Abstract Thought as a Danger Zone in Inside Out

What ensues is one of Pixar’s most conceptually self-reflexive episodes and from the very beginning, abstract thought is designated as a danger zone.

“The abstract thought room” turns out to be a vast, empty, seemingly endless white space where the rules of gravity do not apply, as demonstrated by a lot of geometric structures hovering in the air. This is unusual for Pixar or any other commercial American animated feature and is therefore implicitly coded as otherworldly and unsettling due to its lack of definition and concrete detail.

Which basically means it makes kids uncomfortable and is dissimilar or even contradictory to pixars style & animations.

Abstract thought is not simply a spooky place, however. It quickly transforms into an active physical threat to the characters’ bodily integrity. Joy, Sadness, and Bing Bong undergo several rapid changes in visual design.

• Picasso versions of themselves (nonobjective fragmentation)
• fall apart into pieces (deconstruction)
• two-dimensional, stylized versions of themselves

 

In that sense, abstract thought is portrayed as a destructive, uncontrollable, and terrifying force.

The terms in which the characters verbalize the threat of abstraction holds the key to Pixar’s approach to animation. Bing Bong shouts that he is lacking depth. Joy is sorrowful of her two-dimensionality. Sadness warns that they need to get out of there “before [they’re] nothing but shape and color.”

Pixar literally address their style; Abstraction is the antithesis (opposite) to Pixar’s creative philosophy. As Sadness points out, the Pixar manual advises against going there

In Pixar– abstraction remains off limits, while two-dimensionality is increasingly unwanted and dangerous.

It is aesthetic suicide – not to mention a marketing one. Pixar are, have been and will forever remain commercial animators, not abstract ones. They are 2 very different techniques, forms, modes of animation, with different audiences. It is important not to blur the line between the two or things can get messy.

 

 

An Animated Future for 3-D

I read an article about 3-D animation for Yuan’s class and the topic was is it possible for 3-D filmmaking to be sustainable as a commercial venture?

Kara Lynn Andersen the author of the article explores some common objections, suggesting that the key to sustainable 3-D might be the animated feature film.

She quotes Rick Mitchell’s argument that because the best 3-D film processes are too expensive for most theatres to install, 3-D production will remain centered on the less satisfying processes and therefore fizzle out.  This is akin to saying that television will never catch on because its screen is smaller than the cinema.

With 3D TV’s and the games industry producing 3-D games, this increases the demand for 3-D in general. With the VR production still very much in BETA stage of production, Video games employing first person perspective trigger simulation sickness in some people – but this has not stopped the games industry from releasing more sickness-inducing games, because they sell well.

It is not the everyday realism of seeing in three dimensions that we do every day.  It’s something that pretends to be like it, but offers a different sensation.

Thus, live-action 3-D production has been centered primarily in the less realistic genres: science fiction, thrillers, horror, fantasy, and animation.

By sidestepping the questions of realism and purpose behind the effect, animated films provide 3-D images that are simply fun.

Hayao Miyazaki Article

We all got split into groups and all asked in our groups to pick an article that we would like to do a presentation on. After reading some of the articles and the titles that sounded interesting, we settled on an article about Miyazaki;

The study aimed to look into the textual aspects of the 3 movies to see how these stories are rendered as Interpretation-Friendly Objects and to describe Hayao Miyazaki’s Persuasive Artistry.

As simply as I can put it, Miyazaki engages you into his mystical worlds that are rendered imitations of the real world. This is what grants him access to these audiences around the world. We experience the child heroes’ journey’s with a number of setbacks, setbacks that we experience with the character, that resemble challenges in our own lives. The journey and happy ending infuse the audience with an optimistic desire to make a better sense of the maturation process and difficult aspects of their own lives. Watching his films, the audience projects their own interpretations on screen, relating it to themselves and their own lives in different ways. Archetypal (standard) stories or mythic narratives are metaphorical texts distanced from the reader–audience’s present reality. Although distant, these stories reflect universal human actions, compelling characters and an imaginatively habitable world.

Here is the article if you care to read it: miyazaki_article