Study Task 2 - Feature length Films/Short films/TV Shows Watched this Year 2018/19

(When it comes to animated films, I am always overly critical. But I'm critical out of love and passion for the medium. I tried to choose films that I thought pushed the medium to its limits. However, that doesn't mean that they were all-round good films. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses)

Coco

Coco, like every other Pixar film, made me cry uncontrollably. Pixar films are, by design, made to make the viewer cry. The film uses music theory, with 4 generations living in one place, and is set around the Mexican Festival of the Dead. There are strong inter-relational links between the characters both alive and dead. 

At the beginning of the film the grandmother reflects upon her memories, but as she has Alzheimer's her memory is confused. When memories of her farther surface she tries to sing, this scene is out of context as the audience doesn't know why she is singing or what she is trying to remember exatly. At the end of the movie, this scene is repeated but with the character and narrative development that happened during the 2nd act. Now that the audience is given more context, we know what she is trying to remember and that is what makes it so sad. 

Luckily my tinted 3D glasses helped mask my sorrow and despair. Overall I loved the visuals. The colour in this film was amazing. I remember reading that you could actually play the notes Miguel played on his guitar. The animation was that accurate. The story its self felt rather generic  (copying of the Book of Life) and the characters seemed very one dimensional  


Mary and the Witch's Flower

I went into watching this movie with high expectations as the director is from Studio Ghibli.  It was

good animation wise, but the script lets it down, and some elements of the film did not flow or were not easily understood. The pacing seemed to be paced for a Western market, not the action - break - action - break sequence of a typical Japanese anime.

If the script was improved it would have been an incredible movie. Too many questions remained unanswered, especially in relation to the two main characters, and lack of character development. There may have been issues in translation as I did not see it in the original Japanese. Lip syncing issues were obvious, so the mouth and lips were moving, but the mouth shapes would not match. It nodded to previous Ghibli movies such as a fire demon character called Calsifer from Howl's Moving Castle, and the similarities of the cat character of Gi Gi from Kiki's Delivery Service.


The Maker 
I liked this film as it looped in an unexpected way. For the stop motion, it was incredibly smooth.


Which goes a long way to break the uncanny valley phenomenon. Sometimes when the animation is not 12 or 24ps which is the industry standard, the animation can look choppy and thus can fall into the uncanny valley.

It also says a lot about how far top motion animation has come since the Chicken Run days. I remember watching it as a kid and having nightmares that I was going to get turned into clay. The puppetry and set design are exquisite with everything being hand made from scratch with intricate detail in every nook and cranny nothing is left to the imagination. For example, there where 3 different faces made one for sad one for neutral and one for happy.

Due to the way the face is shaped it is a very subtle difference. This helps to make it feel very immersive almost as though you could imagine yourself in his shoes. The animation itself is fairly stylized. In particular, the scene when he is stuffing his friend needs to be stylized. If it was realistic than it would be too graphic for children. The style fits the stop motion because of how whimsical it is. 




My Little Witch Academia
if Harry Potter was a Japanese Anime about a girl's boarding school, then this is what it would look

like. It gets super weird, even for an anime.  At one point, there's a fire breathing chicken.  The World Building is comparable to the Harry Potter universe too. It isn't really great - the continuity is messed up. For example, in Harry Potter, how are they supposed to get from Platform nine and three quarters to Hogwarts and back, if there's only one train that only goes one way.  Certain elements have only introduced halfway through the series.

A comparison to this would be in Little Witch Academia, where it is established that they need the philosopher's stone to allow their magic to work within their school. So, they can't fly outside of school, yet, you see them flying outside of the school all the time.