Goodbye Blog

I've had such an Anime weekend ^^

After the last lecture i wanted to watch more anime, more dammit MORE! So i spent all weekend watching them hehe. Akira, Princess Mononoke, Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo!

Omg Warner Brothers are planning to do a live-action remake of Akira D= Noooooo they'll murder it! Live action films are never as good as animes, well DeathNote was good (except for Misa) but that was Japanese, America won't do it right. And why can't they think of their own stories instead of just constantly doing crappy remakes? The Japanese film industry has originality and a sense of culture and magic that America just can't beat.

Alternative Disney Princesses ;)

Pretty little 'happily-ever-after' Disney Princesses are boring but fortunately for me there's some warped artists out there who improve them!

Jeffrey Thomas on DeviantArt has created a "Twisted Princess" series taking Disney's beloved characters and giving them a nice turn for the macabre. He's also created backstories for them which i find just as interesting as the images! You can check them out here:  http://jeftoon01.deviantart.com/gallery/11344500

Jeffrey (they're BOTH called Jeffrey! Haha how odd!) Scott Campbell is an American comic book artist who has worked for Marvel Comics and the video games industry and he's made Disney princesses sexy! So adults can enjoy the stories too hehe ;) The images are available in a calendar and as individual posters but i've found them all together here: http://www.dumage.com/disney-for-adults/

Much better ;D

Last Lecture =(

Pity it's the last lecture cause Bill seemed to be finally getting the hang of it. It was still very heavily animation orientated but at least it was animation I liked this time, especially the Anime. ^^ He even got a reference to character creation in!

It was about 'The Circle of Life: Globalisation of Culture and the Relationship Between Japanese and American Traditions' and Bill started by discussing how technology being better does not always guarantee better work. Linear progression & technological determinism = bad!

We watched the breakthrough Pixar animation of Andre and Wally B which featured:

motion blur
objects bending
particle systems
an injection of humour!
The Luxo Lamps animation was just adorable and amazing with how they managed to express so many emotions but Tin Toy was just plain creep! They tried to make the baby realistic and cute apparently but went way beyond Uncanny Valley and into 'please-can-i-throw-that-baby-into-a-valley' territory! =S

Bill then discussed anthropomorphism and synthetic nature in the history on animation.
Ideology naturalises the social
Takes the cultural and social amd projects it as natural, treats changeable relations as fixed.
Althusser -a French dude that killed his wife- posited that ideology is "the false obviousness of everyday life."
No better place to explore this than in cartoons (the medium 'for children') featuring visions of Nature.

We watched clips from the traumatic Bambi which featured:

• multiplaning camera - paraplex perception
• anatomically correct animals -a real deer was brought into the studio to aid this!
• Tyrus Wong's input of the Chinese art of blurring and voids in the background

Bill then decided to bring up 'Sexuality in Disney' and showed us the scene in which Flower, Thumper and Bambi get 'Twitterpated' and described them as getting full body erections as they go all stiff and then vibrate...

Well Disney is trying to corrupt the youth and make them hyper sexual and gay, i mean look at this undeniable proof:

Gotta love conspiracy theories! It didn't mention anti-semitism though and we all know Walter was a Nazi supporter and why were there no non-white princesses until after he died... hmm? Hmm? HMM?!

They're exactly the same!! =O

Apparently we were going to look at Warner Brothers too but as time was running away with us he skipped that to get to the best bit: anime!

We watched lots of My Neighbour Totoro and that's when Bill got the reference to Character Creation in! He noted that the characters look stereotypically scary, Totoro with his huge mouth and claws and supernatural powers and the Catbus with it's strange body and uncanny Cheshire cat smile. They look like they should be scary monsters but in actual fact they're lovely. Unless you find an alternate twisted image of them:  

Bill also mentioned that the scene where they make the oak tree grow is eerily reminiscent of the mushroom clouds caused by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'd never made that link before despite being well aware of both the film and bombs. I can only think it's because the film is so magical and bewitching that i don't think about the real world whilst watching it. 

Talking of which the synthetic nature created in My Neighbour Totoro is far more enchanting and other wordly than Disney. Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki described it as: "It was nature painted with translucent colours." Disney borrows from Chinese traditional art but i don't think it has the same wonder and magic as Japanese anime. 

I really should write more here...

Art v Commerce or just all about Animation as it happens...

Animation is not the art of drawings-that-move, but rather the art of movements-that-are-drawn. What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame.

~ Norman McLaren

We started by watching the 2008 homage to Fantasmagorie to celebrate it's centenary. Bill dicussed how technological determinism isn't all it's cracked up to be as the 2008 version wasn't actually as good, let alone better as the 1908 origional, the CGI rendering didn;t have the same energy spontenaity, and aura as the hand drawn animation. Walter Benjamin touches on this in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" talking about how mechanically reproduced art is lacking something, what he refers to as an 'aura'. In his opinion only unique and handmade art has a true 'aura'. For example if you go to Le Louvre and stand before the Mona Lisa, you get a "Holy-Crap Da vinci actually touched that! This was done with the masters very hand!" kind of feeling whereas when you see a photograph of her your reaction is much more like "meh, it's the Mona Lisa"

Bill then talked about how hand drawn animations have a metaphoric energy and interesting dynamics are created between the lines and their creator.  The Looney Tunes episode "Duck Amuck" is a great example of how this can be exploited. In the episode Daffy is being tormented by a sadistic unseen hand that constantly changes Daffy's clothes, location, voice and even body, ignoring or over literally interpreting Daffy's frantic yelps until at the end it is revealed that the animator is Bugs Bunny. It contains a lot of self referential humour and breaks the fourth wall but more importantly showed for the first time that you can create characters that are recognisable even when their voices are changed and bodies erased or metamorphosed.

We then watched Street of Crocodiles the renowned short film by the Brothers Quay. I'd never actually watched any of the Brothers Quay's work which is a bit shameful when i love Jan Svankmajer's work so much. I love this type of stop motion animation, it was very slow and metaphorical but i don't mind that. I loved the gloomy haunting atmosphere and creepy broken dolls are always good.  After seeing their work however i was immediately reminded of Tool's videos and thought that maybe they directed them but after researching this i found it's a common, but wrong, thought. Their video's are in fact often created by Adam Jones who is influenced by the Brothers Quay.

Nine Inch Nail's Closer is also heavily influenced by this animation as is, i feel, The Birthday Massacre's Blue with it's prevalent creepy dolls.

WARNING! WARNING! There will be violence in this post!

SCREEN VIOLENCE

In this lecture we examined the claim that exposure to screen violence causes desensitisation in today’s youth. Bill discussed On Killing by Lt. General Grossman who argues that violent videogames (or “murder simulators” as he prefers to call them) work in the same way as modern army combat training to acclimatize soldiers to the concept of killing. In World War II it is reported that the majority of soldiers never fired their weapons, because as human beings most of us have an innate resistance to killing another person (yet it's so easy to murder poor little animals what's the difference really? Humanity disgusts me.) So after the war the government introduced measures to break down this resistance and instill the 'warrior instinct' to provide the necessary aggression to meet the enemy unflinchingly in the important situation of kill or be killed. Apparently it really worked but i don't see why they had a problem anyway i think modern warfare's cowardly. Where's the bravery in shooting some speck in the distance or bombing people with a missile while you're all cosy inside? I'd be so pissed off if someone shot me, i mean if you're gonna kill me at least get my blood on your hands. 

Maybe videogames with their infamous headshots have caused this but i doubt it. After the shocking Columbine school shooting people blamed the shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold's  actions on a videogame, Doom that they were obsessed with. It was a first player shooter game with graphic and interactive violence. The movie Natural Born Killers (1994) which follows a pair of mass murderers was also targeted as was poor Marilyn Manson and the Goth subculture even though the shooters were found to not like Manson's music or be any more involved in Goth subculture than wearing trench coats. Whether or not Harris and Klybold were emulating Doom when they killed 12 fellow pupils and 1 teacher, is pointless speculation to me. Thousands of other kids played that game and the massacre was just one isolated case so it's clear to me that they would be likely to commit these crimes regardless of any media influence. Most people are able to differentiate between what we see in the media and what is real life and I think it is unfair to condemn screen violence just because a tiny percentage of people cannot. For example, I don't play videogames (i enjoy watching someone play one with a good storyline though) but I love horror and gore films with with a sick pleasure and listen to supposedly satanic music yet i'm overly empathetic and a vegetarian and feel in no way that i've been influenced to shoot someone in the face. 


Oh, i would rip out Ruggero Deodato's eyes and make him eat them though for killing 7 animals (1 of them just for a reshoot) in Cannibal Holocaust (1980)!  Which brings me onto what we discussed in our seminar: what are our responses to violence in films and what are our limits?  


I'm not really shocked or disgusted by anything i've seen, i know humans are capable of all the horrific things portrayed in films and worse. My favourite is in Hostel 2 when the ugly chick gets strung up naked and a goth chick walks in with a scythe and proceeds to slice the girl up and bathe in her blood. This is obviously based on the legend of 'The Blood Countess', one Elizabeth Bathory who supposedly bathed in the blood of virgin girls to retain her youth. I'm sure goat's milk would have been less messy.

 But horror films are just getting silly now trying to be more gross and disgusting than the last with no real storyline. *yawn* We know they're not real so they have to rely on excellent special effects to make the films even worthy of watching and merit. Of course there is the matter of 'snuff films' which would be very different if they actually exist. The aforementioned Cannibal Holocaust was so strongly thought to be a real snuff film that Ruggero Deodato had to appear in court with the cast to prove they were actually still alive. The fact that he had actually mutilated and murdered several animals just for the purpose of the film didn't matter though urgh! That's where i draw the line. Do not bring animals into humanity's sick desires! There was just no need, he clearly had a great special effects team working for him to make the human deaths seem so real why couldn't he do the same with the animals? I felt similarly uncomfortable watching Freaks as i knew the cast were real deformed people. I would've reacted differently if it was prosthetics i could've admired the creative skills then but i just felt awkward and bad watching real people =S 


Not that i think they should be censored. Humans are violent sexual beings and any attempt to deny this is just self denial. Just because we don't go out raping and murdering it doesn't mean we don't have the capability to do so we just choose to live more moral lives. Our ancestors were prone to such acts we just live in a more civilised culture now where that behaviour is rightly disproved of and punished. Ivan suggested that we enjoy screen violence so much because it's a form of catharsis and i believe this also.If we didn't watch these films featuring fictional people pretending to smash peoples head's in maybe we would go around doing just that.  

30 Seconds to Mar's Hurricane video was first banned then censored to death because of it's terrible violent and sexual scenes. Grow up. It's not even that bad it's an exploration of our dark dreams and secret fantasies and people shouldn't hide from this.

Flyleaf's Cassie is based on the alleged exchange between Cassie Bernall and Eric Harris in which the latter asked the former if she believed in God and when she answered 'yes' he shot her dead.