14: South Park and Muhammad

During the last two weeks, South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have been pushing some boundaries and provoking outrage among the Muslim community. Known for their willingness to make fun of and and all sacred cows, Stone and Parker's two most recent episode continues this trend by bringing back some story lines from earlier episodes (such as Mecha Streisand, Tom Cruise, and Scott Tenorman). They also attempted to depict the prophet Muhammad, but due to the Islamic communities problem with the image of Muhammad, were forced to censor his image or hide him in a bear suit. After the first episode in the two part series, the website revolutionmuslim.com posted this thinly veiled threat on its website:

"We have to warn Matt and Trey that what is they are doing is stupid and they will probably end up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but the warning of a reality of what will likely happen to them."

This has created a wellspring of internet talk regarding the limits and importance of the freedom of speech. The creator of revolutionmuslim.com claims that Stone and Parker may end up with a fate similar to that of Theo Van Gogh, the Dutch film maker who was killed after doing a documentary about Islam. Parker and Stone were not deterred and turned the second episode in the series in, complete with images of Muhammad, which were then censored by Comedy Central as a response to the above statement.

So the question is whether Comedy Central acted responsibly by editing the show? Or should they have let the show air as Stone and Parker intended it to? What does this censorship say about the state of the freedome of speech in our country at the moment?

Dali and Disney Collaboration

13: PIXAR YAY!

Pixar has a relatively small output over the last 15 years but each of their films is as good as the last. Many get noticed for awards and earn them with their strong sense of ethics and entertainment that they lace each of their films with. In terms of contemporary animated film studios Pixar is the one that continues to put out great films that do not rely on typical genre motifs and break animation codes.

Remember Toy Story? That was awesome. The story of Buzz and Woody getting to know each other and learning more about themselves, becoming self aware is a theme that accentuates what Pixar is known for: creating stories that interest and educate the viewers.

Toy Story 2? The greatness continued as we see Buzz and Woody's relationship blossom overcome adversity. Pixar continues to produce films with these brilliant analyses of the human condition, such as Wall-E, Up and Monsters Inc. They probe the minds of the post modern audience.

Crazy animation

This is awesome

A scholarly look at Disneys Alladin

http://www.nickmongo.com/comics/lf/?p=572

9: Stop Motion Animation

In class we watched Nick Park's Creature Comforts, and although this short is rather genius in it's use of real interviews to voice the animals in the cages, it is not Park's most famous work. The Wallace and Gromit series, consisting of A Close Shave, The Wrong Trousers, and A Grand Day Out have gained world wide recognition and even led to Park's creation of a feature film: Wallace and Gromit; The Curse of the Were-Rabbit.  These claymation works really emphasize the virtuosity of Park and his unique story telling ability involving Wallace's unique relation with his non-speaking, but nonetheless anthropomorphic dog, Gromit.

The whole series is very entertaining and I have loved them since I was a kid. Whether going to the moon to get cheese, confusing pants, or thwarting heists, Wallace and Gromit continually amuses and entertains. I have always been amazed that Gromit doesn't talk. In a Disney version of these stories Gromit most definitely would be a speaking dog, and the conversations between he and Wallace would have been inane at best.

A few years ago Park's studio burned down, losing many of the original sets that had been designed for the films, a tragic loss for stop motion animation.  These miniatures were incredibly intricate and must have taken hours to make.  Furthermore, the audiences of the shows could definitely tell that these sets were miniature, but due to the claymation animation, most could easily look past the less than perfect animation and use their imagination to look deeper within the cartoons for the essence underneath.

9: New South Park

In the South Park episode that premiered last Wednesday, Trey Parker and Matt Stone really epitomized the self referential humor that the show is known for. Having read J.D. Sallinger's "Catcher in the Rye", Cartman, Kyle, Stan, and Kenny decide to write a more obscene book that will certainly be banned by the schools.  Fearful of the trouble they will be in when Stan's mother reads the book, they claim that Butters is the author, not realizing that the public thinks the book is brilliant. This episode is a personal analysis of the debate over and about South Park, and a thourough synopsis of the shows history.

The book, "Scrotie McBoogerballs", represents the basic obscenity that Parker and Stone intended with their show when they first developed it. Like Cartman, Kenny, Stan, and Kyle, Parker and Stone intended to shock the establishment with the crassness of South Park. However, once it premiered the public thought it was brilliant, and refused to acknowledge its crudeness.

Also, when some of the critics in the episode are analyzing the book, they claim that it is both liberal and conservative. This is a reference to the debate around Parker and Stone's political leanings. In 2005 Brian C. Anderson published a book called "South Park Conservatives" claiming that the show's creators emphasize a new form of conservatism on television. Once the book was published, leading liberal scholars disagreed and published works arguing for the liberal bent of South Park. Parker and Stone have repeatedly denied political affiliations, their basic stance seems to stand with libertarians, and with neither liberals nor conservatives.

Stop Motion

Here's the ocean!

8:

The Simpsons has been on the air since 1990, and although it was one of the best shows in its time, its time is coming to and end. Seasons three through 9 host a spectacular number for great episodes including "The Stone Masons", "Marge vs. The Monorai" and "Bart of Darkness". However, I'm not sure how long Matt Groening will keep the show running, but I find with each new episode, The Simpsons loses more and more of its claim to be the greatest television show of all time. 


In one of the most recent episode of The Simpsons, entitlted "Postcards from the Wedge", we find Bart in a predicament in which he can no longer garner the attention for his mischief that he once did.  As the plot evolves we see Homer and Marge fight over how to handle Bart, and then make up again. It seems that any criticism of American culture that had gone on in previous season has now completely disappeared, leaving sappy romance and happy endings in its place.

Furthermore, many of the most interesting characters, such as Moe, Otto, and Police Chief Wiggum, only make small cameos, leaving their fully developed characters in the wake of the Simpson family. No longer do we hear weird tales from their lives, but we are completely focused on the Simpsons.  Sad to say, but I think its long time that Groening accepts that the show has lost its way and cancels it, before it loses all the prestige it once attained.

7: Adult Animation Archetypes

I was watching Futurama, and I began wondering what kind of characters are recurring through most of the adult animated shows on contemporary television?  Futurama, South Park, King of the Hill and Family Guy all use similar archetypes throughout their series, and I am going to expound on these briefly.  Characters such as Bender, Cartman, Meg, and Peggy Hill reflect similar characteristics throughout these three shows.

Peter Griffin in Family Guy, Bender in Futurama, and Cartman in South Park are all clearly the most interesting characters in their respective shows.  Cartman's evil genius, Peter's stupidity, and Bender's hatred for all mankind are very similar characteristics because they express much of the driving humor in the shows.  They drive the shows and are the most interesting people to look at, holding the viewers attention throughout.

Furthermore, characters such as Peggy Hill in King of the Hill, Meg in Family Guy, and Zoidberg in Futurama all represent the characters that are kinds of punching bags.  Meg is constantly being made fun of by all the characters in Family Guy.  Peggy, although she thinks she is smart, is constantly proven to be dumber than she thinks she is.  Similarly Zoidberg represents the same character archetype in the sense that the viewer and the other characters in the show hate him.

6:Popeye's Masuclinity

From his less that auspicious beginnings close by in Chester Illinois, Popeye has become a symbol of masculinity in cartoons.  This spinach eating (steroids?), Olive Oyl loving, Bluto punching man is the representation about all that is good and pure in society, but at the same point represents a misconception of masculinity.  If you are not ripped to shreds and saving women from bad men all the time, are you less of a man than Popeye?

Even as Popeye symbolizes masculinity, Superman continues the tradition of unrealistic representations of men in animation. Wells says in Understanding Animation that "Clark Kent is the helpless, well-meaning, inadequate, defined by the limitations of his human-ness [and] Superman is a mythic role model" (Wells, 193).  Just as Popeye is a normal guy until he eats his spinach Clark Kent is normal until he unveils that he is Superman.

However, unlike other super heroes who don costumes to create their alter-ego who fights crime, Superman always wears a costume, and only becomes a crime fighter when he removes his costume.  This is a significant point because Superman only actualizes his super-ness when he is not in costume, whereas other super heroes must put theirs on.

5: Psychedelic Animation.

As I was reading Art In Motion, Maureen Furniss mentioned that some abstract animator have "use[ed] hallucinogenic drugs to encourage intuitive thought processes" (Furniss, 252). This got me curious as to what I knew that had been animated with the help of psychedelics, and I quickly recognized two movies that fit perfectly with this chapter and with the themes of psychedelic animation: Pink Floyd's The Wall and part of The Grateful Dead movie. With both of these clips we can see the mix of abstract animation with realist animation, but it seems as though psychedelics will drive the animator more towards a surrealist style than an abstract one.

Clip from The Grateful Dead Movie

Clip from Pink Floyd's The Wall

In both of these clips we see a subtle mix of narrative with abstraction.  In The Wall, the narrative lies with the music itself, as Pink Floyd made it as a narrative album, but through the animation we can discover new links between the right and left sides of our brains. This mix of abstraction and narrative is present in The Grateful Dead Movie, as we see the beginnings of a story, a space man playing pinball, but what slowly turns into a surrealistic motorcycle trip with a dead Uncle Sam.

However, most of the animation in both films does not only on abstraction, but an elaborate mixture of abstraction and surrealism.  In The Grateful Dead Movie we see mountains morphing into feet, flowers floating in mid air, and a skeleton in a suit jacket leading us on a crazy trip into the desert.  However, a little after four minutes into the clip we  can see a strict abstract animation develop as Uncle Sam rides into nowhere. The Wall provides similar combination of abstraction and surrealism, morphing flowers, but also giving us shots where it is hard to imagine what we are seeing.

Metamorphosis

This reminded me of the discussion about metamorphosis from class today.

4: South Park's Narrative Structure

As I was reading through Wells's description of the narrative structures that dominate animations, I began to wonder what narrative structures dominate South Park.  It seems that metamorphosis is rarely used, as in terms of a cartoon South Park is fairly realistic, and condensation, although used, is rarely as applied as the concepts of metaphor and symbolism.  Wells states "the metaphor offers the possibility of a number of discourses within its over-arching framework" which is what much of the genius behind South Park relies upon (Wells, 84).

In the early seasons of South Park Matt Stone and Trey Parker were much less liberal with their use of metaphor and symbolism, and most of their stories and images represented themselves directly. In later seasons Parker and Stone began to use these two narrative devices to advance South Park beyond a silly, foul mouthed cartoon, and into a brilliant satire of American culture.  For instance, in the season eight episode "Douche and Turd", the elementary school is required to vote for a new mascot, and due to Cartman's interference, the choice is between and giant douche and turd sandwich.  Taken at face value this is a simple story, but when considered in context of the 2004 presidential election Stone and Parker have created a complex metaphor.  As Wells says "metaphors make the literal interpretation of images ambiguous and sometimes contradictory because they invite an engagement with the symbolic over and above the self-evident" (Wells, 84).  This episode presents more than just the literal interpretation of a grade school mascot election, asking the viewer to look beyond the literal images and into the symbolism they have used to vocalize their disappointment in the choices of the 2004 presidential election.

Stone and Parker have continued this tradition of metaphors through their animation with many episodes which are metaphors for contemporary conditions in America.  This is another aspect of their work which is significant.  The quick production schedule of their shows allows them to comment on current events within a week of the event.  They are able to create symbolism and metaphors which the common viewer should be able to determine due to their connection with contemporary events.

Jealous

I really wish this had been my flipbook.

3: Drafting from Comic Books

Dear Intraweb,
As I read through Donald Grafton's article "Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1898-1928, Grafton explicated a trend which I find very common in contemporary cinema.  Grafton notes that many comic strip artists's work had been produced into live action films. However after a while it became more common to produce an animated work from a comic strip, since the two mediums seemed to coincide on many levels. It seems after many decades, this idea of transforming comic strips into live action movies has had a resurrection in cinema with the likes of Sin City, Spiderman, and Watchmen having been turned into live action films. 


This graphic novels have made a large chunk of money for the movie studios that produce them, and this is not a coincidence.  Many have loved these comic books and are very happy to see them turned into movies, especially when they are well done.  A film such as Sin City takes scenes directly from the graphic novel and turns them into a live action movie.  Here is an example




We can see that the director, Robert Rodriguez, has taken scenes from the comic book and translated them into literal live action versions of the book.  This is very similar to the technique used by people such as Lumiere to adapt Christophe's work "Historie sans paroles-Un Arroseur public".  Lumiere has attempted to take the completely false world of Christophe's cartoon and turn into real life.

Similarly, Zach Snyder's Watchmen produced a similarly uncanny resemblance to the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons.  The movie, although it skirts around certain plot lines and other parts of the graphic novel, does the book artistic justice by lifting much of its images directly from the artwork in the book.  We can see that the strategy of turning comic strips into live action movies has come back, and from the look of the movies box office receipts, the comic strip medium will continue to be a mainstay of major studios for years to come.

Another Animation

Dear Intraweb,
Here's an interesting animation designed on a record player I believe.  It helps explain a lot of what we have talked about in class.

Enjoy,
Noah

Line Animation

Dear Intraweb,
I thought this should be spread around.

Enjoy,
Noah

2: Animation and the Uncanny

Dear Intraweb,
In chapter 2 of "Understanding Animation" by Paul Wells, Wells refers to the implicit uncanniness of any animation that appears life like.  Sigmund Freud developed the concept of the uncanny, or "unheimlich" in German, in his his essay "The Uncanny".  The basic notion of the uncanny is the appearance of something that is familiar but also incredibly foreign at the same time. Wells argues that the uncanny is intimately connected with animation because it creates "an environment where inanimate lines, objects and materials have the illusion of life" (Wells, 48).  The animated movie by John Lamb called Tom Waits for No One, exemplifies the uncanniness of animation through the use of the rotoscope animation technique.

First, let's watch the short video.  It does contain some animated nudity.

Tom Waits For No One - Animated 1979 - Click here for funny video clips
The process of rotoscoping involves shooting a live action shot, and then frame by frame tracing over the live action, making it animated.  We can see in Tom Waits for No One, how the rotoscope process turn out.  The fluid and realistic style of the animation is a result of this process, giving the short a very uncanny feeling.  Although it is animated, it seems real, familiar.  However this familiarity is betrayed by the fact that it is animated, leaving the audience with a feeling of unease due to the conflicting strangeness and realism of the short film.  This unease is a great example of an uncanny feeling.

To further this, here is some of the live action video that Tom Waits for No One is rotoscoped from.

Here the uncanniness is evident because of its relation with the animation.  They look so similar but are remarkably different.  We can see some liberties that have been taken as well with the animated version of the film.  The woman appears from the cigarette smoke in the animated version, a surreal process which fits Wells idea that within animation "impossible relations can take place" (Wells, 48).

Within Tom Waits for No One, we can pinpoint the aspects of the uncanny in relation to animation.  It seems familiar because it has been rotoscoped from an original live action shot, and the characters act realistically for the most part.  However, the animated style, the impossible relations within the narrative(such as the smoke creating a woman), and the eerie voice and lyrics of Tom Waits, creates a film which seems familiar but strange at the same time, exemplifying Freud's notion of the uncanny.

1: Contemporary Animation (South Park and Home Movies)

Dear Intraweb,
As I was in class, learning about the different types of animation we saw, my mind drifted. I was considering how many different animation styles have been developed over time.  On any given day of the week cartoons are everywhere on television. From Cartoon Network to PBS, cartoons dominate large portions of airtime over a wide variety of stations, and they all look very different and contain a very different messages.  This variety of animation styles establishes animation as one of the most important genres on television today.


The Simpsons was the first animated television show since The Flinstones to be animated on prime-time television and obtain mass appeal. Since then animated show have flourished, as have their styles.  In 2001 Tom Snyder and others patented a new animation style they called Squigglevision (Squigglevision Patent). This was first applied in their animated children's show Squigglevision, but later adopted by Brendan Small for the first two seasons of his show Home Movies. Using figures which have been traced over four or five times, and then animated on a computer, the style gives the figures a static like quality.  Here's an example from "School Nurse" in the first season of Home Movies.

Although the following two seasons stopped using true Squigglevision, they maintained the same look merely through computer reproduction.

South Park also started out with quite a unique style of animation.  Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the two creators, made the pilot episode and following first season out of cardboard cutouts, which they then processed through stop motion animation.  This creates short and stiff movements that lack the fluidity of an animation such as Silly Symphonies. However, like Small, Stone and Parker made the process completely digital after a few seasons, realizing that it takes way to much time to continue producing South Park by hand.
Here are two examples of South Park in which shift from analog to digital animation can be examined. The first clip is from "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe" from season one (unfortunately it's pretty bootlegged), and the second clip is from "Manbearpig" in season 10.

Clip 2

Here you'll notice that the early episodes were stiff and childlike, but by the most recent season, they have become more and more life like.   They move more fluidly and seemingly have more joints, reminding me largely of GI Joe figures.  Stone and Parker have more than just used the computer to accelerate the production of their original animation style, but have in fact used the technology to create smoother and more realistic looking characters, even though they still look pretty unrealistic.

I have not yet begun to touch on the other various style of animation that are shown regularly on Adult Swim (anywhere from anime to stop motion), but I hope that I have shown two unique styles of animation.  South Park and Home Movies essentially thought up new animation styles, but this does not mean those are the only styles prevalent on television.  Shows such as Sit Down and Shut Up, Robot Chicken, and Archer, all have styles which differ significantly from the two examples shown above.  Between the 24 hour Cartoon Network, and Fox's Sunday night "Animation Domination", it seems as though animated television is here to stay, and is not just for the children.

Thanks Intraweb,
Noah