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.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
realism analysis
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.
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.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
The Turn of the World of the Sweethearts of Peynet
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.
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.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
realism 2
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.
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.
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Comparison between Ballparks of Cartooning
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.
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.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Review of Flatland and Archon Defender
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.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Stop Motion
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.
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