Original Stories (The Iron Giant)

Brett Ainslie

IDD301

Original Stories (The Iron Giant)

The Iron Giant is well liked by many due to the emotions it gives its viewers, nothing else. The Iron Giant is a feel good story that most people can somewhat relate to at some point in their lives. We all have been children, we all have not been believed when we told the truth. Sometimes we love the most random unaffectionate things. This is why so many people like The Iron Giant because we are drawn into the story ourselves, and our emotions are easily played with. However, The Iron Giant is no different from most other mainstream animations and in no way is it better.

The Iron Giant’s story is strikingly similar to E.T. (1982),The Iron Giant comes from Warner Brothers Studios. Warner Brothers Studios is a very successful film studio, but a very unsuccessful animation film studio having previously released two failing mainstream animations.

Warner Brothers has remained mired in the lackluster morass that nearly killed animation during the '80s. The distributor's big effort of several years ago, The Quest for Camelot, remains one of the most depressing animated underachievers of the decade. And this year's The King and I was an absolute embarrassment - a new nadir in animated miscalculation. (Tobias)

The Iron Giant’s story is strikingly similar to E.T. (1982),

The Iron Giant is basically E.T. in reverse: same starry-eyed story of a boy befriending an alien, only here, it’s the boy’s simple wisdom that makes an impression on the alien, not the other way around. And while there’s no single image in The Iron Giant to match the iconic shot of children cycling in silhouette under the moonlight, there isn’t much difference between that flight and a young boy cradled into the palm of a 100-foot-tall robot, catching a bird’s-eye view of a seaside town in New England. (Tobias)

People love these stories because it is like their childhood experiences with their dog. You know, the old story of a boy finding a stray dog, making it his best friend and begging his parents to allow him to keep it.

Avatar is another film with a very similar storyline along with Fern Gully. How to Train Your Dragon is also no different from The Iron Giant. In fact, I think it is better, because although there are many fictional novels that are similar to this film, there are not as many dragon films as there are robot films. The mystical dragon worlds are a much better escape than robots made of everyday junk in the woods. Short-Circuit (1986) and Short-Circuit 2 are two other films with the same story as The Iron Giant (1999),

Struck by lightning, an endearing little robot known only as "Number 5" escapes from an experimental electronics firm. Technician Newton Crosby (Steven Gluttenberg) and his indecipherable East Indian assistant, Ben Jabituya (Fisher Stevens), set out to locate Number 5 before the military can go through with its plans to destroy the robot. Number 5 takes refuge with loopy Stephanie Speck (Ally Sheedy), who is convinced that the mechanical man is an extraterrestrial. Hoping to teach the "alien" all about Earth, she fills Number 5's memory banks with reams of pop culture -- and then the real fun begins. (Erickson)

This sounds like it could be almost any of the films I have mentioned, especially Iron Giant. That is the synopsis for one of the Short Circuit films, who thought their idea was good enough to make another.

Bicentenial Man (1999) also has a very similar story following a robot who is thrown into a human world and learns over time how to live with humans while avoiding being destroyed by most of them. A similar story also comes from the Prehysteria! Franchise of three films from 1993-1995. (Sutton) Batteries Not Included (1987), according to Robert Hartill, is yet another with a similar story.

I could go on with more, but I think my point is made. Although, I am not saying the story is a bad story, I am saying it is a great story due to its emotional power over most people, but it is an extremely overused concept. Sure, after tens of thousands of years of storytelling, if you generalize enough, no story is original, but with such a long history of storytelling, we can retell ancient stories and even adapt them any way we want. Homer’s The Iliad is a good example of this, being made into/adapted into a few good films such as Helen of Troy, and one of my favorite films, Troy. Ancient Greek stories always get me excited and entertain me, along with taking me to a great escape world. Jason and the Argonauts is also a good example of the ancient story of the Quest of the Golden Fleece. An Adaptation example is Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief; this is not the greatest film of all time but I did find it funny and entertaining. An example of this that we have viewed in class is Spirited Away. I do not know much about Japanese mythology, so I am not too sure exactly how much of this is based completely on Japanese mythology and how much was created by Hayao Miyazaki.

Spirited Away is filled with Japanese mythological and folk symbols that stand for things and foreshadow events. Even if you do not understand what they stand for, it is novel and interesting to see, then you can look them up after the movie. Some of the symbols include the stone marker that the family car crashed into at the beginning. This cinematography of focusing on this odd stone let the audience know that it means something even if you have never heard of it. According to an Independent London newspaper, that stone is the god of the highways. The bathhouse was staffed with “not-of-this-world” Japanese clay-toys such as the “frogs and sullen girls who are the spirit of slugs.” The white radish man is the god of home, and also is shaped to look a bit like a sumo wrestler, according to the article. The Otori is the bird spirits splashing in the baths. From folklore, Miyazaki borrowed horned rampagers in shaggy seaweed coats, namahage demons from the coast of the Sea of Japan along with a “haunting troupe of immortals” hiding behind abstract masks worn for their dances at their shrine. The older human girl character, Rin, is the kitsune or fox messenger of the heavens. “She's a white fox, the luck-bringing vulpine who guards the shrines of the god of the fields.” The giant rotten spirit who spewed garbage all over the bathhouse represents the Great River God which “after spewing out garbage reveals his true mask with its Noh bristled eyebrows of benignity.” The hero of this character is often the dragon that the boy turns into which is called the soul of the built-over stream. According to the London article, there are no true bad guys in Japanese culture, since everything with bad qualities, is also benevolent in other ways, yet Miyazaki made adaptations with adversaries in Spirited Away.

Miyazaki created the soot critters in this film which are called susuwatari in Japan, which means mobile soot. These soot critters slave for the spider soul brewing the medicinal water/tea according to the article. The London article claimed that there was a somewhat novel kami called No Face which “hides behind a mask of pathos. It could be a Buddhist hungry ghost, anguished with unappeasable want, but Miyazaki calls it a lonely heart, even a stalker, who swallows the desires of others consuming others in the process). Because Miyazaki believes in the virtue of makoto - a sincere heart - he grants it redemption, busy with crafts in the good witch's cottage. Bliss.” (Rule)

The greedy owner of the resort, Yu Baba, and her twin sister who is the witch of the forest which Chihiro reaches at the end by commuter train, which is contemporary magic, according to the article, drew on Japanese shamans with a human head and a bird body, and even more on bird-women of Siberian legend. The article describes Yu Baba's suite which is decorated in Meiji style which is adopted from the West after the opening-up of Japan in 1853 after being isolated.

The adaptation of ancient foreign stories is what can be found original today, and for a long time. Spirited Away is an animated film that will be remembered and adored for a long time, unlike Iron Giant, an adaptation of the recent domestic story The Iron Man, which is also currently a hot series of films starring Robert Downey, Jr.

Works Cited

Erickson, Hal. "Short Circuit." IMDb. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov 2010. .

Hartill, Robert. "Batteries Not Included." IMDb. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov 2010. .

Rule, Vera. "The London Eye: The Gods Must be Hazy." Independent 14 Sep. 2003, Print

Sutton, Ed. "Prehysteria!." IMDb. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov 2010.

Tobias, Scott. "The Iron Giant." IMDb. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Nov 2010. .

Module 7 When The Wind Blows

When The Wind Blows is an animated film about a couple who are going through a nuclear bomb threat. This is a rare and unique cartoon since it is not humorous. After watching it for several minutes I thought this was a well done film but not done in the correct medium. Then, I realized their choice for choosing animation.

When The Wind Blows also has some shots from real life. For example, bombs, soldiers and people from real life. They also integrated some real life artifacts such as pillows in the same shot as the animated scenes. I think this is symbolism reminding the audiences that, unlike the animations, the film and topic are real.

Usually, cartoons are made to make everything seem fake, simple and funny. They are often used for the targeted audience of children. Or, they are also often used for visual effects, such as making people or characters burn and turn to ashes, an anvil falling on someone and squishing them, and expressing unique features on things and characters in an over exaggerated fashion. When The Wind Blows does not need any of that at all. This is why I did not like the fact that it was a cartoon, but then I realized it. I realized that with the live-action shots, the cartoons put us in a light mood and then once the live-action shots appear, we notice the sudden seriousness of this topic of nuclear warfare and the horrific things that it brings.

According to an animator magazine called Animator, issue 19 (Summer 1987), When The Wind Blows is an adaptation of an illustrated novel which contained many cartoon illustrations that look like the ones in the film. This must have been the main reason the film was animated as it was. But Animator brings up some good points about this that choosing the cartoon medium was a terrible idea. This is because with the drawn spotted lined cartoons, we do not see facial expressions well at all and in such a dramatic heartfelt story like this, we must see facial expressions to feel what the characters are feeling. The film just was not graphic enough to have the success as the novel did, according to Animator. As Animator continues, the film used every word in the novel as its script, which is good for the book and also worked for the radio play, but it does not translate to the screen well. I totally agree with this, film is a visual medium and I felt as though this film was extremely dialogue heavy; it did not need to by a film with a script like this. I needed to see the expressions of fear and mystery, not be told it.

The sound of the film was extremely good with so many minor sound effects sounding real and going with the action. However, the actual animation itself was poor. The best animated scene in the film was after the bomb hit, when the cars were crashing into each other and everything went flying, with the change of colors. Despite the good scary animation, the music ruined this with a song by David Bowie. Animator agrees with me on this “The message, fortunately, is more powerful than the medium.” (http://www.animatormag.com/archive/issue-19/issue-19-page-11/)

Module 9 Pre-loaders

This week’s task was to create a pre-loader for a website. I looked for pre-loaders online to download and edit, but each pre-loader I downloaded would not work. I opened the file and it opened it in the program “text” in a language that is not English. The only files of these flash pre-loaders I could download were “.exe” files which is usually for when you are downloading an entire program. I am not sure why this was happening, but I kept searching for flash pre-loaders to download and had no luck.

So, I just decided to make a pre-loader myself by following the tutorial on blackboard. I believe I followed the tutorial exactly but did not end up with the same results. I had different colors than the tutorial did and added a black background. My pre-loader looked completely messed up and was not doing what it was supposed to do. So, I made a few corrections and it worked. Except for one thing; it was not going to a page. The tutorial had it load an image on an ftp server. I made mine load a webpage I made last year. It did not load it at all and I do not know why, I must be missing some kind of script since I must have told it to load an image instead of just a URL. I tried fixing it and failed. So, it works, but it loads for a fraction of a second and nothing pops up after the pre-loader.

Pre-loaders are essential in web design. Many websites are meant to be simple and have few large images/files that slow down the loading of the page. But in more advanced times, there are many clients who demand for the highest quality images, graphics, and other media such as flash. In these cases, the pages take forever to load, but Americans and other people always have and always will hold time as one of their top priorities. If a page does not load within several seconds, visitors leave no matter what. So, these flash pre-loaders tell the visitors how close the page is to being loaded, gives them comfort that something is showing up on the page at least, and perhaps pre-loaders will become a form of entertainment themselves as many are in video games. I have seen pre-loaders be fun little games themselves. Lets just hope pre-loaders wont ever need pre-loaders themselves though.

Animusic

I watched each of the seven animations and liked 5 or 6 of them very much. Most of them were good for the same reasons, but a few of them did not incorporate those techniques that the others did, which is the reason I think they failed.

I had seen The Piano before, and absolutely loved it. It was not the most intricate animation in the world, but the emotional music and the storytelling in the video while allowing the emotional piano music speak, rather than dialogue, the piece was extremely good in any language. The music was diegetic, meaning, it was playing within the actual scene, rather than just overlaying a scene that does not actually have music in its “real” world. The old man was playing the piano and thinking about his past; perhaps the song was written while he was thinking about his past. In this animation, it was obvious that the animators intentionally matched the music with the footsteps, turns, and looks, or vice versa.

My other favorite animation was I Lived on the Moon. It took a little while to get into it, but at least the music and corresponding visuals set the mood, at a slow pace, making the audience surprised when it really got into it and the tree and stump sprung out of the ground, going for a walk over the seas and mountains. In this animation, the music followed the motion of the characters and their actions very well, changing tone and tempo with the actions. The Long Walk also did a good job of this.

Walking in the Air was a very slowly paced song with very slowly paced visuals. There were few shots, but they were long sweeping shots, corresponding with the sweeping music. The characters would move, but the camera would move with them, then turn a bit at the end of a shot. When the subject in the shot was not moving, the camera would move around it, continuing the moving pace/tempo of the music.

The two animations that I did not think worked were the Gravedigger one and the Funny Bear. I enjoyed the Funny Bear, I thought it was funny, but I did not think it really connected with these other animations; it was a music video, with the character singing to the lyrics, and sort of dancing. The music did not tell a story, nor did the visuals. The Gravedigger animation just didn’t seem to connect the music with the actions much. The storytelling was unclear, the visuals did all of the storytelling. I felt as if an almost random song was just slapped in to play over this scene and they did not work together. The two animations did not include any of the successful pieces of the 5 other animations we watched, therefore, despite a level of entertainment, I think these two animations failed.

Module 4 Poems

I honestly did not like many of these animated poems. I thought the poems were extremely random, the animations could have used music, and the typography, especially, could have been more visually artistic. For example “Shiver and You Have Weather” looked good, so I watched it, and the typography was just thrown in there. Although, it was not typography, it was text on the screen, sometimes in different spots. The words did not animate, nor were they graphic whatsoever. I was expecting these to be the words of the poem visually expressing the poem, rather than just having text there to read, next to a picture/animation.

Most of the poems were just like this and so I was uninspired. The only poem I thought was okay was “This is a Letter”. Some of the typography actually moved; it was the key player in the animation, in fact, for many of the scenes, it was the only player. In this poem, the text actually transformed a bit to express the poem, although I felt like it could have done a better job by making the graphic elements of it more obvious. It was visually appealing and, that, and not only that, is what the animator should be going for.

The Tell Tale Heart Module 3

Animation puts the audience in a world that live action cannot. Or if it does, it gives the audience a different feeling than live action will. According to Walter Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye, emotion is one of the, if not the most important part of story telling, particularly in the story, The Tell Tale Heart. The Tell Tale Heart animation is very old, and therefore uses different techniques than we do today, and the animators had fewer resources and tools to use. However, for the most part, this animation is successful.

The Tell Tale Heart uses motion in very few characters/elements in the animation. The thing that does the most moving is the camera. Many of the shots/scenes were just a picture or series of still images that were then panned through with a camera or representative of a camera; this is often called the “Ken Burns effect”, in modern day. This technique is acceptable, especially for it’s time period (1950s), but since the images are still images, for some shots, it is difficult to tell what things are in the image. This is because, they do not move, so it is hard to tell what shapes represent what. Another reason is because this story is very ominous and therefore is very darkly lit and has many shadows, adding mystery. However, this mystery is not always good, because I found it difficult to tell what some things were with such quick shots, zooms and pans. Another reason why this does not work is because there is audio that is meant to match up with what should be happening in the scene. We see a still image of a person walking, and we hear footsteps. Alright, I know he is walking, but it looses its realism, feeling and I am no longer in to it, and by “in to it” I mean, I am no longer emotionally attached to this story, which loses its affect. The walking example is one that is not too bad for the viewer. Contrary, another instance would be if there is a still image of someone walking, but I cannot tell if the person is walking or not because of the shapes, shadows, darkness, zooms, pans, etc. At this point, the footstep sound effects seem random to the viewer and then the shot changes before we can think about what really happened. With this problem, the animators seemed to have animated the background quite successfully.

The background in The Tell Tale Heart animation is intricate. Some scenes are extremely well done and very realistic as other backgrounds are lacking. Either way, the key goal here is to make the audience feel something, to feel that this “sane” man, really is insane and that perhaps, we really are too. In this particular story, the background plays a large role, that and a few small objects such as the eye, heart, and other things that look like the eye. Other than that, facial expressions are not used much in this animation, and therefore, the background takes over giving that emotional feeling that we do not gain from something that shows great emotion such as a human’s face. In Murch’s book, In the Blink of an Eye, emotion is the number one reason to make a cut, but the third most important reason to make a cut is for “rhythm.” The quick shots, and still images make this animation very jumpy and give it terrible rhythm. However, The Tell Tale Heart is a bit of a nightmare like story; the emotion you get watching this film or hearing the story, is similar to a nightmare if the story is told well. In dreams, images and thoughts are very jumpy and fragmented, according to Murch. “Film is like thought. It’s the closest to thought process of any form of thought,” says John Huston, in In the Blink of an Eye. Therefore, this negative aspect of this animation, can actually be seen as a positive aspect. Perhaps, it was created with this fragmentation in order to make that nightmare-like connection to the human thought and get the audience to experience The Tell Tale Heart senselessly, like in a dream, and be vulnerable to become afraid and feel that this eye and heart are extremely irking.

This rhythm brings us back to the emotion that we feel. Bottom line is, the emotion I felt is that this narrator is insane. He thinks he is sane, but, he is definitely not. Which then raises the question, “I’m sane, right? Maybe not.” With that said, I believe that this animation is successful. It may not be traditional, it may not be the easiest movie to watch, but it gets it’s thoughts and emotions across to the audience successfully, and that is all that matters, once the audience is already in their seats, viewing the movie.

Works Cited

Murch, Walter. “In the Blink of an Eye.” Silman James Press. Beverly Hills, CA. 1995.

Module 2 Character Animation

When I originally made my character sketch, I drew an ape character. But when I went to draw him in illustrator, I found it very difficult to achieve many of his physical attributes such as bulging muscles. Also, I was inspired by the Bendito Machine, so I figured it would be much more practical to make a silhouetted character. With silhouetted characters, their shape and external outline are very important. I am a fan of expressionism with its exaggerated contrasty sharp looking shapes and images. So I free-formed a shape, which looked like a beak, so I finished the character off by turning it into a bird. I learned the correct way to make a shape tween since I successfully did it the wrong way in class (does not work all the time). There is still much more to learn through this project and technique because I am not sure how other silhouette factors will be a problem, such as many silhouetted elements in a scene overlapping each other.