9. Astro Boy and Early Japanese Animation

The article on blackboard that I read talked about early Japanese animation in the United States as well as Tezuka and Astro Boy. Much of the animation was construed differently in the United Sates because of added narration and shifting of dialogue meaning. In the original Japanese Astro Boy his death was a result of an unknown factor, but in the English version released in the US the accident causing his death is implied to be caused by faulty future highways. Tezuka was outraged about the editing and censorship of the cartoon in America. I think it’s very interesting that the Japanese version is hard to even find on the anywhere anymore, many people only come across the japanese subtitled versions. It just doesn’t make much sense that the original version of something would be almost phased out.

I also was thinking about the re-popularization of Astro Boy with the release of the CGI film in 2009. This could explain why the Japanese versions of the show have become nearly extinct. Americans became interested in where Astro Boy originated and started to watch more of the old episodes. Tezuka, the creator of Astro boy is deemed as the “Godfather of Anime or Manga”. His style of animation really set the stage for all other anime artist because much of his work is reflected in the anime of the present. He is known for drawing large eyes and exaggerating other prominent features of the characters. I thought it was strange that the article said early Japanese animation used many different techniques from many different styles of animation around the world because anime and Japanese animation has such a distinct form about it with its exaggerated drawing style and its sometimes heavy subject matters.

Astro Boy was originally named Atom, which is a very unnerving coincidence considering the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed with an atom bomb. His name was changed from ‘Atom’ to ‘Astro Boy’. ALthough the program was more violent that regular American TV shows it did well with audiences, so good in fact at one time, it had beaten out Superman and Lone Ranger.

Animation Assignment #3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3FlxIbvY_0

8. Full vs. Limited Animation

Chapter 7 in Art in Motion by Maureen Furniss describes the difference, relationship, and history between full animation and limited animation. Full animation is all about having every drawing of an animation be distinctly different or there is no cycling or images, and limited animation has the reoccurrence of many sequences of images, also known as cycling. Full animation also uses more metamorphosis of shapes and sizes, playing with the z-plane, while limited only stays within the x and y planes. Full animation uses the most fluid motion whic comes with 24 images per second, but limited animation tries to reduce the number of images per second, as much as possible, usually using about eight per second. Limited animation includes lots of different camera movement because it makes the image seem more dynamic even if the movements being made aren’t. Full animation has its focus placed on visuals, while limited has the much of the animation based in sound with voice over, narration,and dialogue.

One animator that became very well known for his use of limited animation is Osamu Tezuka. Originally, he went to school to be a doctor, but he established his stance as an animator with his synthesis of 500 to 1000 page cartoons. He has also been noted for his use of cinematic techniques within his animationsHe created a series called ‘Astro Boy’, which aired in Japan in 1963 and was a great success. He also did a feature length film called ‘Onboro Film’. In The Birth of Astro Boy it’s easy to recognize the limited animation within it because of the cycling in images of the still crowd and the repeating of the cars passing by.

One of the studios in competition with Disney was United Productions of America. Much of this company was made up of former Disney employees, which is because of the many strikes that Disney endured. UPA’s films were minimalist with very little shading to show depth, as well as the lack of perspective linesUPA was also different from Disney in their choice of story line with films like Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty-Toot-Toot, Madeline, The Tell Tale Heart, and Mr. Magoo.

7. Disney's Rise

In the reading for Chapter 6 in Art In Motion by Maureen Furniss Disney’s rise to fame within the animation medium is attributed understanding of traditional storytelling, character development and other factors. Disney was first employed at Newman Laugh-O-Grams, a studio that made animated ads and shorts, with many other would-be-big names in animation, such as Ub Iwerks and Hugh Harman. One film that helped Disney rise was Alice’s Wonderland, which is a live-action and animation film. He signed with a big name, Margret Winkler, after the fact to make a series of Alice comedies, helping him financially. Winkler was not satisfied with many of Disney’s cuts of the comedies and asked him to send all of the raw footage to her, so she could recut it. Winkler was still focusing on a story line in terms of gags or jokes, but Disney wanted to move toward a more liner or plot driven story line.

The Alice comedies began to loose steam, in their later stages because the double exposure technique used to insert a live-action character into an animated scene was tricky and unreliable. This lead to Alice’s screen time being very much down-played and diminished. Disney came up with another character to replace Alice, and it was Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. This character was an overnight success and was also profitable for a lot of spin-off merchandise. Charles Mintz was Margaret Winkler’s husband who had taken over the business and started to edge Disney out of the studio and since Disney did not own the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit there was nothing he could do. After this Disney came up with his most famous character, Mickey Mouse. Disney had broken away from Mintz and moved toward liner storytelling with Mickey’s character.

Disney then came up with the idea of ‘Silly Symphonies’ or stories that were not recurring. They just used a set of characters for one Silly Symphony and then they were done with them. With his focus on short-format films, Disney later shifted his attention to possibly making a long format film or a feature film. He decided on Snow White as the story line, and soon thereafter Disney’s staff jumped from about a handful to 750. Many of these new animators did not know how to handle the emotion of a certain movement, so they had to study movements of actual things and try to match them on paper. Disney has received a lot of flack for being able to only make a realist female character, many saying his ‘Prince” was stiff and unrealistic. All together Snow White took about $1.5 million to make and garnered about $4.2 million in profit.

There are four types of traditional tales used when considering an audience of children: folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends. Fables are stories that teach a lesson. Fairy tales can involve humans and animals and be set in a nonspecific time and place. The function of the myths are to explain great mysteries of the world. Legends are based on actual historical events. Bruno Bettelheim suggest that fairy tales help children deal with growing up because they present solutions to situations. it provides children a model for coping with his or her fears. One of the most interesting parts of the chapter was when the book tells of how societal norms are reflected in mainstream media. There is a construction that most if not all of the films follow, that is white, heterosexual, and male dominated social order. I would like to see Disney, Pixar or some other big animation company step outside the box and portray another side of society. Let’s see two princes or two princesses fall in love.

6. Gender Constructions

In Chapter 5 of Understanding Animation by Paul Wells, I learned animation has often been put into the children’s category, or many brush it off as if it has no implication. Cartoons have many biases and discrepancies in how genders are represented. Many main male characters such as Popeye and Superman are shown as tough and strong implying their masculinity because those are classically associated traits. Popeye’s masculinity comes from his working with hard metal, machines, and his display of his biceps. Clark Kent shows many similarities with his muscles, super strength, and his ability to save Lois from evil.

The female image and femininity also have an extremely direct relationship. In “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” Jessica Rabbit portrays the epitome of a cartoon woman. She has large breast, small waist, long hair, and is wearing stiletto heels. Gender-bending is also common in animations. Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck are no strangers to this; they both have been dressed up and made-up to look feminine, which introduces questions about sexuality. The genders of these characters are sometimes indistinguishable, leaving the audience thinking of the characters being in a state of sexless androgyny.

I thought the section about questioning Jerry’s gender was very interesting. It is never clearly stated or even shown what Jerry sexual identity is, bur she is often shown dressing up in women’s clothes. She also has very feminine mannerism and body language, like covering the area where breasts would be when she is naked. There are also lesbian tensions implied when Jerry is shown being embarrassed from being in bed with a female doll. The question of gender can be implied with shades of colors, with the darker being the male and the lighter typically being the female.

5. Abstract Animation

Chapter 13 from Art in Motion by Maureen Furniss discusses the problem of spectator interpretation of abstract animation. I thought Wassily Kandinsky had an interesting and very valid point about todays viewers and abstract animation. He basically says that todays spectators are overanalyzing the picture that we view in any type of cinema. He thinks that instead of trying to make meaning out of the picture, we should let the picture make its own meaning. This of coarse comes from Hollywood cinema’s hyperdominace in the main stream, making narrative story lines the norm.

The Hollywood cinema has trained us to try and probe beneath the surface of what we are watching, but one has to realign his or her process of interpretation to appreciate viewing abstract animation. Viewing an abstract animation more than once in a sitting is preferable because it is hard to extract meaning from one viewing. When one switches their conceptualization of an image, they use different parts of their brain. The right part of the brain is predominantly used at night and the left during the day. One switches their interpretation to the right side of their brain to let the meaning of an abstract film make itself.

This seg-ways into the idea that watching a film is like having a dream, and sometimes strict laws of reality don’t bind the world of dreams. Shamus Culhane says that people have an aversion to thinking with right side of their brain because there is no use of logic or reason, just intuition. This scares people because they perceive a loss of control. A final element I thought was interesting, was the section about mandalas. A mandala is a symmetrical object , sometimes a circle or a lotus, used in Buddist or Hindu culture to meditate. These ‘mandalas’ are used in many abstract animations as focal points.

4. Narrative Strategies for Understanding

There are many different techniques that can be used within animations to help the viewer understand the story better, as talked about in Paul Wells book Understanding Animation. The narrative can develop in certain ways, as a result of these different techniques. One device is called metamorphosis, which is a fluid linkage between imagery. It is the actual transformation of the drawings. Although unrelated images can be connected, narrative continuity can be conserved. Another technique is condensation, which is also known as elliptical storytelling. This is when cuts are to show a significant passing of time between the shots, and it is predominantly used in shorter films. The third technique is synecdoche. This is when a part of something is used to represent the whole. This is often used as a metaphor, when some small action is used to represent a greater meaning. Another way it can be used is to have a hand representing the whole body, a part acting for the whole entity.

A very commonly used technique within animation is symbolism and metaphor. Symbolisms complicate the structure of the narrative because they can be used to represent something else or some other meaning, but the object or character can also be construed as representing literally what it is. Peter Munz said that a sign merely duplicates the thing that it symbolizes because there is the existence of the implied meaning, as well as the literal and more specific meaning. Metaphor is very similar to symbolism, but it’s used to represent a system of ideas in a more appealing way. Another very common technique within animation is fabrication or the idea that objects or material things can have a sort-of life. Svankmajer introduces this idea, and he believes that objects have much more memories than men. All of the experiences that they have had, they conceal within them. Fabrication introduces the existences of a meta-reality, where objects are alive.

Associative relations are displayed when unrelated imagery and conjunctions are spliced together to create a different narrative impetus. This construction is used more for experimental animations, similar to montage of motion picture films. Acting is another part of narrative strategies because the animator has to understand how a certain character would look, reacting in a certain situation. A character has to be developed from a script, taking into consideration the character’s role, their rang of motion, and their overall demeanor. Another construction of animation is choreography or how the movements of the characters correspond with weight, space, and time. The animator has to understand how certain conventions of the real world would translate onto paper. The animator has to relate shape movement to effort action, or make sure the action the character is doing matches with what they want.