Now, I have always thought that half of how we as animation students get better at animation and become better animators is simply down to watching animation. But when I've had a lot of work to do I have tended to not watch much movies or television shows, let alone animation which I feel is a major problem. This trip was exactly what I needed because even though it was still related to animation, it was definitely a break from the animation I was currently doing with so much of my spare time.
Of course throughout the festival I have seen a monumental amount of animation but there are a few in particular that have stuck in my mind, in particular the graduate film ‘MANOMAN’. I absolutely loved this animation and it did turn out to be my actual favourite of the lot. This is surprising to me because I have not always been the biggest fan of puppetry (besides The Muppets and Team America). And I proffered it to all the traditional 2D hand drawn animations of which is still my favourite medium in animation.
MANOMAN was a bizarre animation about letting your primal instinct run wild and take over. This well manured, somewhat pathetic character does exactly this and with the bad influence of his primal instinct (a small hairy naked man) he goes from being timid to running completely wild resulting in crazy and chaotic consequences. It was just really funny and very entertaining. It was proof that it doesn't really matter what medium an animation is presented in, be that 2D traditional, 3D CGI or stop motion, all that matters is good story and characters.
I have to say I was a little disappointed at the traditional 2D animations, mostly because there seemed to be a lack of them compared to 3D and stop motion. But of the 2D animations that were shown, my favourite was definitely the graduate film ‘Wolf Games’. Animation to me is never scary, not even slightly creepy, it just isn't. But I remember watching Wolf Games and feeling genuinely creeped out. The music was incredibly loud and ominous which added to the deeply unsettling tone. Not a lot happened in it and the character designs were incredibly basic yet it worked and definitely did it’s just of being something actually quite disturbing.
So I've mentioned my two favourites, but another animation, of which is probably my joint second favourite was the 3D animated graduate short film 'Chiaroscuro'. When this came on the screen I was positive I was not going to like it. I felt like it was going to look very nice with very impressively rendered 3D backgrounds but I just had a feeling I was going to fall asleep when I saw the main character was... a ball of fire, no facial expressions, nothing. But, I couldn't have been more wrong. The narrative basically went like a fire ball appears, precedes to get chased by an an assembly of morphing blocks through a concrete jungle. That is it. And yet I found myself getting hopelessly pulled in to what was going on on screen. I found myself rooting for this ball of fire that somehow had personality about it and wanting it to escape the cluster of black cubes that although was basically just a cluster of black cubes there was something quite ominous about it and it was definitely clear it was the antagonist of the animation. I also credit how well the animation works to the impressive score that perfectly compliments what is happening on screen.
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