Animation

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Insan3
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Re: Animation

Post by Insan3 »

I'm a huge fan of animation, particularly anime. My favorites include Monster, Evangelion, Legend of the Galactic Heroes, Maison Ikkoku, Perfect Blue, Ghost in the Shell, and many others. I'd say I'm more of an anime fan than a live action fan at this point.

Mentaculus
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Re: Animation

Post by Mentaculus »

We devolved into Anime. Let me try.

I have a particular soft spot in my heart for animation as an art form for many reasons: it can express worlds in vivid detail that live-action can only hint at, the creators have intimate and total control over the visualization of expression and movements - which only leads to greater pathos and character, and there is often a bold formal experimentalism at work which is absent in other fare. Like Doggie Poo.

But seriously, while I have a soft spot for anime (ALL the works of Satoshi Kon, for ALL the above reasons), Watanabe Shinichiro, and of course the Studio Ghibli crew, animation is slowly gaining a greater audience through ever-increasing distribution channels. Check out the Blu-Ray release Animation Express for some killer Canadian shorts, or the work of the Brothers Quay, or even the work at Pixar (including the pre-or-semi-Pixar Pixars, like The Brave Little Toaster and The Iron Giant). Then tell me animation isn't a medium worth scholarly consideration. I'll even defend the genius of Walt Disney (whose many fans included Sergei Eisenstein). The greatest sin that the American mainstream perpetuates is that animation is strictly for children or adults with stunted brain-growth.

paulofilmo
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Re: Animation

Post by paulofilmo »

Norstein has been my most important discovery since my last post. I've seen Hedgehog in the Fog many times. I didn't particularly like it the first few viewings, but now it's very dear to me.

I was given a start when reading in an interview with my favourite Ghibli director, Isao Takahata*, when he cites the French Canadian animator, Frédéric Back, as an influence. Back's adaptation of Jean Giono's The Man Who Planted Trees is one of my favourite films.

Image

So two directors are mentioned that uniquely hold my affection.. but there's a third:

I: So, which are the works which influenced you the most?

T: Well, I quite admire the Canadian, Frederick Back, and the Russian, Yuri Norstein.


Image

Wikipedia wrote:Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn (Russian: Ю́рий Бори́сович Норште́йн), or Yuri Norstein (born September 15, 1941) is an award-winning Russian animator best known for his animated shorts, Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales. Since 1981 he has been working on a feature film called The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol of the same name.


The still above is of Norstein's most lauded, Tale of Tales, and comes from the Shooting Down Pictures blog. In this link you'll find analysis, reviews, more stills, as well as the short film. Oh, and a section of documentary, where Norstein shows his methods and explains the partnership with his wife -- guaranteed to wipe away any cynicism modern Hollywood has instilled.

- Paul Wells, Understanding Animation. Routledge, 1998. Pages 93, 94 wrote: Voted as the best animated film of all time by animators and critics at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales, is a personal, and often profound, statement of atavistic recollection. Norstein uses the animated form to recall primal and ancestral sources of human feeling and experience. Fusing folk-tale, memory and personal symbolism, Norstein achieves associative relations which move beyond the realms of standard representations of time and space, privileging the psychological and emotional as the focusing agents in relating images, rather than using orthodox modes of story-telling. As Norstein himself suggests, ‘The sanctity of the image, or rather its construction, seems to move in gradually from all sides; the elements that coagulate create the image’.

Whilst the workings of an artist like Norstein may, in the first instance, seem impenetrable to the viewer, it is important to recognize that such methodologies foreground the idea of image-making as a tension between conscious and unconscious experience. This may be understood as a process which accepts and includes images which emerge from a number of sources and which seem at first to have no particular relationship. Further, such images, whether they are perceived constructions of real physical space, fragmentary recollections of dreams, half-remembered visions, hallucinations and fantasies, or pictures without past or purpose conjured in the mind, are not forced into a coherent story, though they do possess their own narrative which informs the relational conception of the film. The images possess an ontological equivalence, and in being valued as equally valid and important whatever their source, occupy a narrative space which refuses to categorise any one character or event as its presiding or dominant element. Tale of Tales refuses all obvious signposts of plot, preferring instead a system of leitmotifs, recurring images that play out their own subtle differences and developments as part of a wider scheme of recollection. It may be useful to stress that Norstein’s work is recollection; a gathering of images which define the psyche and the act of memory as an act of creativity. As Mikhail Yampolsky has noted, ‘What confronts us is not simply a film about memory, but a film built like memory itself, which imitates in its spatial composition the structural texture of our consciousness.’

Animation is especially suited to the process of associative linking, both as a methodology by which to create image systems, and as a mechanism by which to understand them. Understanding these images only comes from an active participation in the images as the repository of meaning in their own right, and not necessarily, in direct connection to other images. Norstein and Tarkovsky create works which ultimately require the viewer to empathise as well as analyse, and this dimension of feeling – what Norstein calls the ’spinal cord’ of emotional recognition – is the quality which lyricises the image. The ‘deductions’ that are made possible by this kind of involvement are those which relate the personal to the universal. Norstein essentially engages with his childhood during the war, and through the accumulation of the everyday details and events (real and imagined) of his past life, given special emphasis by the selectivity of memory, he creates a text which elevates the expression of the psyche’s own sense of history to the level of poetic insight and spiritual epiphany.





Hedgehog in the Fog - youtube - HQ - 10 minutes



*Ghibli director Isao Takahata is best known for Grave of the Fireflies. However, my favourite film of his is Only Yesterday, a sensitive, slice-of-life portrait of a 27-year-old female office worker, who reminisces about her childhood while considering the choices she is confronted with in the present. Naturalist themes, nostalgia, and Hungarian folk music abound. Miyazaki makes marvelous films for everyone. Takahata makes films just for me.



from above wrote:Oh, and a section of documentary, where Norstein shows his methods and explains the partnership with his wife -- guaranteed to wipe away any cynicism modern Hollywood has instilled.


This control is important. Nothing rushed, just a patient perfectionism, as if to say any other method would be dishonest. An artisan mentalitiy; the utmost care.

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Oliver Sacks' Ted Talk on hallucination:

Oliver Sacks wrote:There is another part of the brain which is especially activated when one sees cartoons. It's activated when one recognizes cartoons, when one draws cartoons, and when one hallucinates them. It's very interesting that that should be specific.

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