:00

This post is slanted towards realistic character animation. Realism in animation is incredibly convoluted, but the general trend as well as I've been able to figure it out, seems to be this: In order for your character to be believable once it delves heavily into precise realistic detail, you have to have to start dialing back the realism in the way the character moves. If the character is less heavily rendered though, like in hand painted forms of animation realism, you can actually get away with a more realistic design approach, but have to keep the character's actions theatrical to adjust to the limitations. These distinctions alone wouldn't mean much, but I had to reconcile yet a third, more thematic, storytelling and character related approach. Both of these approaches mean that in order to have a character that looks most realistic, you're best dialing further back from visual realism in order to have characters that behave realistically in a more human sense.

For animation realism, I'd like to distinguish between full visual realism, strict realism, and what I consider pushed realism. Full visual realism is the complete commitment to portraying life as accurately as possible, a feat which has not advanced very far yet, as Beowulf and Final Fantasy show. Strict animation realism is a feat which is not so much suited for hand drawn animation as hand painted animation, I'd say. It's just about portraying what are generally realistic forms and realistic movement, though with the limitations of confining technique that keep the possibility of full on realistic detail and nuance remote. Pushed realism is more about visual styles which, while possessing a very high amount of realistic observation, aren't so much concerned with depicting real characters, but more or less, heavily stylized characters with a bent towards realism in the way they behave.

It's tough to be too specific on what is the most detailed work of art or what detail means, but I'd say that there's a general trend towards detailed works demanding a certain amount of realism simply by the observation required. In 2D forms of animation, there seems to be a general dichotomy in animation, though rarely approached too straightforwardly, between emphasizing drawing with little movement and vice versa. Sure, there's plenty of people using limited animation with very simple visuals, UPA and Zagreb for example, but I think that this is not too effective in the long term because works simply start to look alike. This is only realism of course, in a superficial visual way, but the more details you add, the more you end up looking like one realistic thing or another. But why do they do this? Useful detail. Each approach gives you enough useful detail to plant a story or general visual impression on the viewer while leaving them in the abstract in another. But what if you have both heavily rendered artwork and 24 fps motion?

It's by far the most detailed approach, but it uses up it's creative gases pretty quickly. What you start ending up with is a lot of works which are gorgeously detailed but look very similar because you're beginning to run out of the artistic choices that are essentially premade. It's like a one player card game you start playing by drawing a 45 card hand from a 52 card deck. There's not much variety to be had if everybody starts playing this card game.

Here are what I consider to be three of the best examples of strict animation realism. There's a clip from Heroic Times, Hercules Visits Admetus, and The Old Man and the Sea.

Heroic Times has some pretty exaggerated motions at times, though due to the technique, it's often hard to tell for subtle movements. Some of these jousts are not just unlikely, but the way the riders get thrown off is clearly exaggerated. The Knight's facial expression is certainly a bit exaggerated before he puts on his helmet. Some moments seem less exaggerated in animation than in lighting, like the loving embrace towards the end of the clip.

Anatoliy Petrov's Hercules visiting Admetus is an exercise in the most full blown realistic visuals I've seen in animation. The short uses Petrov's technique of photographica, which involves a layer for lighting effects superimposed over cel images for a greater emphasis on light and shade on characters than if there were only one layer. There are quite a number of glaring flaws, and I think that the film frankly works better when the viewer isn't given the opportunity to see the visuals work alone. That's not to say that I think that they're irredeemably bad, but that I think that there are some glaring flaws. There's some awkward repeated motions, shots where characters come off as haloed rubber mannequins, and frankly blatant shortcomings in character movement which slant toward flat planes. There are, like in many other films which are heavy on realism, everything from dark shots of characters to the trademarked eyeballs on static heads, and hair blowing on static heads, tricks you'll see plenty of in anime. But when you see all the personality which the characters convey when animated properly, the technique is revealed to be as legitimate as any other. The backgrounds are more oriented towards visual richness than complete realism, and the characters are certainly stylized by the way they're lit. There are some especially mythological characters, and some of them are a bit exaggerated, but for the most part, they're rather grounded.

Alexander Petrov's The Old Man and the Sea, is a different form of painted animation, paint on glass. This film isn't as faithful an exercise in straight realism as the other two are, a much more impressionistic approach. There are some points where Petrov overused his reference footage, for the sea especially, and the boat's movement, but regardless of these concessions, it's a stunning work of art. The characters are of course, distant, due to Petrov's rendering, but they are intriguing in silhouette and their hinted personalities work well with the sea setting. This film seems to be much more true to real human motion than Heroic Times, but less so than Hercules, simply because it's not as realistically rendered.

These don't show what I'd consider strict realism perfectly, but artists of course don't make their work for poor amateur theorists like me.

Now onto the twelve principles. Some of the classical principles of hand drawn animation aren't as cut and dry as they seem.

A majority of the principles, like arcs and overlapping action are sound, but there's a few that demand further examination. Always be wary of the example that proves the principle and ask why the principle needs to be there at all.

Here are the ones I'm skeptical of:

1. Squash and stretch

Squashing and stretching is a perfectly valid principle, but it's also a fairly subjective observation. You could make up a principle and call it 'warping and folding'. Squash and stretch is supposed to be valuable for allowing fluid motion, but the observation of 'warping and folding' can allow for fluid motion as well. Folding doesn't just have to apply to pieces of paper, as you fold a sleeping mattress but think of that more as a three dimensional form. When you fold a sleeping mattress, you inevitably squash and stretch the material. When an object's shape is warped, you can say that part of it gets squashed or stretched, but that's not the emphasis.

2. Exaggeration. So since you can't capture life perfectly in animation, you're obliged to consider something animated to exaggerative by comparison? Just because an animation comes off as exaggerated compared directly to real life doesn't mean it intends to be exaggerative on its own terms. And the terms 'caricature' and 'comedic' seem to have an obscure relationship that isn't fully described.

The fact of the matter is that most cinema can be seen as exaggerated from one angle or another. Even many films which are labeled as serious are often light headed or have subtle hints of comedy to lighten the mood. I can't claim that I know exactly what makes a film serious or not, but many more seriously intended animated films look ridiculous when compared to one another because they vary such widely in their content. Now here's where I'm going to talk about serious animation, because this is a subject that I've rarely seen brought up at face.

But I still haven't addressed the major point for serious and more particularly realistic animation. You can't make an animated character that emotes as effectively as their live action counterpart. No you can't, in terms of making a character with the same amount of nuanced expression, but this point can be referred to an interview with Satoshi Kon. He talks about how there's less detail in each frame, and how this guides your eye quicker, allowing you to cut faster. So by this interpretation, if you had a scene in animation compared to one in live action, you'd simply go through the scene quicker because you understand it faster visually. Essentially, you show somebody less so that they see more. This is the justification for making realistic animation of a wide variety of sorts, some more in visuals, others more in theme, like Everybody Rides the carousel.

But there's other ways that animators have come up with more serious animation. One way is simply to cut down on character expression, emphasizing the scene more than the character. This might be considered by those who subscribe the idea of caricature as a sort of 'under caricature' depending on how its done, whether it's getting rid of character's faces or deliberately under-emphasizing their emotions. After all, exaggeration goes both ways. This is a point that doesn't seem quite clear, whether it's abstraction or caricature when you start deliberately diminishing a character's presence by doing things like getting rid of prominent facial features. I'd say that this is an area that's up for contention. Other not necessarily mutually exclusive ways seem to be going for a more theatrical approach to character acting or aiming for more symbolic expressive characters. Sometimes the solution seems to be to take what seem to be more cartoony designs and just avoid funny expressions, taking advantage of their especially direct emotional appeal.

I think that the works above have shown that you can use painting to suggest forms clearly enough to bring out what resembles more of a theatrical real person than a theatrical character exaggerated from a real person.

3. Then there's the means of animating, the principles of straight ahead and pose to pose. Straight ahead I'd say is a pretty misleading term, since you can animate something from backwards to forwards or forwards to backwards. Straight behind animation is conspicuously ignored in most mentions of the principle, however, with the wording towards 'first' drawing in the scene. Why not start with the last drawing and work your way backwards to the first drawing? Maybe it's supposed to go without saying, but does it? I can deduce logically that in cutout animation, this order could be pretty important. You're animating with paper that has little detail, and you want to show a simple ball rolling forwards towards the 'camera' in a shot. If you animate straight ahead, it takes more paper to animate that action than it does if you animate it straight behind, because if you're animating straight behind, you can cut smaller balls out of the larger ball. These principles are of course, related to hand drawn animation primarily, but I still think that they need to be examined and considered.

I've brought up all my concerns with the 12 basic principles of animation because they're surely going to come up in the likely event that somebody should argue this post with a different point of view on realistic animation.

Since I've explained that animation realism is not cut and dry and cannot be construed directly, and I've clarified that it's a continuum of approaches I'm going to go a bit deeper into how it can be expressive in the animation medium. Keep in mind that this subject leans towards visual realism, not thematic realism.

Those stricter realistic animation films I showed, while artistically brilliant, don't make as full use of the more superficial aspects of visual realism as some more stylized films. One short film I want to use as example is a Soviet propaganda film, Shareholders.

The film's major characters lean towards realism, but are clearly caricatured. They exist in a stylized satirical USA. More minor characters have various levels of abstraction and the short gleefully exploits the skewed widescreen angles and limited color schemes. The characters exploit animation with their blatantly exaggerated facial features and gestures. Just look at some of character's eyes and the shape of Pearson's snout. The contrast between the more realistically rendered characters and the often simple and/or abstract backgrounds gives the short some wondrous beauty. Background characters are often flattened and silhouetted to stand out from the major characters. The characters may have form that's heavy based in realism, but they're still quite flatly colored.

There's all sorts of exaggerations here, characters jumping unrealistically high, running through cityscapes that change shape, and a skeleton with exaggerated eye cavities to emote like a human being.

I hope that by showing you this short, you see some of the things you can do with more superficially realistic animation.

You can still exaggerate the way people move, even if they look realistic. Just look at the man's jump near the end of the auto race. You could probably pull off an exaggerated jump even with a more realistic looking character. There's not so much to do with squash and stretch or other distortions, but there's still quite a lot to do with motion blur. Don't forget about growing and shrinking either.

I'll just list things that can be captured better in realistic animation than live action? For this argument, I won't be very lenient for effects. If it takes animation to do that one thing, no point in turning a fox into a fur coat.

1. Aging. You can have the character look right without being forced to one person for the part. Not everybody has the patience of Richard Linklater to shoot a film over 12 years and pray that none of his actors die.

2. Serendipity. You learn so much by trying to emulate life that you wouldn't know by just filming it, and get to use it to your advantage.

3. Selection. In some ways you can just be more selective with what you portray in animation. In the 2d forms of animation, you often have to sacrifice camera angles, but you get to put everything in the film your self. Some things you just aren't likely to pull off in live action regardless of the number of takes.

4. Don't forget about realism beyond the limitations of human sense. There's frequencies beyond our hearing, electromagnetic radiation beyond visible light, slow and fast speeds, and sizes below the human threshold of sight. A realistic portrayal here might be more valuable as these are events that are not ordinarily experienced. Call it the National Geographic effect, I guess. In a way, it's the same reason we read that sort of magazine or watch nature documentaries.

5. First person perspective. There are many things to do with first person perspective in various sorts of animation which can't be done in live action. Just look at the short film The Fly for example.

There's plenty more, but that's all I care to type right now.

Animation realism

Here's the best way I can think of to describe how stricter forms of realistic animation uses the medium. Here's what one person using this technique might say if they dared: "I can't capture real life perfectly in animation, but I can give it a different spin of imperfection at any point in time, and I can use such imperfections to justify the use of the medium in spite of the fact that it is negligible to the realism of my portrayal. I trust that the people in the audience will be able to appreciate this peculiar distinction better than animators who are, in this particular situation, bored geologists who have a predisposition to feel every bump on a rocky road."

I need to bring up storytelling here, simply because at higher levels of visual animation realism, it's a loaded design choice. You have to have a good reason to use it, especially when your characters reach the point of strict animation realism. You don't have the freedom of exaggeration that is available when you make something more abstract, which effectively weeds out most gags. It makes more sense at this point to create a work that exploits the technique for a narrative that demands the realistic look, create a more experimental work, or combine both approaches. You don't get the meat and cheese of animation, but you get the two slices of bread on the other end of the sandwich.

It goes without saying that these characters of stricter animation realism are not as essential for the media as others. Animation could live without the character Admetus but suffer with the loss of characters like Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. On the other hand though, some of the most easy to animate characters are also by extension, the easiest ones to copy in terms of basic form, which, let's face it, can degrade their individual value in the long run while it strengthens their importance. The fact is that strict realistic animated characters are not and never will be as well suited for animation as more abstracted and/or exaggerated ones. That, however, does not degrade the artistic value of the few done well, because they cannot be held accountable for these traits when the number of works remains small as they do not exhaust their potential right away.

Now I'm going to address something you've certainly been waiting to hear about. You've certainly been told that in order for animation to function effectively, motions have to be accented. Shouldn't strict realistic animation be unjustifiable as a result? Well, my response is this. Paint on film animation allows for more leniency than hand drawn animation in this regard, and where hand drawn animation is designed to be easy to understand visually, hand painted animation is better at hinting at what you see and does not require the animator to outline the forms clearly. With its extra steps towards capturing a person's look without bolding out the detail, it allows just enough freedom to portray a character which looks like somebody who's overacting in the midst of fancy cinematography.

But what about all the arguments towards simplicity in animation? Here's a few paraphrased, hopefully correctly, which I've seen people make.

1It's harder to hide your poor draftsmanship in the high level of detail that realism provides and reducing your artwork to it's simplest form demonstrates your understanding of art principles and the essence of what you've portrayed.

A valid point. It certainly is difficult to hide poor decisions made in a simple artwork because they're not masked by the complexity of the work. However, the simplicity in reducing a work to such simple form also gives the artist the opportunity to weed out details that they're not so good at portraying and focus on those which they are, which is not so feasible in a more realistic work. This point seems to come out stronger on non-human characters which members of the audience may not be entirely familiar with. Sure, if you deliberately clutter a drawing or an animation shot with details, it's possible to obscure the work's flaws. If you deliberately go from overloaded quick shot to overloaded quick shot in an animated film, it's possible to hide it's lack of quality. Heinz Edelmann admitted in an interview to overloading Yellow Submarine with if my memory serves correct, 20-30% extra detail because he knew the story would not stand up to scrutiny. Certainly plenty of realistic artists are guilty of hiding their errors and shortcomings in a forest of bombastic detail, but I think that while details don't convey as much in a realistic work due to often having so much, an artist can still show their effectiveness of craft in repetition of lines, contrast, and use of color.

2. Simpler work reads quicker and thus makes a better, more immediate visual impression. Maybe so, but this comparative inefficiency is dealt with fairly naturally. Realistic characters are less easy to exaggerate, and it's less appealing to do so, which in effect means there's more time to study them in their greater complexity due to the greater consistency in their appearance. Silhouettes can read well enough with realistic characters for an observer to tell the difference between a good and a bad pose, so I say it's simply good enough. On the other side of the equation though, what is the character good for after they catch your attention? Simply rendered images may be more iconic, but I'd say that there's another side to this, that simple images can be distinct but not distinguished. Plenty of type fonts can be bold but scarcely distinct from one another when compared and so can an overwhelming number of simple cartoon characters. Plenty of cartoon characters from Disney and Warner Brothers from the 30's and early 40's manage to come across as united in their simplicity of form in spite of being very different characters.

In having to rewrite this post as Blogger's save function fails, the internet malfunctions, and accidental erasures stemming from the first, I've been able to rethink this post half a dozen times. I apologize for the blatant shortcomings in this post, because it's been a real nightmare.

Now I'm going to explain how I feel about full visual realism in animation. First, how should it be done? The obvious answer, at least at the moment, is that it would be done with computer animation. Motion capture I think is good for little more than reference and maybe not even that. I think that characters ought to be completely virtually developed, from every aspect of the way they look to the artificially produced sound of their voice. I think that the technique if successfully pulled off, would be a completely different form of animation than we think of it right now. It would be best for more of a treacherous realism, so to speak, where everything would look real, but in a way that's entirely unusual and unfamiliar to us. There would be bands playing unusual instruments, unfamiliar vehicles, fictional ethnicities of people, nonexistent breeds of dogs, stop lights with different colors, and best of all, characters with more legitimate conflicts than those that are perceived in real life.

What would you think of you saw an animated film that seemed completely realistic in every last visual detail where you saw characters emerge from inside of wombs, age and die realistically, and stop at purple-orange-blue traffic lights? With characters that don't look quite look like anybody you've seen before and never appear again anywhere else, and everything you're familiar with appearing in an unusual form? I think that full visual realism, while limited by the aesthetic standards of animation, would counter its limitations by the ways it takes your everyday familiarity and twists it to unparalleled advantage in a way that visually simpler art does not attempt.

This would be an outrageously difficult feat to achieve, but if it worked, would it really degrade animation? I don't think it would be much more valuable than an intriguing antithesis to what's done in most of animation. Would it really make most animation less entertaining by comparison? I personally don't see it adding up to anything more than a black sheep compared to the rest of what's done in the medium. Much of the hype and resultant worry about motion capture I think has steered people off course to how virtual realism would happen. Motion capture only captures the data of one person, so how's it supposed to make much progress in the long run? It seems to me that we've mistaken the superficial realism from motion capture as the way full visual realism (regardless of animation)would be achieved. It seems to me though, that artificial evolution in virtual environments presents a far greater long term possibility of achieving the higher levels of faux realism. How else but by artificial generation can somebody dream of mimicking life to the fullest degree? Link to example In the long run, this seems like it would provide more possibilities for figuring out how to simulate virtual environments which look real because the knowledge gained is additive.

If you wanted to go underwater, it would be easiest to start with a suit and air hose, but eventually if you want to go deeper, you'll need a submarine. I suspect it's the same way with animation realism. Sooner or later, the hallmark of artificial realism means departing from real people into creating fictional computer generated people, from the way they look from the way that they talk. At that point, motion capture would be worthless because imitating real life does not make you better suited towards entirely inventing it from scratch.

Animation realism is extremely convoluted. When it looks almost completely photorealistic, rendering and all, you have to use motion accents. When it's in the general direction of photorealism and hinted at, you do not necessarily need motion accents. Since it's so difficult to make a character at extremely high levels of realism, less realistic characters can actually behave more realistically because the audience accepts them more easily.

So that's 3 different sorts of realism embodied by very different depictions. It's no wonder that people are confused. If you look realistic, you can't move completely realistically, if you move realistically, you can't be completely realistically rendered, and if you behave realistically then you have to take a few steps back from realism altogether. What a conundrum. Throw on the laziness of filmmakers cheating the technique, the lack of proper plots for much of it, experimental filmmakers who blow boundaries, conflicting sorts of animation realism, and lack of recognition for the best works, and you've got utter madness.

So, wrapping this up as best I can. There's plenty else to say. Russian animation has plenty of examples of poor strict animation realism and Americans scarcely have done it right. The Japanese seem to have avoided strict realistic character animation in 2D, but they've done some brilliant work in other areas. Just look at some of the scenes in Wings of Honneamise and Akira. My ideas on realism in computer animation stem largely from the post of Ward Jenkins where he shows how to handle the characters from Polar Express better with a few tweaks in Photoshop. I've got too many things to say and too little time.

I suspect I'll be making adjustments soon, but here's what I have to say for now. Onto a less intense subject.

edit-confused abstraction with under caricature, a stupid mistake

50 Most Intriguingly Bizarre Animated Films I've Seen

2010-05-25T11:10:00.000-07:00

Now it's time to belatedly publish that list. I'd wanted to have a point system, but the points were in a notebook that was thrown away, so I can't remember all the points or how I'd scored everything. I remember that the scale was out of 40 points and that each film had to get at least 25 to qualify. The highest, The Cosmic Eye, got 38.

The general rules were:

1. Must be 45 minutes long

2. Must not be derivative of a television series

3. Must not tread too far on rotoscoping/live action

4. If it's just deliberately being strange for its own sake with no good reason, it didn't make the list.

The film must be 45 minutes long, meaning 45 minutes completed. One film on this list stretches the rule. Waltz with Bashir could be argued to stretch the rules on rotoscoping. I've discovered many films after the point system got screwed up, and will mention many of them at some point in the future. Many of the film's orders I'd reconsider, and the list is quite short on stop motion entries which would be fixed if I still had the numbers. Be forewarned that a very large number of these films are not suitable for children, and that this list was not made with druggies in mind. A couple films which you might like were originally on the end of the list but got knocked off when more suitable entries appeared. Enjoy the list, however patchy it is right now. Somebody will surely make a better one at some point in the future.

50. Little Nemo's Adventures in Slumberland

49. Puss 'n Boots

48. Sea Prince and the Fire Child

47. My Neighbors the Yamadas

46. Aladdin

45. Heavy Metal

44. Twice upon a Time

43. Yobi the Five Tailed Fox

42. Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon

41. Waltz with Bashir

40. The Triplets of Belleville

39. Wizards

38. The Tune

37. Alice in Wonderland

36. Everybody Rides the Carousel

35. Akira

34. Neo Tokyo

33. Hair High

32. Gwen the Book of Sand

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jknRMyZPu0Q

31. Sita Sings the Blues

30. Fantasia

29. Johnny Corncob

28. A Soldier's Tale

27. Tekkon Kinreet

26. I Married a Strange Person

25. Robot Carnival

24. Uproar in Heaven

23. Night on the Galactic Railroad

22. Krysar

21. Hugo the Hippo

20. The District!

19. The Adventures of Mark Twain

18. Fantastic Planet

17. Nezha Conquers the Dragon King

16. Midori

No Footage Available

15. Of Stars and Men

No Footage Available

14. The Adventures of Prince Achmed

13. Angel's Egg

12. Dead Leaves

11. Time Masters

10. Yellow Submarine

9. The Thief and the Cobbler (recobbled)

8 Paprika

7. Beyond the Mind's Eye

6. Mind Game

5. Belladonna of Sadness

4. Son of the White Mare

3. The Cat who Walked by Herself

2. Chronopolis

1. The Cosmic Eye

No Footage Available

I'll see what I can find for these films, but for now I have to post this list because it's been so long. The next post will be about realistic character animation, and to a lesser extent, serious animation if anybody happens to stumble by this blog. I need to write a bit more about each one at some point, so I'll either edit this post or I'll describe them more in future posts.

edit-clip now available for Everybody Rides the Carousel

Know the store. Know about more than the store.

2010-03-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

I've mentioned the names of many films on here, but I've neglected one crucial thing, how to find them and how to understand the whole of animation history. It seems that most people are either uninterested or incapable of looking at animation from the scope of all its history, and I'm addressing this urgent problem right here now. It's time to push back against these neverending cults of personality.

1. Anticipate and understand that there's more than just what you see in front of you. There's always good films which you haven't seen, even if nobody you know is aware of them. Avoid exaggerative use of the word 'everything'.

2. If you want to discover more films, features especially, start with a timeline of the history of animation and a world political map and work your way down. Break out from what's presented in front of you and heavily advertised. Just start by going over to Wikipedia, and looking at their list of feature length films which you can reach by following this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animated_feature-length_films

3. Don't just wait for a copy of the film to be given a legitimate release, because odds are it won't happen. Fans come before distributors if the distributors come at all.

4. Do not under any circumstances declare one medium to be the only legitimate form of animation nor any philosophy to be the whole of all worthwhile animation. Do not use the term 'traditional animation' except to apply to animated work which was mostly or entirely produced outside of a computer. Understand that even if animation is traditional, that a computer or computer animation may likely have contributed to its existence in some other way.

5. Be the person with the answers even when they aren't pleasant, and give your best advice to where the answers may be found if you do not have them.

6. When you're introducing the person to the films on Wikipedia, expect indifference and plan accordingly. Mention the article, and then give them a second source, a place where they can watch a large number of films that they never heard of for free.

Phrase it cleverly like this, with the important parts first, :

Did you know that all you have to do is think in terms of the timeline of animation's history and the countries that have been around since? You can look up nearly any film on Wikipedia and find something good to watch elsewhere on the internet. Here's a website with some free movies from ___ to get you started.

If somebody says just something simple like "Thanks!" as so often happens, they reaffirm the first two statements while they're almost certainly, truly interested in the third. Then they've got the first two statements sealed with the third in their head, and somebody might confuse their decision and look for their self, and they can always come back to it later if they remember.

7. Please stop assuming that mentioning a few token names like Sylvain Chomet and Yuri Norstein makes you literate about worldwide animation. It does not.

And finally, here's the basic info, the maps with the timeline and websites to find all the films.

All the Maps you Need

Sources:

Most convenient, films that are mostly available http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_animated_feature-length_films

Most Adequate, but too dry for newbies http://www.animated-divots.net/chrnearl.html

European Animation http://www.animationeurope.com/

Look a bit further on the Animated Divots site, and you'll find even further information, like sites where you can buy more films and all sorts of things. The European animation site will take you to further information on new releases.

The rest you can find on video sites, web stores, and such, which you'll likely arrive at through a simple web search. Here's search engines for nearly every country. This should help get you started if you're not familiar, and I hope you benefit from having all these things in one place. At some point in the future I hope to have a post card or something to pass around, just to disseminate the information quicker.

Actual Post Date April 13, 2010

Swimsuits

2010-03-10T20:42:00.000-08:00

If you look at the label for this post, you might accuse me of being postmodern, but that's not what I'm going to write about. I'm going to write about a very disturbing truth of our society that's proven by the evolution of women's swimwear. I'll write about women's swimwear since I'm not interested in talking too much about mankinis.

At the turn of the 20th century, women wore long swimwear and it was the social norm. If you'd asked a person then they would have told you that wearing anything less long was indecent. Nudity is a bit of an anomaly here, since inconvenient swimwear surely convinced more people to swim nude, but people swimming nude probably didn't have much of an impact on the course of swimwear. As for things like swimwear that allows for partial or whole nudity, those are anomalies that are made to drive overanalyzers like me nuts. Not a word on monokinis.

Nowadays, though, swimsuits are much shorter on average, and the smallest, bikinis, are far shorter than that swimwear, a radical polarization from those attitudes. What once wouldn't have even been construed as sufficient clothing is now normal.

Here's why I believe this happened. There wasn't anything left to do but shorten the swimsuit. If you wanted to try a different set of materials, but they were expensive, you had to make a smaller swimsuit. If you wanted to be more creative with its design, you were guided towards creating a smaller swimsuit. The shortage of materials during wartime helped contribute towards smaller women's clothing in general, but this was a hard trend to avoid and such shortages could likely have come from somewhere else.

And let's face it, men liked seeing women wear shorter swimsuits. And that's what our culture is all about right now, getting more for less, or at least, letting the people who desire to do little do it. Nowadays you can wear any size of swimsuit and it's considered if not desirable, acceptable. Now we get to let people wear what they like, the way it should have been all along, right? But it won't last. The game's gotten old and there needs to be a new game to sucker people along, so we've got surfing suits and diving suits. Sure they don't mean much now, but wait until they become a little bit cheaper.

Headline from tomorrow! If you aren't diving 20 feet under the water, then you aren't swimming and we've got a fast maglev train to get you there to the beach quicker than before. Aren't you tired of all the people showing off skin and doing the same old strokes? Meet more people like you who are athletic but like to have fun and help us help you set the sharks on beach bums.

This doesn't mean that a catastrophe can't happen and keep people out of the water or that the people making swimsuits and diving suits aren't talented. You can still bring progress to a halt even in the most mainstream of activities. I'm also not saying that this is the only way to be progressive. But what I am saying is that if nobody's playing this game, there can be no progression at all.

People aren't all that different on the whole, so we have to keep dressing up in new ways to maintain our interest in each other. That way political figures can throw out the word unity without making us all feel cheap. If your neighbors keep dressing up in new outfits you won't have to meet anybody new, and right now we've got a general idea of how many neighbors there are in the world. All we can do if we don't like having so many neighbors is to like less neighbors and hope that the neighbors we don't like are somewhere else. I'm convinced that if every person in the world could stand in a place where they could see each other nude, that would be the end of the world.

All there's left to do is to put on the mask that hasn't been put on yet and keep the costume party going. Find some people who are pretending different things, then keep looking and see where the party game's falling short. No nudity and a name just helps to play the game and helps to spread the blame and all to keep alive the flame that brings us here and lets us call ourselves ourselves and keep us all the same.

It's the material truth that matters, our best guess of what things truly are, what they've been and what they're going to be.

geographic shorthand

2010-02-13T11:25:00.001-08:00

You've seen it plenty, but I've never heard it discussed. Like a great number of other cartoon traits, it's rarely seen in features, so this post will be a slight digression.

How many cartoon cities have been shown on the screen like ornate piles in a garbage dump? Who's seen the round the circular globe? What about planets with a little more detail than you'd ever be able to see from that point in space? There's dots on a map to represent the movements of armies. I wish that I could find John Hubley's commissioned short film Urbanissimo, as that's a brilliant example of 60's exaggerated geography in cartoons.

Duck Dodgers in the 24-1/2 Century has an interesting use of shorthand, with planets clearly marked with letters of the alphabet, lampooning over-simplified scientific diagrams.

Looking at Dumb Hounded, it's full of these sorts of tricks. The train zooms a bit conveniently over the mountains with fast motion blurs. Its ocean journey is cut short with convenient timing and a fast moving ship, and getting off he moves to a quick plane trip after hopping on his automobile into a hangar, only to take a startlingly quick plane ride over a small set of clouds, ending up in the Canadian wilderness and riding a horse off of the plane into a cabin. Once he discovers Droopy there, he darts represented by a dot, all over America only to end up in an all too clearly defined north pole.

I'm just bringing this up to jog my mind with all the obvious things that I should have talked about in the past. I may add more later.

Aging in Animation (spoilers)

2010-02-12T22:54:00.001-08:00

How many other people have noticed that there's been a general neglect of serious aging in animation? For all the hoopla of the "animation renaissance" beginning in the late 80's, and taking full force later in the 90's, it seems that the 70's and 80's, all the decades looked down upon, bring up aging characters better than any other time. Are there films that deal with this afterwards? Triplets of Belleville, Mind Game, and The Prince of Egypt deal with aging, though I didn't find The Prince of Egypt very interesting for other reasons and shut it off before I finished it.

It's too often that animation filmmakers tackle aging with a wink and a nod, a song and dance to signify passing time, or keep it out of the main course of the plot, before and afters thrown in to get "miracle of birth" mileage. And worse yet, it's one birth to another, or birth to marriage. It's yet another unwritten rule to widely be considered "good" animation.

So what are some examples?

One example is Son of the White Mare. You see the main character from conception, with brief but effective moments until he's of age, and it helps bring you into the story.

Then there's Toei's The Wild Swans, where Eliza is shown over the course of years, weaving to save her brothers at the neglect of her personal well being. It adds needed emotional weight to a film with such stock characters.

The Fox and the Hound obeys the birth to marriage trend, but it adds a bit on the way, largely due to its literary pedigree. Tod and Copper are seen from inception to adult age, with attention to them both at many places along the way. It even takes an interesting turn at the end with Tod transitioning to the forest, which gives the process more dramatic character.

Karel Zeman uses aging quite brilliantly in Krabat, focusing on time as the students progress, only to be beaten down by the head wizard. The use of time makes the film interesting, with the main character young but not quite as young as before. The shapeshifting, time, and urgency of the characters make the film interesting, as does Krabat's gradual change within the hierarchy of the wizard's school.

That's about all I plan to post for tonight, though I may add more later. As a final unrelated note, I actually watched Sudsakorn part way through and found it to be filled with ridiculous errors in animation. I really was a bit too impulsive, and now I see why the film hasn't gained much recognition.

What is Hand Drawn Animation, and Computer Animation?

2010-02-07T00:48:00.000-08:00

Hand drawn animation, or as many people refer to it, is seen as the dominant form of animation over nearly the entire history of the medium. It's only in recent history that it has been subverted largely by 3D CGI films, but I think there are some deep issues that are largely being avoided.

First, there's the role of hand drawn animation and how it developed early in the history of the medium. For all the time it lasted, how did it change, why, and what does that mean to the history of the medium? Why and how did computer animation gain dominance?

You can easily read on the history of hand drawn animation in the United States, but there's an important thing to talk about here. The fall of Mosfilm which produced puppet and cutout films, and how Soyuzmultfilm delayed the tradition within Russia, tending towards Disney-esque films only to break out of the Disney tradition within hand drawn animation and letting the other forms resume later. This effectively meant that hand drawn animation would be seen as the dominant medium around the globe, at least until the popularity of CGI.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I have to ask the question of the distinction between 3D and 2D CGI. 2D CGI is largely seen by its practitioners as developments of whatever medium they prefer, in spite of the fact that pixels are manipulated instead of cut paper or medium put down on paper. It is, the way I see it, a bunch of clever ways to stroke the hairs on a camel's back, ways to suggest a lot with very, very little though film and animation in general can be described in exactly the same way. The distinction between 2D and 3D CGI today, as far as I can succinctly describe it, seems to boil down to three things: computer modeling based on technical drawing, forward and inverse kinematics, and attempts to produce realistic shading. There's a fair amount of less realistic looking CGI coming out now, but doesn't it seem a bit too much like a clever joke based on a colloquialism?

So when did 2D computer animation become hand drawn animation, and how should a person distinguish between computer scanned imagery colored on the computer from imagery created entirely through the computer? What does it say about human culture that there are so many artforms that are in some manner expressed through the dancing of pixels on screen?

And doesn't it seem like the 'story first' mantra is being too commonly used by Pixar as a cheap way to dodge the issue? Where exactly are these brilliant storytellers? There's too much buddy formula, happy endings, and nostalgic abuses of old shorts. Cars hails back to late 40's Disney shorts, A Bug's Life hails back to Silly Symphonies, toys were the focus of an awful lot of 30's cartoons, Ratatouille plays off a tradition of mice and rats in cartoons, and The Incredibles has enough superhero cartoons preceding it. Finding Nemo was preceded by enough Hollywood short cartoons revolving around fish. WALL-E is a blatant exception, but it's basically Ben Burtt-isms for main characters in a fairly typical sci fi world. PIXAR films don't really get all that deep in my opinion. I think it's really just that the story keeps the audience distracted enough from the technology which the audience supposedly doesn't care for. There's an awful lot of talk about how PIXAR is occasionally willing to try out other mediums, but only rarely and for minor purposes.

We've lost track of something deeper here than the people throwing around the story mantra would have you believe. Hardly anybody really gives a damn about resolution, as the switch to digital technology has proven. And the moment you switch to a digital pixel display, hand drawn animation rendered in pixels is no better than 2D computer animation. It's what's being done that matters, the way things are being moved. It's the way a computer allows us to move things that we need to take into account, not the fact that a computer was used.

I don't believe that there's much a person does that can't eventually be mimicked by machine or that there's anything innately human that another person can't achieve similarly through technology. The moment you bring up a machine though, many traditionalists seem to completely lose appreciation for whatever is being made. I don't suspect that it's that something looks mathematical that most traditionalists despise, but that everything within the nuance of human expression can be interpreted mathematically.

Look at the general ways that things, generally characters, are moved within different mediums.

Stop motion relies on models adjusted frame by frame.

Hand drawn animation relies on a new drawing for each frame.

There's replacement modeling, which relies on a new model for every frame.

Cutouts rely on the exploration of a small number of parts in motion.

3D computer animation is essentially technical drawings reformulated by a computer and rendered over.

So what techniques can you use on the computer? Well, you could use all of them with the right software, but it doesn't seem to have become the norm. Computer animation isn't another medium anymore, it's a means to examine every medium and try out ideas, many of which can lead to new mediums outside of the computer. There's so many hand drawn animators and fans screaming at people deviating from using their standards inside of a computer when they hardly have a medium left anymore. It's all just red herring to keep people from realizing that there's very little left to hand drawn animation as a distinct technique in and of itself. There's a reason why hand drawn animators and fans keep rubbing our noses in tradition: tradition is almost all that's left of hand drawn animation.

I consider hand drawn animation with drawings scanned into the computer to be a thin exception from computer animation despite it's history preceding that of 2D computer animation for the public. Just take a look at SANDDE and Rhonda. These are helping to break the gap between drawing and modeling on the computer and thus forcing the question of what computer animation really means.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaJUJGpmJGI

http://drawn.ca/?s=wireframe+models

Who knows how 3D will blur the distinctions further, but it's time nonetheless, to reevaluate what constitutes hand drawn animation and computer animation. I say that anything animated from entirely within computer constraints is to be classified as computer animation and anybody toeing the line while maintaining an anti-technology stance is to be severely criticized.

The Adventures of Sudsakorn (raw on YouTube)

2010-01-29T16:24:00.000-08:00

If you've been looking for The Adventures of Sudsakorn, but haven't been able to find it, I discovered it unsubtitled on YouTube. I posted this the moment I found it, so I don't have any comments yet. It turns out that Payut Ngaokrachang's film has been available since March, but I didn't discover it until now. Hopefully somebody else is inspired by this news. More posts are coming soon, and I have quite a bit to talk about after such a long break.

The nuance in CGI

2009-04-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

In CGI, the technology keeps evolving and the look of the films from major studios get progressively more advanced every year. But these advances in technology have come at a very steep price, that filmmakers have used live action as a guide to further the advancement of the medium and have gotten a bit too successful.

It goes without saying that not every CGI film attempts a more realistic style, but even the ones that don't usually try to look like something else. There's the faux-clayish preschool style, the silvery tech commercials/music videos/art films(I can't tell which is which), chinese ink, technological noir, crooked and rundown eyesores, and quite a couple of others.

With just about every approach now, the computer is used as a sandbox tool that largely mimics something else with a few concessions to computer physics. There isn't much of a computer look nowadays that stands out from the real world, and virtual reality has become virtually reality. There still are the rare films that look like they're made on a computer, but mostly from filmmakers who can't afford better rendering or who are aiming to break the mold somewhat self consciously. Earlier computer animators did their best to express their vision within quite restrained technology, and being blatantly computerized was inevitable for every approach.

Nowadays it seems like animation is going through a transitional period where computer animation is considered such a force in and of itself. The other important thing to keep in mind, though, is that even more traditional animators are using computers in their traditions. With computer drawn animation, flash, and computer use in stop motion, media forms are being divided every day. I think that computers are going to be incorporated more as a single essential tool of an overall technique. With the advances in robotics, I suspect that robotic animation will some day develop out of the traditions of stop motion, CGI and animatronics.

The 2D approaches to computer graphics are now effectively overwhelmed by old traditions, except for a few rebels taking inspiration from old video games. It's hardly even considered to be computer animation anymore to work in a 2D format on a computer, since the technology's become so good.

The progress of CGI to me is like a process where box that keeps getting carved into 8 smaller and smaller boxes of the same shape. First it isn't all that interesting because you can easily count the boxes, then it gets a little more interesting because there's enough to be interesting without being overwhelming, then it becomes impressive but unrelatable as there's many boxes to see but far too many to count. Eventually the boxes are microscopic in size, and you're still amazed when you can tell it's there. Finally, as the boxes get perpetually smaller, you work your way down to atoms and you're left with the same box you started with.

Two New Discoveries

2009-01-17T21:44:00.001-08:00

There are so many good animated films that don't get enough recognition that it's absolutely tragic. Thanks to the timeline on the website Animation Podcast, I've discovered a couple gems, one relatively new and one old.
First is a Romanian live action/animation hybrid, Maria Mirabela which has some lovely if slightly zany songs which make me feel like a young child again. The film hasn't been released in English as far as I've been able to tell, but what a joy! Here's one of the song segments posted:

The other film is more dreamlike, a Spanish film from Miguelanxo Prado, a Spanish director with more experience in art outside of the animation industry. I'll let the visuals speak here, as they speak louder than any of my words.

More discoveries are going to come soon, I hope. Maybe some actual readers, too.

Features of The Hubleys

2008-08-12T21:22:00.000-07:00

I've now seen all three of the feature films directed by the Hubleys, and my opinions seem to differ quite a bit from those of the masses, with Everybody Rides the Carousel being my initially least favorite of all three. To refresh the memory of readers or let them know for the first time, the other two are Of Stars and Men, and The Cosmic Eye. Time will tell if this remains my opinion, but I found the other two Hubley films to be severely underappreciated while Everybody Rides the Carousel feels a little bit overpraised.

Of Stars and Men was my favorite film of all three, the most inspiring, entertaining, and ethereal. It was a collaboration between John and Faith Hubley, directed by John. It's an analysis of humans as a species and our nature in space, time, and size. I'll admit that the material didn't feel completely new, and the treatment of the subjects was rather simplistic and dated, but it felt the most coherent and well developed of all three Hubley films. The narration provided an amount of structure that the other films didn't have and needed. It should also be noted that of all three films, this was the one with the least amount of character development and the one most accessible to younger children. It was the oldest, from 1964, eleven years before Everybody Rides the Carousel, and twenty two years before the completion of The Cosmic Eye.

Everybody Rides the Carousel was also a collaboration between John and Faith, a television film made for CBS, inspired by Erik Erikson's Eight Stages of Man theory, and is the most educationally valuable of all three. It's the most artistically restrained and minimalistic, which I found rather refreshing after seeing the other two. The biggest problem in my view, as that the movie is much too akward in the initial stages and end where it could have had some of the most impact. The scene of birth just doesn't feel right, and not because of the akward feeling but the lackluster execution. Near the end of the movie, too many shots are reused which gives the whole film a cheap TV feeling that starts to ruin the mood. Nevertheless, the theory in the film is very compelling and the animation is suited for it, and few animated films revolve around such a valuable but relatable concept. It's certainly a very good film, but my least favorite of the three.

The Cosmic Eye is a genuine oddity, probably the most whacked out unusual animated film I've ever seen, and I've seen enough to make a long list which I'll post when I add a couple more titles to top it off. The film uses a large amount of prior footage, short films intended to become part of the feature, but made many years beforehand to gain funding for a large project. By the time of the film's completion, John Hubley had unfortunately died prematurely in 1977, though many of the segments he worked on beforehand, so his influence is still felt. Of all three, this film is the most artistically unrestrained, and is guaranteed to leave the average viewer very cold. The film deals with myths, environmentalism, pacifism, and doesn't have a strong plot, but for the keen viewer, it's a goldmine of semi-abstract interpretation and deep, personal thought. The film feels incredibly dated and doesn't succeed completely as a serious piece of work, but if you take it with a grain of salt, you'll be more than satisfied. The audio is quite akward, but that's part of what I like about the movie The film's faults are what makes it so enjoyable or completely throw you for a curve if you're easily bored and not paying serious attention.

In my opinion, all three films are worth seeing, but the better films here are the ones that get less respect. It's also quite clear just how underappreciated Faith Hubley's work is, that it gets such little respect in comparison while having such comparable artistic merit and its own charm.

Everybody Rides the Carousel is available on a disc with A Doonesbury Special and Faith Hubley's short film My Universe Inside Out. The Cosmic Eye and Of Stars and Men are available on a disc called Art and Jazz in Animation. Both are going for rip-off prices on Amazon, but you can get the latter through Netflix if you have an account or likely through your library.

What's the Real Point of the Entertainment Industry?

2008-07-24T23:05:00.000-07:00

I realize that this post is of a wider scope than animation itself, but it's an important can of worms that somebody needs to open. Why are we paying money to imagine that we're doing something interesting when we're just playing with a piece of plastic, punching keys on a keyboard, or simply staring at a screen? What's the point of periodically deluding ourselves in worlds of fantasy when there's a perfectly good real world that's staring us in the face? We entertain ourselves with preconceived constructs, come up with new innovations for these constructs to better suit or delusions perpetuated by our perceptions of our environment, and animation cinema seems to be one of the forms of entertainment which goes furthest off the deep end.

Animation represents a fictional world that is thrust upon the audience in a way that allows the viewer to knowingly delude their self into believing that it is true and false at the same time. We know that we're seeing something contrived, but don't seem to care so long as it entertains us enough to wish that it were real. Doesn't it take time to adjust to this artificial reality and come back to normality afterwards? On top of that, there's the irony that what we're seeing is somehow based on our environment or we wouldn't be watching it and wouldn't have been made in the first place. When you start getting into the subject of obscure entertainment, the subject gets even more complex.

It's quite obvious that I'm deluding myself while watching animated films, but how does this relate to the entertainment industry as a whole? It's quite obvious, at least to me that in the United States, the desire for profit and other forms of self perpetuated illusions of contentment have overshadowed the desire to create unique films and that the simple minded greed is on both sides of the board, the consumers and the financially motivated entertainers. The self demeaning nature of our industry however, has spread around the world largely thanks to us, and now thanks to greed, artistry has developed where there was none and we've developed fancier and fancier ways of self delusion through animation. But are we really any more entertained than ever before? Since there's an industry selling entertainment, are we working for play?

Uproar in Heaven online with English subtitles

2008-07-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

For those who've long waited patiently to see one of China's greatest animated features, it is now finally online with English subtitles on Crunchy Roll. I'll wait until later for a larger write up, but am I the only person who finds it rather odd that Nezha is a villain in this movie and the hero in Nezha Conquers the Dragon Kings? There seems to be a bit of inspiration from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, particularly with the style of the layered backgrounds, the shape shifting battle sequence, and the aura around Sun Wukong after the mountain crumbles which looks like the effects of Aladdin's lamp.

The link for Uproar in Heaven:
http://www.crunchyroll.com/group/CRSeries_-_Uproar_in_Heaven_-_Movie

There's also the English dub of the later movie, Nezha on Youtube, though it has some major changes from the Chinese version. It's easy enough to find with a one word search.

Chromophobia's Influence on Yellow Submarine

2008-07-15T21:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I read a the biography of Raoul Servais on his website, and came across a claim that Chromophobia was an influence on Yellow Submarine. At first I brushed it off, thinking that the two weren't exactly similar, even if they did have some psychedelic themes in common. Then some of the obvious similarities sunk in between these two films, one short and one long, that had somehow eluded me beforehand. Before I go further into this discussion, see if you can find Chromophobia on You Tube, though I won't link to it as you may be visiting this blog from another country where the film is legally sold.

The first, most glaring similarity is that the basic plot is almost exactly the same. Horrible, evil, selfish, mean people invade a colorful land of happiness and content, turning it into a dreary land devoid of self expression. Through an inherent miracle, several unfamiliar figures save the land and its people by witty gags that supported current youth attitudes. If you look closely at the poses of The Beatles while they're saving Pepperland, you'll notice incredibly unsubtle similarities to the Flower Jester(s) from Chromophobia. Also, there's the little cute looking girl in Pepperland that is an obvious reference to the girl in Chromophobia who helps bring the town back to its colorful old life. Then there's the artist in Chromophobia who the Nowhere Man in Yellow Submarine seems awfully similar to, including the gleeful laugh. Then there's the flowers appearing on villains, the depressed expressions on people's faces, the...

Granted, Yellow Submarine is enjoyed more for the music and bizarre visuals than for the plot. The characters are far more developed than those in Chromophobia, as it is a full length movie. There are some moderate tweaks to the basic storyline, and the characters most similar to the ones in Chromophobia are relatively minor. The Blue Meanies are much more interesting to me than the soldiers from Chromophobia. Well I'll cut myself off before I overanalyze everything, but the bottom line is that Yellow Submarine and Chromophobia are as comparable as The Thief and the Cobbler and Aladdin. I'll be back soon with another post when somebody starts reading this blog.

Animated Double Features to Provoke Conversation

2008-06-20T02:43:00.000-07:00

There are some films that offset each other in such a curious manner that they're guaranteed to provoke a memorable conversation. If you're reading this with a satanic sense of humor, and want to get a rise out of some of your siblings or friends, here's some double features that won't happen in a million years.

Ratatouille followed by Krysar

Robin Hood followed by The Tale of the Fox

My Neighbor Totoro followed by Belladonna of Sadness-This is about the only combination that is more uncanny than the theatrical double bill with My Neighbor Totoro followed by Grave of the Fireflies. This combination, is of course, not for children though you could put the kids to bed and watch the second while they're asleep.

Bambi followed by The Plague Dogs

Sleeping Beauty followed by Kirikou and the Sorceress

Charlotte's Web followed by Animal Farm

Who Framed Roger Rabbit? followed by Watership Down

The Aristocats followed by The Cat who Walked by Herself

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust followed by Vampires in Havana

A Bug's Life followed by Fantastic Planet

The Lion King followed by Gandahar (English subtitled version from Britain)

Spirited Away followed by Angel's Egg

As much as I'd like to write about each one of these, it would be better to see both, though perhaps at different times so that you can discover my reason for the comparisons.

Benny's Bathtub

2008-05-31T03:18:00.000-07:00

While searching for information on films that were listed on Wikipedia's List of animated feature length films, I found one film which I'd consider more unusual than good. This film isn't exactly what I'd call unique, either as it is quite unique in concept, but borrows quite heavily from other films and popular culture. From clips posted on youtube, Benny's Bathtub, a popular 1971 Danish film that's virtually unknown outside of Scandinavia and perhaps rightfully so, strikes me as a bizarre psychological but pop cultural children's film with references that go a little over the edge. There's a bizarre starfish character that changes colors like Alice in Wonderland's Cheshire Cat, some unexpected bits of abstract animation that scream Norman McLaren, references to what seems to be The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, and probably eons more I've missed. The whole film is posted on You Tube, but is untranslated(don't let that stop you, because nothing I've seen suggests any sort of comprehensible plot). The film is based off of an also popular Danish children's book, and that's about as far as words can describe this movie, unless somebody bilingual in English and Danish translates it. Here's a song from the movie on You Tube in what seems to be one of the more interesting segments: link

Right Under the Nose of He who Knows

2008-05-18T22:06:00.000-07:00

There are all sorts of well made and original animated classics that are available now on DVD, but that nobody seems to notice. Here is a list which will be updated that points to as many films as possible which are available on DVD right now. Forget that Disney movie you've been thinking of buying that likely a masterpiece as the ads suggest, or that derivative, overpriced anime show that nobody will care about in 20 years and instead buy something of real value. I have no affiliations with any distribution or production company, nor am I personally accquainted with any animator or filmmaker, or relative of theirs who may have worked on any of these films. If such a situation should arise in the future as I continually update this list, it will be declared upfront.

All of the films on this list are available with English subtitles or language dubbing, though not all are both region 1, region 0, or NTSC format. Should anybody know of any superior, legal versions, I shall acknowledge them on the list, but only should the person give their legitimate e-mail and all contributions will be listed in a separate category under their authority, not under mine.

Should anyone reading this blog discover that a film that I or somebody else has posted on this list be an illegitimately released, copied, fake, or nonexistent DVD unwittingly, and in their case possibly willingly, that incident will personally be noted on this blog under an errors section. Back up your case with solid evidence, or you'll be ignored and unable to post, make suggestions, or in any other way take part in this blog . That is all and if you are unsure of a release's legality, please refrain from mentioning it here or inquire further from a more trustworthy source. That is all for now, though I reserve the right to change these rules at any time with the acknowledgment of change, and here is the current list of films below:

For Now:

Available directly through an Amazon site:

Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed

Jiri Barta's Labyrinth of Darkness (contains feature film Krysar)

The Puppet Films of Jiri Trnka (contains shorter version of feature The Emperor's Nightingale with narration by Boris Karloff)

Francois Vose's The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship

On Amazon UK:

Rene Laloux's Time Masters

Amazon Japan:

Masaaki Yuasa's Mind Game (has English subtitles and is also available on YesAsia)

Updated below: Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

On YesAsia

The Wan Brothers' Uproar in Heaven (English fan-subtitles can be found with a quick online search)

Tomomi Mochizuki's Ocean Waves

Isao Takahata's Gauche the Cellist

That's all for the present time, as I need to do some more digging and have several other parts of the blog to update. Thanks for not visiting my blog! I guess it's time to start actually mentioning this blog on some animation websites so I can get some regular readers and other animation obsessed fans who can help to contribute.

When you're out of cash, but want something to watch

2008-05-14T23:47:00.000-07:00

Thanks to a large scale search through the entire Crunchy Roll anime index which I took the liberty of doing several weeks ago due to boredom, here are the feature films which I consider to be good as well as rare. As far as good films go, the database won't last you long, before descending into incredible amounts of derivative mainstream junk. I had nightmares for a week after searching through this hellish geek fetish of a database hoping for a masterpiece or two. Without registering, you'll be able to get through about a movie or two in a day period before you're cut off and forced to register, but the system is easily foiled, so long as you have another nearby computer.

This obsession with rare films is one that takes a huge toll on your wallet, so here are some good films which you can easily and semi-legally view online for free. All of these films seem to be unlicensed for an English market, except for Robot Carnival which has a company that owns the rights but hasn't bothered to release the film on DVD. If I missed any that have less than 2,000 IMDB votes and are both unusual and well regarded, I'll make sure to update the list. This will probably be the last time I ever link to so many films directly on my blog, but that's what this blog was created for, revealing obscure animated films to readers and discussing them.

Belladonna of Sadness

This film is for mature viewers only and revolves around Belladonna, a woman in the middle ages who is tempted by witchcraft after being sexually abused by her town's Baron on her wedding day as payment for the ceremony. The film relies quite heavily on still images, with full animation sparingly used, which works quite well.

link

Legend of Sirius

A dark childrens film, the movie is based loosely on Romeo and Juliet as well as Western mythology. A prince of the sea, Sirius, falls in love with a daughter of fire, Malta, and despite the inevitable ending, the movie is beautiful along the way.

link

Mind Game

You can read a synopsis and reviews at the Internet Movie Database that describe it better than I could: IMDB Page

link

Ocean Waves

This Studio Ghibli movie, originally made for television, is a slice of life story centering on the life of a high school aged boy. The movie is casual in both technique and ambition, but proves to be a surprisingly engaging film.

link

Princess Arete

The one movie from Studio 4ºC that isn't especially experimental, this movie is a refreshing change of pace from the zany creativity of Mind Game. In contradiction of Disney principles, a young princess is tired of being in her position. In a plot revolving suitors, magic, and quiet personal reflection, Princess Arete reexamines her life.

link

Robot Carnival

This animator's compilation film has a wide variety of segments, most without dialogue, and all revolving around some sort of robot. The movie is quite a mixed bag, but contains many interesting segments, the best ones seeming to come from the lesser known animators who have attracted little attention since.

link

That's all for this update, and thanks to all of you for not reading my blog!

Obscure Animated Films I didn't Like

2008-05-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, as my potential readers are well aware, you'll become excited about a rare animated feature which turns out to be heavily disappointing. Here are a couple more obscure animated films that I don't like, despite good ratings and general high regard:

The Cat who Walked by Herself

This movie is an experimental Russian feature presumably based on Russian folklore which relies on too many techniques to name offhand. The film takes the viewer through the history of nature and mankind, with a cat who was there all the way since the dawn of time. For the most part, this is a great movie, but is brought down in my opinion, by a seemingly ever present narration which seems downright militant in crucial dramatic scenes, as the preachy environmental tones are shoved down your throats during the scariest moments of the film. The movie starts off well enough, but at the end seems like a prehistoric bad trip version of Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind.

The Girl who Leapt through Time

You're probably already aware of the basic plot, seeing the popularity that this movie has gained and the fact that a DVD release is due out in the U.S. next fall. Sometimes a popular film isn't a truly good one, and I think this film is better than most anime, but still an overpraised incoherent soap opera with a pretentious pseudo-poetic ending. The characters are rather typical of anime and despite attempts to broaden their two dimensional personalities with secret crushes and repressed angst, none of the characters ever feels very human. The script clearly needed a few more drafts, and the attempt to combine science fiction with a slice of life story simply didn't work. There are interesting segments of genuine emotion, but they don't fit into the actual movie or come together to reveal any sort of actual message. All the interesting animation is truly wasted and the musical score is mostly Beethoven which only emphasizes the fact that every element of the story has been used better somewhere else.

If you want to see a fast paced movie with drama that combines time travel with adrenaline, watch Run Lola Run.

If you're looking for a casual romance story revolving around a young girl, watch Whisper of the Heart.

For an anime or two that combine romance and science fiction successfully, watch Voices of a Distant Star and The Place Promised in Our Early Days, both directed by Makoto Shinkai.

Twice upon a Time uncut on Youtube

2008-05-02T23:13:00.000-07:00

For those of you who've heard of Twice upon a Time but haven't seen it or have only watched the awful John Korty version, the uncut version is available on youtube, albeit with a different ending song during the credits. A brief synopsis and more information can be found on the IMDB page here: Twice upon a Time.

Quick Cocktail Party Notes:

Directed by John Korty, Twice Upon a Time was made using a technique called Lumage, which used backlit paper cutouts and was a very time consuming process. This is the only feature film ever created using the technique, though some clearly similar design can be found in Monsters Inc. as Harley Jessup was the art director for Twice and a production designer for Monsters Inc.

The film is a bizarre parody of fairy tales, and while dated will still certainly appeal to those who enjoyed Shrek and Monsters Inc. The dialogue is quite heavily improvised, and the characters are incredibly abnormal, which might make this film appeal to Yellow Submarine fans. Here's the link, so decide for yourself: Uncut Version

Kayoko's Diary

2008-04-23T16:32:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched this film on Crunchy Roll and it left me with mixed reactions but was an overall positive experience. The movie shows some clear similarities to Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen, the film I didn't find as overly dramatic as Grave of the Fireflies or as inappropriately cartoonish as Barefoot Gen. However, both of those films have a level of quality of animation that this movie doesn't achieve which keeps this film from having a greater emotional impact.

Based upon real life, the film revolves around Kayoko, who is at the beginning of the film, a first grade girl and the youngest member of her family of 6 in 1940 Japan. Later, her pregnant mother gives birth to a baby brother. For the first portion of the film, the movie is rather loosely plotted following Kayoko's life and developing the characters. While the perspective of a first grader makes the film somewhat alienating to older viewers, the film does not misstep and is refreshingly sincere with the realistic attitudes of the characters which makes the first half of the film continually enjoyable.

As the film moves on, Kayoko moves to the second grade and her life changes as she is expected to mature to set an example for her baby brother. The film gradually darkens and the presence of the military is felt stronger as the film moves along as the viewer experiences the hardships of wartime life through chants, parades, and personal belongings given to the military. The film's tone darkens more as Kayoko is evacuated to live with her aunt in the country. Then time moves forward skipping several years to 1945 when Kayoko is in the fifth grade and leads to a climax that I won't spoil for the sake of readers who have yet to see the movie.

As a whole, I think that Kayoko's Diary is a refreshingly honest animated film which handles its difficult subject well, but is brought down by rather weak animation and rather derivative character designs. The backgrounds are well designed with attention to detail, but are so well made that the foreground elements and characters don't quite fit into the world which they are placed. Ultimately, the movie is an emotionally engaging experience but not an artistic or particularly unique one. I cautiously recommend this film to those who are interested in an interesting animated historical account but not for those who are looking to be artistically engaged.

Here is the link to the movie at Crunchy Roll:

Kayoko's Diary

Welcome to my blog!

2008-04-17T16:10:00.000-07:00

Welcome to this blog, created entirely for the purpose of drawing attention to more obscure animated features. It's not a great blog right now, but it will continue to get better each day, so please come back or I'm just wasting my time.

The first film that I feel is worthy of more attention(even if I haven't seen it), but as of yet has not been released on DVD or VHS is an avant-garde musical from artist and filmmaker Gyorgy Kovasznai called Foam Bath, which has some amazing artwork. There is an entire research center in Hungary devoted to his achievements and here is their website with five short films and select works of his art from the 50's to the 80's. Be cautioned that there is some nudity which some people might find objectionable.

http://www.kovasznaigyorgy.hu/english

Further contact information can be found on the site, and to have a snowball's chance of seeing this movie, contact them and see what sort of response you get.

Update: June 3rd, 2008 Below

I've found a short video on Vimeo with several clips from Foam Bath and several of Kovasznai's shorts. Many thanks to Kultplay for uploading this short video. You can find the blog through the Vimeo link, but it's in Hungarian, so I won't link to it directly as it would likely be of little use to the only person who's currently reading this blog.