Triple post: Out of the Inkwell, Neighbours, & Darkness/Light/Darkness

I just wanted to begin by apologizing for my inability to keep up with my blog assignments. I will make up for it by posting all the blogs I had to make up for in this one post.

The first video I watched was "Out of the Inkwell" by Max Fleischer. It features a cartoonist who creates an ink drawing of a clown and brings it to life, all while his companion, a sculptor, is making a sculpture of a man with an abnormally-shaped nose. The clown, who appears to be animated through rotoscopy, takes the opportunity to create his own version of the art within his illustrated world before slipping out of the paper and causing mischief for the artists. The cartoon ends with the drawing diving back into the cartoonist's inkwell and turning back into ink. The clip uses both traditional animation and stop motion to bring a being who shouldn't exist the way he does to life.

The second video was "Neighbours" by Norman McLaren. It is, in short, a morality tale on how to love ones neighbors. In detail, it features two men who are friends with each other until a dancing flower appears in between the lawns of their houses. The two friends begin to fight over the flower by dividing their lawns with a fence, soon descending into violence as they literally transform into savages, destroy each other's houses, attacking each other's families, and unknowingly killing the flower before they themselves die. The story features stop motion animation to not only bring the flower to life, but also to allow the characters to move in ways they couldn't normally, such as sliding across the grass on their backs and hovering in midair. The animation seems more unnecessary to the plot and more like a supplement to give the film a more surreal vibe.

The third video was "tma/svetlo/tma", also called "Darkness/Light/Darkness", by Jan Svankmajer. It begins with a hand made out of clay entering a small, empty room with two doors and a window. Soon more body parts begin to enter the living room, such as another hand, eyes, ears, feet, a head, and even a wing-dang-doodle, which have minds of their own and try attaching themselves to each other. Eventually a huge wad of clay enters the room, which the body parts use to create a whole human male body for themselves, except now the body is stuck in the cramped room. Similar to the first cartoon, the characters appear aware of what they are: clumps of clay meant to be animated and molded to tell a story, which is what they do.

Weird Fishes: Arpeggi by Robert Hodgin

The video I watched this week was called "Weird Fishes: Arpeggi" by Robert Hodgin. The primary focus of the video is a glowing orb that appears to be sinking through water and contains a group of small lghts that are moving every which way like a school of frantically swimming fish, which may be the main reason why the video has the title it does (besides the fact that actual schools of fish occasionally swim by for comparison). The strength of the light the orb emits and the distance the orb appears to be from the screen differs with the intensity of the song that plays in the background from the start to the end of the video; the more intense the song becomes, the closer and brighter the orb becomes. I can hardly say that, while the video does contain a sequence of events, including a beginning, middle, and end, I can' really consider it as a "story" as much as it can be called a mere visualization of the background music. It may have characters and events, but the events are influenced by a background element rather than the elements that are present in the foreground, which I believe can only be achieved through animation.

Fantasmagorie by Emile Cohl

The first animation I have viewed for this class is Fantasmagorie, a short animated film made in 1908 by Emile Cohl, and what I understand to be one of the earliest, if not the first, animated cartoon in the history of cinema. The film shows a clown-like figure partaking in a series of seemingly random events together with objects, people, and creatures that transform into other things entirely, all throughout the span of just under one and a half minutes. Because the transformations of these objects are so spontaneous, I believe that the story the film is trying to convey (of which I was uncertain directly after viewing the film) is one that can only be expressed through animation, or at least the method in which the story is told. If Cohl was trying to convey a specific message, I believe it wouldn't have been able to be so abstractly done if he were to use live action film.