The Sweater

Post #8

I was looking through the National Film Board of Canada's website and stumbled upon this short animation called The Sweater. It is a distinctly Canadian story about a little boy that is forced to wear the hockey jersey of another team. I found the flatness of the animation very interesting in it.

The film is based off of a children's book called The Hockey Sweater. The animation very much resembles a story book with how flat it is and the simplicity of it. The animation doesn't include a lot of details or any depth. I found the animation very similar to the drawings of Eric Carle's, who wrote and illustrated such children's books as The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? Color are very rich and the figures are solid. Even without the depth in both Carle's work and The Sweater the images hold a lot of weight. The simplicity and the fluidity of the work gives a weight to the images without having a great deal of depth.

The flatness and simplicity of the animation also plays with the simplicity of the story line. The animations is aimed toward children and has that simplistic flat children's story plot. The animation well reflects the nature of the story.

The animation has a beautiful quality to it. It has a fluid painting quality to it that leads you through the animation and keeps you locked in.

Stop Motion

Post #7

Experimental Madness

Post #6
I left animation on Monday seeing dots. After three hours of what I can only describe as circles flying at me, my head was beginning to hurt. Once I had time to let the animations settle in me (and my eyes stopped feeling like shapes were attacking me), I began to be able to see all the ways experimental animation have affected and relate to none experimental.

One way I saw that the experimental animations we saw related to other things is in segments of other animated films. The one I thought of was the trippy acid section of Dumbo. The way the elephants morphed and moved in Dumbo's drunken dream reminded me of the way some the animated shapes morphed and moved about the screen. Particularly in the kaleidoscope like one.

Another thing I thought has been affected by experimental animation is music videos. The relation of many of the animations to music makes them "music videos" in some ways. I can see how the way images relate to sound effects music videos today.

Up!

Post #5

In the spirit of The Academy Awards, I recently watched Up I usually don’t bother watching Disney movies unless I am with a little kid or one of my friends wants to watch it. I have nostalgia for Disney but usually I would rather watch a film that doesn’t include talking animals. However, I kept hearing great things about Up so I thought why not give it a try.

The first thing I was struck by in Up was how quickly I found I cared about the characters. The movie begins with a five-minute montage of the old man, Carl, and his wife, Ellie’s, life together. I find that usually montages in any film, live action or animation, are not necessarily very effective. Montages often can come off across as cheesy cliché summary. In Up I found it to be tremendously affective. I was able to instantly see the love between these two characters. They highlighted upon all the right moments like something as simple as fixing up a house, cloud watching, having dreams like the wife’s South American adventure, and losing dreams like not being able to have a child.

One of the things I felt was so affective about the montage was the use of recurring images. The most obvious is the use of the balloons. Carl as a young boy loses his balloon, Ellie returns it to him, Carl sells balloons, and later when Ellie is in the hospital Carl sends a balloon in the same way Ellie did for him. Later in the film Carl flies his house away using tons of balloon. They also used other images to go along with the theme of “up” like clouds in the sky and going up a hill.

Another interesting thing about the montage is was entirely non-diagetic sound. The only sound was the beautiful score. It fit so well and carried the mood perfectly. All of these things sucked you into this world so much that you almost believed if you had enough balloons you really could carry your house away. I think what made the montage in Up work so well is that every image, sound, and note counted and meant something.