Are Animated Movies A New Approach To Serious Topics?
In the past year, I have seen many an animated movie that confronts the heavier issues of life, like grief in “Big Hero 6,” released in 2014, and “Inside Out,” released this past month.Grave of the Fireflies (1988) and The Breadwinner (2017) that both deal with children struggling amidst a war in their own country. Two beautiful, beautiful movies but also very absolute… and sad, animated tragedies that are nothing short of some peoples facts of existence. While this particular topic is not actually the centre of these films, they sure make the stories more relatable for every viewer; we know that these fictitious characters are just like us.
It was movies like the ladder 2 that made me feel comfortable in tackling something so dreadful and deplorable. I asked everyone around me whom I told about my Idea or asked for advice; “Its not too inappropriate or unseemly, is it?”
“No, why would it be?” they asked every time.
I was worried that tackling a subject that made me feel so much emotional pain might not be able to be expressed through a medium that I believed the “stigma” around was “childish or frivolous”.
Approaching topics like death and grief is certainly not an easy thing to do—especially for children’s movies. Rather than stick to the stereotypical portrayal of depression and death, filmmakers are moving in a different direction. When these serious topics are put into an entertaining setting, we see a normalisation of how real people handle them; the characters may not be bouncing back from saddening events with resilience, but they show that despite any tragedy, the world keeps spinning. Though they aren’t light topics, grief, depression and abandonment are things to be greatly concerned with, but they are also things that needs to be handled in a variety of ways depending on the individual; these movies are showing that there isn’t just one image. Sadness comes in assorted forms. Grief, depression and feeling of abandonment are all very real feelings that can happen to anyone—they aren’t exclusive to lonely, dark and abnormal people who are seen as simply going through an angsty phase.
– Dale Chong
And although this is very true and very effective, my heroes like Pete Docter, Brad Bird, Miyazaki, Isao Takahata, Wes Anderson and Nora Twomey etc, do it elusively, interpretably and through the analogical visual metaphors of visual expressionism that the directors and artists choose to do every time they begin a new project, its never a first hand account of a persons nonfictional reality.
So I thought that I would attempt to create a project that would subjectively, compassionately and conscientiously breathe life into the 3D project I was about to do on such a despairing, barely indistinguishable autobiographical story.
It was going to be a challenge for me, I just cant understand, reading Ishmaels memoirs and not being apprehensive about how you are going to portray this persons condemnation in a 3 minute 3 dimensional computer animation. Ya know?
Anyhow, I thought that because I pondered the question so much and felt like I had so much to say about this conundrum, that I would make it my dissertation question so I could study some videos, articles and dialogue regarding other peoples views on the topic, and try and work out why indeed is it a little more expostulated to tackle a serious or “depressing” topic in the form of a medium that is almost exclusively directed towards the totes.
duckinthesobriety 