#animation room

[kstearb]

Ive been missing my classroom a lot this year, here's a little video I took before an 8am class a few months before the pandemic started

[dogtroll-thefilm]

Gotta clean this room up before I can do anything....ughh

[anthonyparisi]

Disney California Adventure Animation Room

[news14-arts]

好きじゃないか ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

or.... at least that's what i think he said. 

Connor vs. Philip vs. Allison vs. Heath vs. Charlie in a riveting game of Egyptian Slap. 

stop on by because va's are really fun

[chororine]

Animation Room: Rabbit

Sclah Films, Arts Council England, Channel 4, 2005, UK (9 minutes) Directed & written by Run Wrake

Animators have been known to take inspiration and materials from odd places, and Run Wrake is no exception: his short animation Rabbit takes its cue from 1950s stickers found in a junk shop. The stickers, which were intended to help children with reading, recounted the adventures of two children and showed a variety of images labelled in big clear letters - a picture of a rabbit labelled "rabbit", for example, and a picture of a jewel labelled "jewel", and, er, a picture of an impish-looking golden statue labelled simply "idol". Wrake set about making a freakish fairy tale made up largely of the images from these stickers, rendered in cut-out animation and set in front of computer-generated backgrounds. Like the stickers, most of the objects and animals seen in the short are labelled with floating text.

The idol, it turns out, has magical powers: he is able to turn things (particularly flies) into other things (particularly jewels, feathers and jars of ink). The children are delighted with their discovery and gather up the jewels that are filling their house, occasionally popping out to kill more animals to attract more flies, and trying to find a way to get the idol under their control.

But the kids' greed and flagrant disregard for animal welfare don't go unpunished for long, and eventually things go pear-shaped for the two nippers. Rabbit takes place in a strange, primal world where children have no parents and the only adults, aside from a briefly-glimpsed farmer, are some distance downtown and totally oblivious to the countryside goings-on. The two kids seem, if anything, to be part of the animal kingdom that they so recklessly exploit, although it is their tinkering with the natural order that causes their downfall. The short has a story that would have been interesting with just about any visual style, but what really gives Rabbit its appeal are the images from the 50s educational stickers. They lend a sense of familiarity to a deeply odd world. They also provide a lot of irony: aside from the obvious contrast between the cute kiddies hacking things up, there's the fact that some 1950s images that were never intended to be animated in the first place have ended up in a very modern piece of animation.

[chororine]

Animation Room: Atomic Betty

Atomic Cartoons, Breakthrough Films & Television, Telelmages Kids Canada/France, 2004-2008 (78 episode TV series) Created by Trevor Bentley, Mauro Casalese, Rob Davies and Olaf Miller

It's no surprise that Powerpuff Girls, the most commercially successful of Cartoon Network's in-house productions, would have its imitators. But with My Life as a Teenage Robot and now Atomic Betty, the show may be well on the way to spawning a subgenre.

Powerpuff Girls has an imaginative mixture: the tone and humour of a standard American cartoon with the settings and genre conventions of superhero comics and a light smattering of anime's visual style, wrapped up with cute characters. Atomic Betty has a single cute character inhabiting a totally uninspired universe. Apparently, the creators of shows such as these have been taking cues from the seminal 60s anime Astro Boy. But what they miss out is one of the main ingredients of Astro's staying power - Osamu Tezuka gave the manga not only slapstick comedy and kinetic superheroes, but heart. Astro, along with his friends and enemies, have array of emotions; broad, cartoony emotions, but emotions nonetheless. The stories also made light - but surprisingly poignant - philosophical and social comments. Powerpuff Girls makes up for what it lacks in that area with its charmingly offbeat sense of humour, which it delivers at a cracking pace; Betty just has action scenes turned into incomprehensible messes by widescreen switches and split screening thrown in seemingly just for the heck of it, and humour ranging from unremarkable to stale, with a lot of reliance on overused cartoon stock gags. The cleverest piece of humour is the name of bad guy Maximus' I.Q's servant, Minimus P.U. (Portable Underling). That should tell you something about the show's writing. Which brings me to the main point: Atomic Betty isn't all that funny. Not because the gags are bad - although that's often the case - but because there's very few of them. Despite the light-hearted tone, actual attempts to be funny between each episode's set-up and punchline are oddly sparse - apparently, Atomic Betty isn't intended to be an all-out comedy. As an action adventure-oriented series it is also let down, not only by the half-hearted action scenes and relatively slow pacing but by the fact that it simply can't be taken seriously. The show just doesn't know what it is. Even weirder is the fact that, despite all that, it's still a fairly entertaining show, in an "alright-to-watch-if-there's-nothing-else-to-do-and-for-whatever-reason-you-can't-do-anything-besides-watch-TV" kind of way. It's rarely boring and it's rarely painful; it's just so enormously unremarkable. Its chief redeeming feature, therefore, is that it's not as bad as it could be. So, while somewhat enjoyable, Atomic Betty is hard to recommend.

[chororine]

Animation Room: Hiromitsu Murakami shorts

SMALL WISH (Royal College of Art, 2002) Directed & written by Hiromitsu Murakami UK (1½ minutes) A little girl in bed, her face obscured by the mirror in the hand, says that she feels things changed that morning. She then lowers the mirror, revealing an enormous pair of eyes.

A BOY WHO WANTED TO BE A SUPER HERO (Royal College of Art, UK, 2004) Directed by Hiromitsu Murakami Written by Hiromitsu Murakami and Mark Simon Hewis 8½ minutes (part live-action) A boy, playing with a toy superhero and monster while leaning out a window, tells us how he dreamed of becoming a superhero. But, hearing about crimes that no superhero ever prevented, he became disillusioned with his dream and the whole world, locking himself in his bedroom. The monologue scene ends with the superhero figure dropping out of his hand and breaking on the pavement below. Next we see a panda, and the boy talks about his new dream - to become a panda that spent its time in a zoo eating bamboo leaves. He describes how he became more depressed as time went on, up to the point where he was thinking about jumping off the roof of his house. But on the roof he meets a walking panda soft toy (which, he says, feels familiar to him) that tells him he is now a superhero who must save the world. A shoal of fish with wings fly past. The boy goes to sleep and wakes up on a beach. The panda leads him down an empty road, while he muses about the world being a play performed for him. The two end up outside the boy's bedroom, and the boy wonders if he'll meet himself; the panda "undresses" (i.e, undoes a zip fastner on his back and vanishes) leaving his fur behind. The boy puts it on and walks into the door, finding a depressed five-years-younger version of himself. He remembers that, at that time, he cut class for the first time and was scared that things would change for the worse - but as no-one noticed, he became worried that nothing would change at all. The boy in the panda suit tells his past self "hold on there - I'm going to hold on too". And that, the boy tells us, was how he saved the world. He finishes by commenting that children's superheroes change as they get older, and his happened to be a panda. Compared to Hiromitsu Murakami's previous short Small Wish, Boy who Wanted to be a Super Hero is longer, heavier in theme and more technically accomplished. While Wish cut-out animation and, while not exactly cheerful, was rather light-hearted in its quirkiness, Super Hero is a mixture of live action and CGI that deals with its main character's depression. But it's not a gloomy film. It carries a message of hope and, even in its bleakest moments, is more delicately wistful than brooding. An interesting contrast with Small Wish is that Murakami's previous film had the main character leaving her fantasy (at which point her "Keane eyes" shrink back to a normal size), but the boy here stays in his dream world of superheroes and talking pandas. And his eyes stay wide open. But that's not to say that he isn't in touch with reality. He acknowledges its existence, if only as something to run from. And while Small Wish had fantasy intruding on reality - parents becoming penguins, teddy bears beating up bullies - Super Hero deals with more restrained fantasy; the panda only appears to the boy and, as we see later, is the boy. Also, instead of replacing reality, it simply helps the boy cope with reality. But why a panda? Again, we can't expect a kid's dreams to make sense. But there's some obvious symbolism in the boy's role model changing from a comic book hero who saves the world to a creature that - in the boy's own words - sits in a zoo and eats bamboo leaves all day. But, more subtly, when the boy becomes the panda he doesn't depart from reality - he provides comfort for himself, so that he can "hold on there" and, again, cope with reality. A Boy who Wanted to be a Super Hero is a coming of age tale. (As a side note, the Japanese-British Murakami has included another nod to his heritage. Despite the Coronation Street-esque British setting, the boy's two toys are a Power Ranger-style hero and a Godzilla-like monster. Just thought I'd point that out.)

[chororine]

Animation Room: The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina

Hyperion Pictures, Miramax Films, 2002, U.S.A. (74 minutes) Directed by Glenn Chaika Written by Willard Carrol Based on the stories "Little Tiny or Thumbelina" by Hans Christian Anderson and "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

As babies, Thumbelina (Jennifer Love Hewitt) and Tom Thumb (Elijah Wood) are kidnapped from a village of tiny people by a cruel circus ringmaster. While Thumbelina ends up in his freak show, Tom is separated and adopted by a kindly old man. As teenagers, Thumbelina escapes from the circus to look for members of her own kind, while Tom is let out into the world by his adoptive father. The two meet up and encounter friends (insects, mice and a bird) and enemies (a kid who wants to keep them in glass jars and the tyrannical Mole King who wants Thumbelina for a wife) before finding their home city, where they find that they are actually prince and princess.

"It's a normal day - normal birds, normal amphibians, normal raccoon guano, tiny girl in a sardine can... tiny girl in a sardine can!?"

Then, of course, there's Tom Thumb himself. Tom is useless. He's another bland love interest in the Disney tradition, but Thumbelina is essentially a straight partner to the various comedy animals. Straight partners and bland love interests have no chemistry. Tom really should have been portrayed as a comedy sidekick - after all, Thumbelina is at her most entertaining when she's interacting with the OTT Mole King. To Carrol's credit, the story structure isn't too bad. There are a number of interesting set pieces, and the side characters are all introduced at just the right time, and used in just the right scenes. But even so, I found myself annoyed at some elements of the storyline - for a start, there's the ending where the two heroes become royalty in their fairy tale city. Thumbelina had ostensibly been looking for this town for the entire film, but the plot was ultimately about the two characters' adventures with the animals. Coming so soon after the climactic confrontation with the Mole King - a villain totally unrelated to the search for the city - the ending felt tacked on.

Then there are the songs - Thumbelina performs an atrociously dull "I want" number just when the plot is starting to pick up; the Mole King does an entertaining but unnecessary "I'm so evil" song; and, finally, Tom and Thumbelina sing a love song that's so bad it's just bizarre:

'One day the birds will sing The trees and everything Will go "one, two, cha cha cha, one, two, cha cha"'

The contrived ending, bland love interest and syrupy songs are all out-of-place fragments of the Disney formula. Did Thumbelina have to become yet another princess? I preferred the girl in the pink sweater. Considering that this film, in so many respects, tries to avoid being a Disney fairy tale, it could have taken the Shrek route and turned convention on its head. Come to think of it, given that the film plays so loose with Hans Christian Anderson's original, it didn't need to be "Thumbelina" at all. The animals and landscapes are so heavily caricatured that it could just have easily starred a pair of ordinary-sized children in a land of monsters. After all, Don Bluth had already done Thumbelina in 1994. The Adventures of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina is an enormous missed opportunity. There's so much to like about it, but everything else conspires to ruin it. Willard Carrol had some good ideas on his hands, and you can't deny that there's a real spark here; maybe if he'd had a decent co-writer, this could've at least been on par with The Brave Little Toaster. But as it is, and coming out between Spirited Away and Triplets of Belleville, Tom Thumb and Thumbelina amounts to a sad reminder of everything that we don't need in animation today.