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.