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.
I agree that this film has a beautiful style and quality. The constant jostling and quick shifts of color and shape remind me of the style of the Beatles' Yellow Submarine. I love this shifting style because it's so captivating. However, I kind of have to disagree about the flatness of the piece. I personally thought it had some depth to it; at certain points, the characters were rendered with shading to give them an almost 3-dimensional quality. I do agree that the background was flat, but the quality and richness of the characters drew away from its lack of depth.
ReplyDeleteBrown bear brown bear was one of my favorite books as a child!
ReplyDeleteThe Animation style of this film is very reminiscent of 'The Street' by Leaf. I'm not sure it was done, but it almost looked like Leaf's style of painting on glass with a little less metamorphosis. This animation did show depth in an interesting way though. when expression was shown or when a character moved closer to the camera. Although this animation did not use as much metamorphosis of perspective and metamorphosis as scene transition, it used it within the scenes nonetheless.
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