Watership Down film info and review

Watership Down (1978)

Director: Martin Rosen
Based on Watership Down a novel authored by Richard Adams
7.7 stars on IMDb (27299 reviewers)
82% on Rotten Tomatoes (33 reviewers)
Rating: PG

People have complained about the violent themes present in the film, especially since it was marketed as a family-friendly film for children, resulting in the trauma of a generation.

Review:

Watership Down is about a group of rabbits who flee their old warren upon one of their number receiving a prophetic vision about its destruction. After finding the perfect place for their new warren (the titular Watership Down), the group have to find does to make kits as the does of the group had died on the journey through a series of unfortunate accidents (one was taken by a hawk for example). They find a nearby overpopulated rabbit warren, with a surplus of does ruled by a cruel leader. With the assistance of a bird the group had helped earlier, they managed to infiltrate the warren and help the does escape. The rival rabbits track down the escapees to Watership Down and attempt to kill or subdue them, although they are ultimately defeated when some of the main rabbits relay a dog back to their warren.


The film contains themes including loyalty, slavery and the uncaring nature of humans from the rabbits point of view.

I would not recommend this film to young children, due to it's violent themes and gratuitous use of blood. Maybe this film might be suitable for teenagers, but I know I was a timid child and I would have been traumatised by this film if I had watched it when I was younger.

I would recommend this film for anyone 13 and up and even then with warnings of violence and blood.

Netflix Remake

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/27/bbc-remake-watership-down-with-less-violence-to-avoid-scarring-c/

There is slated to be a series on Netflix with more emphasis on female characters and toned down violence, although the mature themes will remain. I will reserve my opinion on this development as I do not know enough about the Netflix series to really tell if it would be good or not.

A New Game update for the week

Today we did some more work on the sets. Since Kevin (the tutor) hired out some cameras for today, we had one set up in an experimental set to see how big and how far away everything needed to be.

 

A close up of the camera and  its view

 

Marilyn took pictures for documentation, and Chloe took pictures of Marilyn taking pictures for documentation of the documentation.

Some of the clothing cutouts Chloe made for Lulu's clothing choices

Me working on some of Zack's clothing choices

 The final UI setup with Zack's clothing choices, which I'll cut out later

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Here's more pictures for the scene set up for the living room scene (I'll add in some framed pictures in the background to make it look more like a wall)

Here's the UI again with the blank videogame character cutout

For future sessions, we requested Kevin purchase a perspex sheet so we can put the videogame character on top of the UI without the 3D elements of the UI interfering with the cutout animations

For lighting, we are thinking about perhaps using reflected light so the light sources aren't reflected off the perspex screen for the videogame UI. We were thinking of making the living room scene quite dark, with the only light coming from the TV screen, which will be achieved by the use of an LED light, either from my torch or from the tracing screens in the stop-mo workshop room.

Stop motion film:

Deer Flower 

Director:  Kangmin Mim
Producer: Studio Zazac



Deer Flower is a 8 minute stop motion film about Mim's childhood experience of drinking deer blood one summer in 1992. The film contains a blend of cardboard cut out, paper layers, 3D printed assets and even some 2D animations. The end result is that this film looks fantastic and the simplistic character models are able to make the disturbing themes even more so, as a lot is left to  the viewer's imagination.



Apparently these character models are 3D printed, then painted or have patterned paper stuck to them so they look like cardboard.

Weekend A New Game update

This weekend we met up to finish the videogame UI screen as well as start working on the living room scene, namely the couch the two characters are to sit on.

the couch

the UI screen

For our animation, we plan on putting the player character avatar on a perspex screen on top of the UI so the character can lay flat without disrupting the stuff on the UI

Yuri Norstein

Yuri Nornstein (Yuriy Norshteyn) is a Russian stop motion animator most well known for his works Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979). He animates by using paper cutouts on stacked planes of glass (similar to what we were thinking of using for the videogame UI segments in our stop-motion project A New Game) to achieve a 3D effect.


Still from Hedgehog in the Fog

Still from Tale of Tales

Tale of Tales (1979) review

The Tale of Tales is a series of story snippets told in no particular chronological order, with details about Russia's involvement in the Second World War. The film seems to focus more on the effects of the draft and casualties of the war on those left behind (the women and children). Throughout the film, a recurring character is a small wolf, introduced in the form of a lullaby sung to children saying that the wolf will snatch them up.

The film seems to be heavy with symbolism, such as the green apple and the wolf, which unfortunately goes over my head as I am not Russian, nor overly familiar with its involvement in World War 2. In terms of animation quality, the film is a beautiful piece of work, where the cut-out technique is used to generate a 3D effect in a beautiful and seamless fashion.

The Fox and Rabbit (1973) review

The Fox and the Rabbit is an animation based on a folk tale about a rabbit who is kicked out of his house by an ill-tempered fox. The rabbit then seeks the help of some of the more fearsome animals around the forest such as a wolf, a bear and a bull, all of which get chased off by the fox. The rabbit finally gets the fox out of the house by enlisting the help of a militaristic rooster, and the film ends with the rabbit and the rooster living peacefully in the rabbits house.

I enjoyed this film because the interactions between the ill-tempered fox and the other characters  as well as the final fight scene between the rooster, the rabbit and the fox were hilarious and entertaining to watch.

A New Game progress

In class we were given a Gantt chart to help organise and schedule various tasks associated with the stop-motion project. After watching a short stop-motion film (the review is below) we went down to the workshop areas and started designing our sets. For today, we worked on the videogame user interface, based on the concept art that Marilyn provided.


 We also made a mess of our workshop in out arts-and-crafts vigor:

Head Over Heels (2012), Directed by Timothy Reckart

Head over heels is a 10 minute claymation student film, detailing the day to day life of an old married couple.
The husband and wife life separate, but parallel, lives, with one on the floor and one on the ceiling. When the husband tries to give the wife a gift, it starts an argument that sends the house (which was previously floating in a cloudy void), crashing to earth. The house has crashed in such a way that the wife is on the floor and the husband on the ceiling, allowing the wife to walk on the ground outside and trapping the husband in the house. In the end the husband and wife end up reconciling their differences by adapting to each others way of living (the wife nails her shoes to the ceiling of the house to be in the same orientation as her husband for example)

The film has impressive attention to detail, ranging from things such as the picture in the frame and the shoes. The lighting in some of the scenes was good, especially where they had a low, yellowish light to simulate a sunset.

Catprint animatic progress

The animatic is nearly done! I've added some animated movements into the animatic, which caused no end to my frustration. There are still some minor pacing issues, but I'm worried that if I try to fix them, it'll mess with the rest of the animatic because I have so much stuff going on in it. I've also added the sounds I've recorded (some were a bit too quiet so I will go onto my freesound.org account to find suitable replacements).

I may delete some animation keyframes in the animatic as some of the movements are a bit too fast on playback
Here's the video, although it may not play because this is Blogger

Catprint is copyrighted to M. Askew

fantastic planet 106

Fantastic planet (1973)

Director: Rene Laloux
Country: France
An adaptation of Om en Serie (Oms in series) by Stefan Wul

Fantastic planet takes place on an alien planet where humans (oms) are kept as pets by the Draag, giant blue aliens. The story follows the life of a male om called Terr, who after spending much of his childhood as a Draag pet, runs away with a set of Draag educational headphones. He then joins a group of feral Om, who live in an abandoned park. When the park is fumigated by the Draag to get rid of the Om pests, Terr and a few of the remaining Om retaliate by killing a Draag and relocate to a abandoned rocket dump. Using the knowledge gained from the educational headphones, the Oms build a rocket and fly to the planet's uninhabited moon. Upon landing, the Oms find out that the Draags have been using the moon as the location for alien bootycalls, which they promptly disrupt. The Draags find out about the extent of the Oms intelligence, agree to a peace treaty with the Oms and the Oms get an artificial moon on which they can live.

The film presents themes of animal cruelty, where the story is told from the perspective of a pet human and the treatment of Oms by the Draag is a reflection of the various ways humans treat animals. An example of this is shown near the beginning of the film where Terr's mother is killed by a group of Draag children when they play too rough. Another example is when the Draag fumigate the Om-infested park, similar to how a house is fumigated to get rid of termites.


I thought the film was a fairly enjoyable watch. My main criticism is the audio quality (which seems to be a recurring theme in my reviews of old movies), where loud noises are either piercing, deafening or some combination of the two. It is clear that a lot of thought went into the worldbuilding elements, such as the planets history and the culture of the Oms and Draags. One potential criticism is that many of these elements are shown with no clear reason as to why they exist in the first place and have little to no relevance to the plot, although one could argue that the nonsensical nature of these scenes is the point: the Oms are on an alien planet, the rules of Earth don't apply. Another potential criticism is that there are scenes of full frontal nudity (which is okay-ish with within reason), which are largely exclusive to the female characters (which is not). Any scenes with male nudity are either done for a joke or a costume chance, where many of the scenes with female nudity has been done to titillate. Alien planet or not, the creators (of both the book and the movie) and the audience are humans with all our societal biases and these elements reflect poorly on the film.

A New Game plot and details

For the animation, I was in charge of writing (the treatment and screenplay) and animating act 1, Chloe for act 2 and Marilyn for act 3. I was in charge of collecting, cleaning up and streamlining the treatment and screenplay.

Here's a copy of the treatment and logline, because I forgot to put these up earlier:

Logline

A pair of siblings, an older brother and younger sister, argue over the appearance of a videogame character on a character customisation screen.

Treatment:

Older brother= Zack, younger sister= Lulu

Act 1

Sitting on a couch in his family’s lounge, the moody teenager, Zack, playing a videogame. Lulu, Zack’s younger sister, runs into the lounge and sits next to him, ignoring his obvious displeasure. Lulu continues to ignore Zack’s attempts to get her to leave and instead asks him what he is doing. Resigning himself to Lulu’s presence, Zack explains that he is beginning a videogame and is currently creating the character.

Act 2

Lulu becomes intrigued and excited at the fairy wing options available. Lulu asks if she can have a turn, to which Zack refuses. He tells her to get lost, Lulu stares at him a moment then dives for the controller. Zack shouts in protest to no avail. The menus start to flick through various items as lulu looks for those wings she saw earlier. The second those wings are put on his character Zack starts to complain it was too girly, the menus flick to some options that are more black, replacing the fairy wings with those of a bat. Lulu does not like this and counters it by adding blush and a tiara. The siblings argue over the characters appearance as. various sparkly and edgy parts are swapped and replaced on the character.

Act 3

After a long time arguing without any satisfying result, their mother who hears them shouting from another room tells them to be quiet or she’ll turn off the game. Both siblings soon quiet down while looking at the TV screen and try to figure out an outfit for the character that appeals to both of their tastes. The resulting videogame character is a mix of Zack’s edgy style and Lulu’s pink sparkly style, which turns out to be quite interesting. Then Zack adds two horns which makes them laugh so hard after seeing the unique character. Soon after that, they are satisfied with their character’s ‘patchwork’ appearance and look each other with a bright smile.

We also have the screenplay, but that's a .pdf file which Blogger doesn't like. A New Came characters, concepts and story are copyrighted to Megan A., Marilyn S. and Chloe T.

2D animatic

This week I was adding some animations and cleaning up the animatic for the 2D animation.

 For future reference, it'll save me a lot of headaches if I just put each moving element as it's own drawing and peg layer- the moving elements start to interact with each other in unwanted ways if they are all on the same layer.

BSA 106 Animation History 1970-1975

Animation history 1970-1975

France

 Serge Danot made the pilot for The Magic Roundabout (1963-1970), which ended up with 500 episodes, cumulating in a feature length film, Dougal and the Blue Cat (1970)

Norway

Ivo Caprino experimented with an early version of animatronics, allowing him to manipulate characters in real time. He moved from animatronics to stop-motion when he created The Pinchcliffe Grand Prix in 1975, which took 3 years to make and was so successful that it was shown in some theaters daily for 28 years.

Hungary

 William Feigenbaum and Jozsef Gemes made the children's film Hugo the Hippo in 1975 with it's catchy theme song, which became a cult hit among adults. It's popularity resulted in it being the first feature length animated film being released from Hungary

UK

 Bob Godfrey made Karma Sutra Strikes Again during the early 1970's craze for adult animation. As is typical for 'adult' animations, it focused mostly on sex and it's many possibilities. Godfrey believed animation should be more surreal rather than mimicking reality. The film was given an X rating and screened alongside A Clockwork Orange in the UK. The film was nominated for an Oscar for Best Animated Short.

France/ Poland

 Piotr Kamler made The Step 1974, an experimental stop-motion film which was centred around sheets of paper moving around a box

Japan

 Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, who later founded Studio Ghibli, created the TV series Heidi in 1974. Heidi was based on an adaptation of a childrens book.

Renzo and Sayoko Kinoshita made the film Made In Japan (1972), which was an animation about Japanese culture focusing on putting the economy before anything else. They also made Pica-don in 1978, a disturbing short that detailed the bombing of Hiroshima from the eyes of its civilians. The short featured the realistic impacts of the bomb and radiation sickness on people.

USA

 Lillian Shwartz created early computer art, being among the first to use the computer as an artistic medium. Her work features many flashing images that may cause epileptic seizures in some, as it was made before people discovered the link between flashing images and seizures.

Fritz the Cat (1971)

 Ralph Bakshi made Felix the Cat, another 'adult' animation that focuses on sex, drugs and rock and roll. This was Americas first X rated cartoon.

France/Czech Republic

 Rene Laloux made The Fantastic Planet in 1973, which was about a society where humans were taken to another planet to be pets. The film alludes to social concerns of Fascist repression and war as well as alternative culture and Eastern mysticism ('adult' themes without resorting to sex, drugs and rock and roll). 

USA

A Christmas Carol (1971) was made by Richard Williams, the author of The Animators Survival Kit, which was a made for TV film that was later released in movie theatres. When the film won the 1972 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the controversy it caused resulted in the rules for Academy Awards refined to exclude TV films from being nominated for the Oscars.

A Christmas Carol (1971) Review

A Christmas Carol details the personal journey of Ebenezer Scrooge, a cold-hearted businessman, as he is visited by three spirits the three nights before Christmas. Over the course of the three nights, Scrooge (and the viewer) learn the cause of Scrooge's callousness, it's effects on those around him and the possible end result if he continues to live this way.
I found the film to be beautifully animated, which is no surprise given the director worked on Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Thief and the Cobbler. The hands on some of the characters were a bit big even when not using perspective, but otherwise the animation was very smooth and detailed. The only real weakness of the film was that the audio quality, coupled with the verbose nature of the dialogue, made following what the characters were saying difficult.
This story and animation has definitely made a cultural impact, with many adaptations to the story including The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) and Bah Humduck! A Looney Tunes Christmas (2006), as well as countless Christmas episodes for cartoons.

Stop-mo A New Game animatics cont.

We put the sound files we recorded in the weekend into the animatics.

I also added some animation which I will clean up later

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Here's the completed animatic. I keep forgetting that Storyboard Pro hates being an open and functioning program so I had to frequently save on top of autosaving every 10 minutes

This is the latest version I found of act 2 (done by Chloe)

This is the latest version I found of act 3 (done by Marilyn)

BSA 127 pitch bible + animatic

This week in BSA 127, I finished off my pitch bible and started my animatic.

For the pitch bible, making a background image in Microsoft Office Word results in the image tiling when it is printed. To fix this, remove the picture as a background and set it as a watermark instead and set it's scale to 100%.

Today for the animatic, I had timed out the shots (the entire thing came to be about a minute and a half long). Next time, I'll try to figure out the camera so I can incorporate the pans I have planned in the storyboards into the animatic.

I also have to incorporate sounds into the animatic to help time it out.

Here's a picture of version 1 of the animatic. I have yet to incorporate camera movements and sound. Art and Story are copyrighted to me.

Animation history 1965-1969

Toei Doga

 Cyborg 009 was a manga that was about a champion athlete that became a cyborg after a serious injury. It was adapted into an animation in 1966 (film), 1968 (TV series), 1979 (TV series) and 2001 (TV series).

Hiroshi Sasagawa

Made Mach Go Go Go (1967), which was called Speed Racer in the West. The Western version was censored and toned down to include less death. Speed Racer along with Astro Boy  opened up the Western market for Japanese animation

USA

Disney made The Jungle Book (1967), his last film before succumbing to lung cancer. The film was notable for animating the characters based on the movements of the voice actors for the first time.

UK

The Yellow Submarine (1968) was a film based on songs by The Beatles. Each song was animated with a different visual style, making full use of the technology of the time.

USA/Japan

MOM Production in Japan made a stop-motion film Mad Monster Party (1967) for US producer Jules Bass. This film influenced the later work of Tim Burton.

UK

 Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin made the company Smallfilms and produced many children's series (Ivor the Engine, Bagpuss and Noggin the Dog) in a cow shed, which they converted into a stop-motion set.

Italy

Osvaldo Cavandoli made The Line (1969), which was turned into comics and a TV series

Belgium

 Belvision Studios made an adaptation of the first volume of Asterix the Gaul (1967), without the creators consent or knowledge. The creators (Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo) couldn't stop the first film from being released, but stopped the sequel to be stopped in production.

Canada

 Eva Szasz directed a short film based on the book Cosmic View (1957) called Cosmic Zoom (1968), which focused on a boy rowing a boat, zoomed out to the edge of the universe, then zoomed back in to the atoms on the boy's hand.
The film The Powers of Ten was also based on the same book and came out at about the same time.

Croatia

Pavao Stalter and Branko Ranitovic directed an adaptation of Edgar Allen Poes The Masque of the Red Death in 1969

Canada

Ryan Larkin produced a sequence award winning films in the 1960's, including Walking  in 1969

I may use him as an artist model in BVA 103's project proposal.

Russia

 Andrei Khrjanovsky made There Lived Kozyavin (1966) which was a commentary on the absurdity of faceless communist beaurocracy and was greenlit despite heavy KGB interference on all Soviet film production. Another film he made The Glass Harmonica (1969) was the first animated film to be banned in Russia

UK/USA

 Terry Gilliam created Storytime 1968 and Monty Pythons Flying Circus and he came up with the anarchic animation style by using a mix of photos, Victorian imagery, surreal machines and strange illustrations.

Film Review:

The Cosmic Zoom (1968)

All the zoom levels in this short are drawn by hand. Here is a close up of the mosquito drinking from the boy's hand.

This film begins with a live action sequence of a boy rowing a boat on a river, zooms out to the edges of the universe, zooms back in to the boy, and zooms in even further on the boy's hand to the atoms of an iron group in a haemoglobin molecule in a red blood cell being sucked up by the mosquito on his hand. The animation of the short was alright but was a little bit inaccurate when it came down to the miscroscopic level, I was unable to tell things apart when they represented amino acids, molecules and atoms all using circles.Some of the images from The Powers of Ten. Note what appears to be a Scanning Electron Micrograph of the skin in the bottom image third from the right.

I kept comparing The Cosmic Zoom to The Powers of Ten, another short based on the same novel, but was annotated. The Powers of Ten was similar to Cosmic View but the central image was a couple picnicking in the US, the zoom out was to 100 million lightyears and the zoom in ended to the subatomic structures of an atom in a DNA molecule in the nucleus of a white blood cell. I preferred The Powers of Ten to Cosmic View as it was annotated, explained what was on the screen and the images at the microscopic level are more accurate. When I watched The Powers of Ten as a highschooler, it actually helped me understand the scale of things on both a macroscopic and microscopic level and helped me visualise things such as electron clouds surrounding an atom and the distance from the Earth to the Moon.