animation

I was drifting off a bit in this last lecture – I don’t know what I was supposed to be learning, that Bambi’s forest is a womb?

I sort of feel like Bill tries to force his own opinion on us every week, rather than teaching us a theory that we can apply to our own work and ideas.

I’m also not sure what relevance this lecture had to Character Creation.

I’ve never really taken much notice of Japanese Animation, although I do vaguely remember Pokemon and Didgemon.  I always found the style quite funny but a bit confusing, and the stories a little obscure.  American animation, however, is extremely clear story wise (unless you read way too deep into things like our Bill), and the comedy is there for both children and adults, and as Ivan mentioned in the intertextuality lecture, there are clever little references made to older texts in order to engage the adults a bit more.

art versus commerce

Art versus commerce in terms of animation I guess is the Brothers Quay versus Disney. I love the Brothers Quay animation films – they were a major inspiration to me on my foundation course last year.  I think they are brilliant in terms of models and lighting effects, and atmosphere in general.  However, the brothers are typical fine artists, and when you try to figure out a plot in their films it leaves you a bit brain-dead, and when they talk about the plot of their films it leaves you even more brain-dead. I remember seeing an interview with them, where they talked about the few commercial pieces they have made, one of them being Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer video.  They said something like “it was one of our deals with the devil” – done purely to pay the rent. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JajPuTn8IHM  - link to Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies, one of the Brothers Quay’s films.

Most fine artists do this- even Andy Warhol’s famous Pop Art pictures of Marilyn Monroe were done just to make a bit of money, as he knew the stuff he was doing for his own enjoyment had no commercial value at that time. 

Obviously Disney is art, but art made for commercial purposes only, therefore the stories are never too complex, and the atmosphere is always bright and lively.

I do think, in term of films in general, that you can have a cross over between art and commerce.  For example, yesterday I watched Skyline (if you havn’t seen it yet, count yourself lucky).  It seemed to me to be one of those films with a high special effects budget made purely to make money.  The story was non-existant, and there was no art as far as I was concerned.  But there are other films which combine the two.  Pan’s Labyrinth is a good example – a lot of money and work was put into the making of it in order to realise a vision Guillermo del Toro’s, not just to make money.  He obviously expected it to sell too, but the film really was a piece of art.

I’m not sure of my own opinion of violence in the media – I hate violence in real life – I couldn’t stand to watch either a bar fight or a boxing match, and violence in films, when realistic, affects me probably more than most people. 

But it has always been popular, looking back at the days of the Mayans or the Aztecs when human sacrifice was common, or the days of the Romans when Gladiators were fought inside an amphitheatre.  Until fairly recent times people were excecuted in public, and as far as I can make out from films, the public lapped it up.

 There has been violence in the media for a long time too; Punch, a form of glorified violence used for comedic effect, similar to modern action films.  On a different level, Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War shocked people who saw them - the realisation of the fact that the country’s heroes were the victims of needless acts of horrific violence must have been devastating.  When I saw Goya’s prints recently I found them horrific, despite the cartoon style.

Disasters of War

I do think violence is an essential part of some films.  For example, American History X, or Harry Brown (if you’ve not seen Harry Brown, watch it!!) and Apocalypto, show the violence extremely realistically, but without it they could not tell the story.  Neither story is of glorified violence, and so I don’t believe either of them could encourage somebody to commit such cats of violence.  The violence in these films simply make you sympathise with the victims.

What I do hate is what I think Ivan called “torture porn”.  Films like Saw and Hostel I just cannot watch, and I don’t really understand people who like them, although I know that millions do.  I know the violence isn’t real, but the ideas of what happened won’t leave my head.  It’s violence for the sake of violence that I can’t stand.

It is only glorified violence in the media that could maybe encourage real violence, and this is the kind that we’re all addicted to.  People love holding the gun in computer games, and in films like Kill Bill every girl has a character she’d love to be.  We all love action and superhero films and fantasise that we’re the star.

A parody of all these kinds of violence is one of my favourite recent films; Kick Ass.  It has Super-Heroes, wannabe Super-Heroes, bullies and mobs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYQOZcMRruo&NR=1- Kick Ass!!!

Big Brother is Watching You

Again I found the beginning of this lecture difficult to follow, and I wasn’t really sure where it was going, however I managed to pickup the thread of it after a few minutes.  It was basically a repeat of the intertextuality lecture but based around Science-Fiction this time.

What I did find really interesting is the concept of “controlled environments” – humans trying to shut out anything unexpected.  This is a common theme in Sci-Fi films, and in the films it normally leads to the technology, which the humans have been using so efficiently within their controlled environments in order to make their lives easier, becoming more powerful than the people and taking over.  This represents a current fear, as our technology constantly advances.  One of the first films that use this idea as a theme is Metropolis.  There’s also the Time Machine, the Matrix and God knows how many more.

What interested me about this, is that I recently watched video about the Venus Project.  The Venus Project is a theory and potential “controlled environment” invented by a guy called Jaques Fresco.  To me, it seems like total bullshit, but a lot of people have bought into it.  If you want to check it out this is the website: http://www.thevenusproject.com/  The guy reckons we can live without money, work, and pretty much everything else- the place would be a sort of Garden of Eden in the middle of the sea. God knows what we’d do with ourselves all day.  The Venus Project claims to tackle many problems, such as violence, crime, and, interestingly the fear/possibility of technology overthrowing humans.  However, this controlled world, isolated from the rest of us, appears to me to be one huge step closer to the world of Metropolis, and somebody is actually trying to make it happen!!

 

Something else intriguing is how fascinated we all are with this concept – enough to conduct and watch voluntary human experiments with it.  Big Brother, a concept taken from the book Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell), is an enclosed environment controlled by a voice.  The voice comes from an unknown source, but it is clear that the owner of the voice can see every action of the subjects.  I have always wondered how Big Brother was so popular for so long, but I guess it’s because it represents a real current fear, the same fear as many Sci-Fi stories use as a theme.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf1gZxmIDKw – a link to an interview with the man behind the Venus Project

New Media

This is the first time I’ve been really stumped – I think the last computer game I played was Space Invaders when I was a kid!  I found the lecture really difficult to follow, partly because I have absolutely no interest in the subject.

I do appreciate that games have developed a lot since the days of Space Invaders, and some of them have become very realistic. Some of them have been made into films because they were so successful, such as Resident Evil. 

That is literally all I can say. 

Here's Johnny!!!

I've found it really difficult to write much about the Structuralism: Binary Opposition lecture. I found some of it quite interesting but I don't think it's a very effective way of analysing a film, scene or character, at least not as effective as denotation, connotation, myth. However, I've had a go, looking at Stanley Kubrick's The Shining.

The two binary opposites I identified in the film are;                  love - hate
                                                                                               reality - imagination
It is the fact that both of these thing blur together which makes the film so terrifying.

When the film starts, Jack appears to be a family man who loves his wife and child, although as his sanity slips away he begins to hate both of them more and more. At first he shows this just with contempt and annoyance, but this quickly transforms to murdurous rage. This makes the audience extremely uncomfortable, more so probably than during a different type of horror film, as a father/husband figure is supposed to be someone the family can trust and who loves them. This monster is much more frightening than say a vampire, with whom there is no emotional connection.

The blurring of reality and imagination is both interesting and alarming to the audience, as it makes the film totally unpredictable. Jack seems to be imagining many things - a party full of people in 1920s dress, conversations with the bar man and with the waiter, the waiter convincing him that he needs to kill his family... However, after his wife locks him in the food-store cupboard, it is the "imaginary" waiter who releases him. This could have been a figment of his imagination too - he could have made his own escape in reality - but there is no sign that this may have happened.

Another example is the old lady in the bathtub - it wasn't just Jack who saw her - his son, Danny, saw her too, and he even came away with bruises from her. We know that Danny can "shine", which is why he can see her, but niether the audience nor Danny realised that these images of people which he can see were capable of harming him.

Molly Chambers' gonna change your mind

I have heard that the brain cannot invent something totally new and original, it can only take previously seen ideas and make them it’s own.

I found it interesting to look at conscious and unconscious intertextuality.  I guess conscious intertextuality either wants you to notice it, or wants to re-invent the thing it’s referring to as its’ own e.g. song covers, some film re-makes, or music samples such as the sample of Enya’s Boadicea used by the Fugees in the song Ready or Not (The Fugees were so successful in making this there own that a lot of people seem to think it is).

In the way of films and Television I think it’s sometimes difficult to tell whether the link is conscious or unconscious.  Obviously some text is simply paying homage to another e.g. in Black Adder II when Black Adder falls in love with Bob, a eunuch, who later turns out to be a girl. This is very reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which Olivia falls in love with a eunuch, who also later turns out to be a girl.  However sometimes it’s not so obvious, such as I’ve always thought that The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett was based on Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. There are so many similarities in the stories and in the atmosphere of both stories, and this may have been an unconscious influence on Frances Hodgeson Burnett or perhaps one author paying homage to another.

Something I looked up that I found really interesting was the phrase “Molly’s chamber”.  The Kings of Leon used a version of the phrase a couple of years back in their song Molly Chambers, but it is most commonly known from Thin Lizzy’s Whiskey in the Jar:

“Being drunk and weary I went to Molly’s chamber

Takin my Molly with me and I never knew the danger”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrguJziuq9s

However, in the traditional Irish folk song (or at least all the versions of it I could find) Molly’s chamber is not mentioned, in fact in many versions the name is Jenny not Molly:

“I went into my chamber, all for to take a slumber,
I dreamt of gold and jewels and for sure it was no wonder.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIlDymYg1WM

I think Thin Lizzy inserted the phrase as an erotic reference taken from Molly’s chamber pot, from James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1909), in which there is a Freud-like erotic pleasure found.

Intertextuality is especially present in, and I think essential to, Character Creation.  Linking in with last weeks lecture on semiotics, the image of a character (in particular a created character) is very symbolic and conveys many things to the viewer.  For instance, Hellboy –he’s big, red and has ram’s horns and a tail – he’s basically the standard image of the devil.  His character is obviously not entirely original, if it were then the viewer would not understand his character as they should.  When making my own characters/models I always look for inspiration before even making any sketches – I don’t see it as lazy or copying, but I think intertextuality is an essential part of creating anything;

“Life imitates art”