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.