huiwen'scosmic

29/11/2020

The mature-marked animated music video ‘All Over’ has surprised me by its astonishing transition of 50 images from at least 38 classic movies in history. It is animated by two-dimensional computer techniques based on Cruisr’s song ‘All Over’. And it also absorbs and reappears many classic films’ actor images and classic shots to describe the simple but abstract lyrics in this song, which I think the makers did a great work on not only its cool style, but its smoothing transition of animation.

The video sets up two basic characters as male and female(or two well-known actors) to create mutually reactive scenes inspired from classic movies. In the beginning, there are two heads morphing themselves into different persons whom mostly are famous celebrities or surreal animation characters. From a fantastic transition into a boxer, this style changes into a scene with simple but symbolic background which consists of simple geometric or classic movie scenes, simultaneously with these two characters transiting from imaginations. I can see that these two characters mostly represent two kinds of couples, and sometimes they show love or hurt action to each other, which totally matches the topic of this song: going all over. And it ends up with the beginning’s style—two heads. When this video uses these classic movies’ similar meaning of images to strengthen its core idea, I think it make sense for all these transitions.

Also, its cool style worths a look. Throughout the whole video, it uses a kind of dark drawing strokes which remind me of old movie or fashion posters with print styles in black and white, and distinctive solid colours like yellow, pink, blue and orange. When the title appears or during the two-head transition part, the background takes an old paper-like colour and little textures on screen, even though it is still a digital work. In fact, this style does bring me back to the movie ages. So unlike other commercial colourful computer animations, it obviously seeks for a feeling of past ages, which expends the topic of this song and lyrics. What is more, I think it also shows a good example of practicing unlimited transitions as well. Its wonderful and rhythm-following transition seems to grab the audience’s attention easily, and to leave a highly completed animated frames. Personally speaking, its art style and amazing transition really inspire me a lot at this moment.

MV address: https://vimeo.com/channels/staffpicks/113248603

28/11/2020

This weekend I have fortunately enjoyed two animated music videos and Kalle Matteson’s song ‘Thick As Thieves’ worked with stop-motion animator Kevin Parry is one of these fantastic MVs. As far as I am concerned, the combination of both animation and music is a creative way to expend the content of lyrics, though it is still a developing area like animated documentaries.

According to this animation, it describes a world history from the earlier brith of earth to human’s modern life by crafts in an interesting stop-motion way, making the whole music down to the earth. The most impressive element from this video is its unique expression in two materials: one is the huge earth or moon covered by different rough cloth fabrics and colours—representing different lands like rock, earth, sea and desert; the others are people, buildings, trees, animals, meteorites, and even spacecrafts shown as drawing papers cut and moved in a plane way(see below).

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These are totally distinctive textures but the animator combines them within harmonious colourful pictures which give the audience a feeling of touching.

Additionally, its animator did a great work on the shots of expressing changes of history on earth. For example, at the beginning shot it starts from a white point light illuminating from a hole in darkness, followed by multiple paper-piles and rock stone which represent the Bi Bang, I think. After this transition is a close-up of the earth occupying nearly half of the screen as the main stage. The camera stays solid during the main earth part and contents including colours, sky and things change by rolling the earth land toward the screen, which I think is a creative method of transmitting the complex history in a short time(see below).

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Then it is followed by a long moving shot of depicting national spacecrafts flying in the dark space outside the earth and moon. And it ends up with the same shot of earth part illustrating modern buildings and society, and destroyed by a huge robot.

The lyrics are simple enough for the whole music, but the animated frames give more meanings and contents about the video—they made a quick glance of the whole history. And its style of showing a children-like interest has left a deep impression on me. I really enjoy such way of attracting people’s attention—just beautiful and adorable materials encountering with each other and producing an amazing effect. And that is what this animated MV shows.

MV address: https://vimeo.com/23986237

22/11/2020

This Sunday, I have watched a film ‘The Celestine Prophecy'(2006) adapted by a 1993 novel of the same name written by James Redfield, which inspired me a new thought that I am seeking for recently.

Unlike other high technological or art films, this is actually a spiritual film with a simple script telling a story about a male narrator John Woodson involved in a trip to Peru when told by his old female friend that there is a priest, Father Jose, finding eight scrolls of ancient manuscripts written at 5 or 6 BC. These manuscripts reveal a huge and astonishing prophecy about the modern life and future’s development of human beings. At the beginning, John Woodson loses his high-teaching job, pushing him into a crossroad of his life. But there is a shot showing he standing at the classroom and staring at a long colourful picture of evolutionism from brith of earth to human modern buildings on the wall, and then writing down a question behind it: what’s next? Such concern leads John join in the research for the ninth scroll of this prophecy, even though workers around father Jose are involved into a big trouble with the ruling class which uses gun power to stop them publishing these prophecy to the public and is afraid of losing their power over the people.

Without a great act or special effects, this film still left a surprise on the contents of this prophecy for me. Behind it mostly hides some answers I have been searching for several months about. There is a paragraph before this story says to look the world closely not only from your mind, but from your soul, and open up the world from the First Insight. Throughout the whole travel, the main character John opens his mind to the world step by step, even in the hardest tarp, and ultimately sees a real world with higher dimensions.

The nine scrolls in this film actually tell nine steps of spiritual development of individuals:

1. we are re-perceiving our real world full of sudden coincidences and synchronistic encounters. This is apparently true to everyone that we can easily find lots of coincidences full of our daily life. Although science teaches most of people a mechanically linear thinking about the cause and effect, most theories are just built on the possible premiss, making most scientists become only predictors, not real prophets.

2. We will create a new worldview redefining our universe as energetic and sacred. When you open yourself up to the world, you will find these energies everywhere. And I think many scientists have found it as energy creates matter, it also creates every single life on this planet.

3. We will discover that everything around us including matter stems from a divine energy that we are beginning to see and understand. This will be the final answer to one ultimate question for most philosophers and scientists about a source we are coming from. But this source is not physical or ideal. It is beyond all these definitions. If I make a metaphoric explanation, I will say it is more like the One manifesting itself into everything including life and non-life(the whole universe) instead of a humanised God that creates everything. We can find this divine source from ourselves’ existence, so we are not separated at higher levels.

4. From this perspective we can find the deep reason for all human conflict is coming from a disconnection with this sacred source, causing a struggle of insecurity and finding energy by dominating each other. This is the most useful answer to me since I started to consider why people always cause conflicts, wars and classes, and unfair treatments to the female during the whole human history. Here is the reason. As this sentence points out, because most people lost the connection with their real souls and energy source, they feel thirsty and unsatisfied with desires. They can only take energy outside such as elites satisfy themselves by controlling the mass, men take powers from controlling women, and some parents maintain status from controlling children. Every tragedy happens in human society is from the mental lack of human itself.

5. The only solution is to cultivate a reconnection with the divine via unlimited energy and love, expending our perception of beauty, and lifting us into a Higher-Self Awareness. Because only love can give people real power and energy from our heart instead of money and material possessions which cannot fill people’s psychological lack.

6. In this awareness, we can reverse our way of controlling and discover our specific mission of life is to help human evolve into a new level of reality.

7. We can find our inner intuition that tells us where to go and what to do. If we give others positive flow of energy, we will receive a greater positive energy from the universe. In others words, we can receive positive feedback when we share positive actions, words and love; vice versa. If we create hate, insults and war, whether the war is justice or not, we can only receive the same negative feedback. It does not mean we should embrace everyone that will hurt us, instead, we should reduce superfluous negative thoughts and protect our free will via positive measures.

8. When enough of us enter this evolutionary flow, we will build a new culture in a new reality.

9. We already participate into a long journey with life’s ultimate goal to energise our body, and a heaven is waiting for us in the end of this journey.

There is no limit for the steps. And we can also have tenth, eleventh and more steps following. From this film, I have got a positive inspiration of creating my own animation. When I recapped most contemporary animations I watched, I found some animators like revealing darkness of our society. I think it is ok to discuss these social issues from the dark side of our society, but most of them do not give a guide or solution, and I can understand they just want a warning to the public. Personally, I think it is better to create animations based on guiding people rediscover themselves, re-evoking humanity that we are losing, sharing permanent and unconditional love that unites people and stops division from every culture. All the cognitions now we know from the world just comes from a controlled brain which will disappear in the future. And I think it is time to recognise that our future does not exist in high technologies like AI and chemical industries. It exists in ourselves’ inner soul and our spiritual evolution, including relationship with our mother land earth and new attitudes toward other lives and non-lives. There is a word that I think I can use for such change of my thought for animation: the Neo-Renaissance Age.

16/11/2020

This year I started my first animation programme(not only for school as my undergraduate courses) about making a sting selected from one of eight International Competition Programmes for London International Animation Festival(LIAF) with classmates and tutors in the ual. After a long time of idea development and decision made by the LIAF programme group, my animation about ‘Playing with Emotion’ programme was finally chosen as a three-member teamwork for the following holiday and the next term’s first month. Personally, I felt glad to take this job and worked impressively with my partners. It was also my first time to be a director working with Simin and Charlies in an animation production.

This animation, named as ‘Artist’, describes an emotional human-to-animals transformation travel of a female artist in a canvas’ world. It starts with a female artist getting angry during her paining process and then she morphs into a red bull, experiencing a falling-down until she turns into a sad raven in a raining environment, and followed with a satisfied and joyful peacock which transmutes itself into this female artist with a completed artwork in the end.

• Designs

I chose three animals—bull, raven and peacock and used distinctive and rich colours to represent different mood feelings: red as anger, blue as sadness and bright yellow as joy. And the main character was designed from an idea of a puppet-like nose and round eyes, from which I wanted to show an emotional change to a live human look(see below).

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But the design works then became a first significant challenge for me. Without any experience of leading a teamwork, I found it was hard for me to take actions immediately before making the in-betweens and animating. I spent a long time on searching for a better and impressive style during a whole summer. And I also forgot to make a precise scheme to guide the whole making process. So all the things came together at one time, which pushed me into a highly stressful condition, even though I made it before the deadline.

My job covered the main characters and the studio’s backgrounds, following my tutor Steve’s idea of making the beginning frames monochromatic to a colourful end(see below), and Simin completed the animals’ travel backgrounds based on my recommendation and references from some pure colourful oil paintings I searched in Pinterest.

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And the flower in the peacock part was designed from the inspiration of Flower of Life image, based on same overlapping circles(see below).

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• Animating and Colouring

The animating part was separated into three parts. Based on the animatic, I did the in-betweens about the beginning and end parts and also the peacock movement, and Simin did the raven part from the fire to the raining part. Charlies did the movement of bull as well. The movement was crucial for me so that I took most of time to complete. And due to the lockdown impact, I could not use the TV paint in the studio, so I drew most of my keyframes and in-betweens on my iPad(see below). The new software I chose was Procreate which I found has a similar function as Photoshop. But the issue of this software is that I could not set a timeline about animating. In that case, I decided to think of timing very carefully.

• Editing and Music

Because of the date limited by the deadline, we only had a few time of editing. I used Premiere to unify the most shots I had made and added my partners’ shot to check the timing and pace of the whole animation. Then Simin completed the final editing, including the music and sound effect. However, due to the remote work, I could not guide the whole editing with Simin, so I reviewed the last version she made for me and made some small changes before submitting the completed version. And I even added the LIAF ending format through tutor’s require.

This making experience gave me a lot more than I think, including the time issues I could have avoided, and the way that how to separate distributions for animators and unify the pace and shots of the animation. This is also a good chance of practicing how animation products in industries from ideas to a final film. Although I have seen my flaws of ability on organisation, but the highly communication with groups was very useful and helpful for the process. I will thank all the members and tutors who joined in this LIAF Programme.

04/06/2020

The short animation film About a Monter was actually found by accident at one night when I was looking for some inspirations of my school project. After watching this film, I felt so touched and impressed, and even could not hold my tears at all. At that point, I thought it had touched a common ground of one’s deep heart——the selfless love.

This is an approximately seven-min-long graduation animation made by Dina Velikovskaya in 2016, with gaining a series of rewards after school. It has a simple and direct description of its narrative, telling a story about a mother living in a small tribe with her three children. She has an incredible long black hair. When every time she is raising her children by feeding, combing their curly hair, and do what a mother will do, her hair always makes some troubles to her neighbours like tripping others over ground,  obstructing fishing boat，and even disturbing houses and woking people on a windy day. But her hair does not keep holding drawbacks all the time. And this mother will eventually make a reconciliation with her neighbours by apology, giving fishes from the net of her hair, and let her hair as a shelter to neighbours on rainy days.

In the second section of this animation, the three children suddenly grow up as teenagers one by one and leave their mom and hometown via huge ferryboat, helicopter and train. The mother feels happy at first, but soon she finds a little bit lonely and missing about her boys. Later she receives letters about their troubles in life, she cuts her hair to wave a strong net for the first boy’s fishing work on ship, a parachute for the second boy’s skydiving mission, and a heavy coat for the third boy when he travels to an icy country at Christmas.

In the end, this mother stands in the centre of this small tribe, with no hair on her head but a faintly satisfied smile on her face. It seems to indicate that even if she loses her hair, she feels happy to be able to help her children, and her hair looks like a symbolic implication of a link carrying a mother’s selfless love for her children. I can see the delicate love from every moment the mother gives to her children without any complaints via obviously direct depiction of her actions and facial emotions like smiling, surprising and hug. And this story ends with an imaginary scene of the mother that the hair grows again from her head into a moving lens of many fragments of her boys’ new life that she is missing, even though she is not around them.

It is crucial to have a look at this film’s unique art style and representations that the animator made successfully. I can see that clearly the animator chooses an African tribe as the background of the whole story, and adopts a simplistically rock-art-like hand drawing style for all frames in black and white. This monochromatic rough style of buildings, trees and the river in screens appear to give a sense of purity to the audience, and it is also shown in the character design which uses black dots and lines on characters’ bodies and faces, and a simple geometric shape of the mother’s body as an inverted bowl with two swirling stripes. And the background drawing nothing but only white makes me more concentrate on the movements and emotions of the characters. What is more, the wild shots from this film remind me of the ancient rock art drawn by Africans without any perspective rules, but revealing a kind of primeval beauty from the nature. Like in some transition shots, the film uses a graphic morphing of plane from one scene to another scene with simultaneously background objects changing. According to the sound using, the film chooses a minority language from Africa, which emphases the strong atmosphere of a tribe. On each actions, it adds quite right sound effects to bring a real-world feeling to the audience.

From my personal views, this out-of-rule form could efficiently expand human’s imagination of the drawing, and strengthen the ability of the surreal expression that only animation could make. Moreover, the vital point is that it does make sense of conveying a feeling of aesthetic purity in animation art, which gives me a chance of rethinking animation itself as a more useful media of illustrating the pure story and pure feelings without any extra visual and sound effects. Simply the touching contents can succeed in gaining a wide sense of identity from the public, and the topic of love is always an eternal beauty and meaning throughout all human histories.

Animation Film Link: https://vimeo.com/416460138

23/05/2020

This weekend I have had a chance to watch a Brazilian animated adventure film Boy and the World(2013) which has a unique hand-drawing style and no clear dialogue in the whole storytelling. Its narrative tells that a boy living in countryside and growing in a natural place experiences his father leaving the family by train, then he feels unhappy and follows the track to a wilder world to find his father. He is picked up by an old peasant and starts his adventure of this sophisticating world from a cotton industry to a modern city. During his adventure, he encounters a poor craftsman and a pride of people in the street where also the army and weapons are standing in the opposite and stoping the pride. After this adventure, the boy turns into a teenager leaving his hometown by train as his father did before. And in the end he backs his home as an old man. Although there is no more ambiguous words in this film, the directer used the story board and creative transitions to connect the story, making sense of expressing a boy’s angle of watching this world. Or the whole animation with less dialogue can let audiences concentrate more on the drawing frames that depict the world in different aspects.

It is initially interesting to look at the unique style this film adopts in frames and character design. Unlike many mainstream animation films, this film mixes a hand painted picture-book style which could remind me of the crayon drawing each kid do in the childhood, and the digital editing in combination. Firstly, the main character boy is drawn as a simple button-like head with a red striped rubber tube-like body and four linear limbs, and like many other characters in this film, his eyes looks like button eyes as two black lines. This kind of facial design could not express more complex emotions, so in the most part of this film, many characters remain a similar facial expression. But in the contrast, they can show their feelings via actions and behaviours. Secondly, like the character style, the drawing frames use a same rough drawing style with simplistic and geometric shapes like round trees, rectangular cars and ships, linear objects and colourful balls. Some frames even use an abstract access like the post-modern style with hand-drawing objects to creating an experimental representation of describing daily works in industries, bringing a sense of mechanical homogenisation shown under the process of modern industrialisation. Moreover, these frames adopt many classic and impressive colours from real Brazilian cities including Slum and tall buildings, and the hybrid culture in Brazil, which reveal a rich and colourful Brazilian style. Thirdly, there are some tradition parts choosing moving patterns from macro world to micro world, and some parts in mixture with real life-recordings to enhance the perspective of criticising the destruction of nature. They all provide a fantastic picture of this story, and based on such style, the directer has put lots of metaphors in these frames like the mechanical producing process in the industry replacing the hand making, the capitalism turning workers into robots, the over-destroying of the nature, and the lack of happiness and embracing the nature.

However, personally, the most touching part of this film could be the feelings of home in the beginning and the end of this film. At start, the boy looks so missed about his leaving father and even follows his dad’s footstep to leave home. But in end when he grows up as a teenager and opens the gift given by his mom on the leaving train, it is shown as a cap as same as the one the craftsman is wearing. Till here, I just realised that the craftsman and peasant the boy meets are actually the boy himself at different ages, and the trip in this film is more like a retrospect of the boy’s whole struggling life in the city. So in the end when he becomes the old man backing his home and finding nothing but a broken house, he ends up with an imaginary scene that he turns into the little boy’s status again and sleeps in the arms of his mother with his father playing music. It shows that whether how difficult he experiences outside the world, the home appears to be an eternal place that he finally returns and feels safe and peace in the heart. What is more, The director made a nexus between the opening scene as a zooming out shot from a point to a beautiful pattern in an external world, and the ending scene as a zooming in shot from this beautiful external world to a point in an internal world. And there are also two similar leaving scenes where the boy’s mon reveals a similar gesture and worried facial expression. It seems that the mom has become a symbol of the home and safety in this boy’s mind.

We might losing the main point in the middle of this film because the director put a lot in the drawings. But it dose not go so far. By the end, this film still backs to the home scene, making a different feeling from the beginning: whether how complexly the outside world is changing, the home remains the same in the boy’s mind. Here, the home and the world look like a contrasting meanings to the boy.

17/5/2020

There have been lots of fantastic animations looking at the macrocosm surrounding us. But how about going into an inner world inside ourselves? Here, Pixar’s award winning animation film Inside Out (2015) provides a creative access to looking into our human’s inner spiritual world, and focusing on emotions as a crucial part of our daily life. In this film, director visualises the inner world as a complex mechanical country with a control centre and many diverse cities built by person’s memories from real-world objects in different stages of life, and five emotion representatives—joy, sadness, anger, fear and disgust—are the main workers of the centre. It reveals that most emotions expressed by characters from this film appear to be the results of these workers collaboration in daily life. 

Based on such setting background, the story concentrates on a girl Riley’s sudden experience about a disorder of her emotions and feelings when she follows her parents moving into a new environment, confronting an unacquainted school and classmates, and experiencing a stressful atmosphere of the family due to the bad luck from works and the house. Instead of depicting these external impacts, this film expresses this disorder as an unexpected trip taken by Joy and Sadness outside the centre so that the left members have to take over control temporarily. During this trip, Joy and Sadness witness the self-demolition of many cities—they call islands like Goofball Island and Friendship Island in the inner world, then encounter a funny guy—a pink elephant Dream and make huge efforts to back the centre.

As usual, the film Inside Out maintains Disney’s mainstream comedy style and 3D computer-making process, choosing a classical structure of the storytelling from problem-raising to problem-solving. But we could also see some scientific evidences from the story. For instance, a recent study shows that happiness is more than just an experience of joy and positive emotions. It could be a result of both positive and negative emotions. As in this film, Joy feels annoyed about Sadness in the beginning and wants to control Sadness’ behaviour like making her stay within a circle. So when Sadness creates a core memory ball, Joy immediately wants to change it and makes a terrible mess in the centre, leading to an accidental trip with Sadness. Ultimately, Joy backs the centre under the cooperation with Sadness and alters her attitude to Sadness. It reveals that after the teamwork of both Joy and Sadness Riley becomes happier with her new life.

It is interesting to look at the characters’ design in this film. We can see the ideas on colours expression of these five emotion representatives such as Joy in bright yellow, Sadness in blue, Anger in red, Fear in purple and Disgust in green. And each character has an exaggerating silhouette of body like Fear in a slim and tall body, Sadness in a round and short body with slow movements, and clearly Anger in a short but strong body with an irritable personality. Moreover, the main character Joy is depicted as a healthy body with an onion-like head. Here, colours make sense in strongly connection with the emotions and can even enhance our feelings about each emotion.

However, as far as I am concerned, there could be two issues in this film. One is that all the workers in the creative country have individual personalities. For example, Joy also has the feelings of sadness and anger even though she represents positive emotions in Riley’s world. This kind of design might set a premise that these workers are not only the elements of this world, but real existences in this world. Another is the dream producing part in this story. It is apparently shown that the directer describes the dream production as a stage show with camera manipulated by workers. But from my perspective, I think dream may not work like such a mechanical process and even the scientists could not figure out the rules of dream nowadays. Like human’s consciousness, I see dreams more like a higher dimension of operation from souls and hearts. Thus, dreams seem to be too sophisticated to be depicted only as an industry.

Although I have some comments about the idea of dream part, I think the whole animation is still a fantastic creation from the observation of real life. It also provides an inner angle for both children and adults to look inside and deal with the psychological issues with emotions during the growing-up process.

03/05/2020

This year, I was in my first time having chances to touch and study animated documentary from an academical angle. Before that, I personally thought about animated documentary as an unambiguous category of animation that I could seldom recognise because I did have seen many documentaries combining digital skills and animated drawings in some lens segments, but incapably considered as animated documentaries. Yet as a developing documentary form from last late century, animated documentary is still hard to be defined via a clear line from conventional documentary and animation featured film. Fortunately, many directors attempt it as a new access to their recent documentary films, and I could choose one of them as my core study case——Chris the Swiss(2018), an experimental documentary made by female animator Anja Kofmel. 

In the beginning of my researching, I met an initial problem about the language in this film due to its co-producing process between Switzerland, Croatia, Germany and Finland, and many interviewees are Swiss as Chris himself. So there are totally two main languages in this film: English and Swiss which occupies most important interview and live-action parts. As I am not familiar with Swiss, I had to surmise actual contents only through the shots. Later, I chose to find more details from others’ online articles of film reviewing, and fortunately, this strategy worked very well in the understanding process.

During the researching process, I personally considered Chris the Swiss more as a hybrid experimental documentary than just pure animated documentary, because the director here drew two main timelines in this film as one is the real-world time shown by live-action and live interviews, and another is the Chris’ historical time re-enacting Chris’ experiences mostly via animation form and little significant archival footages. Unlike other animated documentaries, I found Kofmel only adopts animation access to the depiction of Chris’ unrecorded stories which are also the most heavy and full-of-imagination contents within the film, but chooses live-action  in her real investigating process. During the animation parts, she uses a lot symbolic descriptions such as surreal black insects, exaggerating transitions about people and objects like Chris’ striped scarf into black and white lines and a dark shadow around eyes of each terrorists including Chris when he joined the PIV in the film; and some well-designed scenes consisting of a dark room with a huge cross-like window slit and light on the ground, the constant drawings between Kofmel’s dream of a large corn field and Chris’ dying place, and black forest shown after Chris going into a dark side of the war. Here, Kofmel seems to overdraw her personal features and standpoints about her cousin Chris, but still leave a relatively rational depiction of her emotional struggles during the investigating travel by live-action. 

At this point, I realised that animated documentary might be easier to express a sense of subjectivity of reality to the audience since animation could be expressed at one point-of-view angle, but still needs to explore more useful approaches to highlight the actual sense of the world we live in, not a world someone might create in front of cameras. From my opinion, I think Kofmel’s live-action parts interspersed among animation sections seems efficient to bring the audience back to the realisation about the sense of authenticity in stories in our world at any time.

Finally, I borrowed a few academic books from university’s library to gain a whole impression of animated documentary, even though there is no more study about this film. It did help me understand animated documentary’s development deeper. And I had at least changed my conclusions about this film twice as I analysed the frames one by one. While I could not contain all my thoughts in my essay due to the words limitation. Perspectively, I think I can do more explorations in the future like attempting to practice my own animated documentary. That will be a  fresh experience.

19/04/2020

There is an essay about discussing an unknown influence of a letter from Wan brothers on Japanese Animation during the World War 2. I was surprised when I found it in the academic book East Art in Japanese Animation because I recognise Wan brothers as the first and significant Chinese animators from the last century and they made many first animation works during war time like the first Chinese-made short animation, the first eastern long animation film Princess Iron Fan(1941) and the first Chinese experimental animation. From then on, Wan brothers were renowned as the first ones who pioneered a unique eastern art road in world animation history. While what surprised me was that they left a letter talking about eastern animation art after making Princess Iron Fan, having an unrecorded impact on many famous Japanese animation pioneers at a time most Japanese propagandas were worked for militarism and anti-Chinese culture and people. Yet I was the first time to known this letter.

It is widely known that the first Chinese-made animated feature film Princess Iron Fan has had a long-term influence on Japanese animators since Disney had made several long feature films in last century. For many eastern animators, the film Princess Iron Fan succeed in separating from Disney-dominating style to a new eastern animation style, even though from today’s perspectives it still has some mimetic signs from Disney early style such as the characters’ big round eyes and some exaggerating movements. But the main make-up like the long eyelids and small month, mellow bodies, the typical Chinese clothes and the Chinese-like actions which you can normally see from many Chinese traditional dramas were all a new creative expression to animation art, obviously revealing that Wan brothers had fully absorbed the traditional elements from the eastern art(we can see below).

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These things were all mentioned in the letter from Wan brothers. From some parts quoted, Wan brothers realised Eastern colours and taste including the fashion, action and line-drawing should be embodied in the film-making process of Eastern art in animation. And based on the roots of east culture including not only China, but the surrounding countries like Japan, the animated films would obtain a wide attraction to both children and adults(Takakiba Tsutomu, 1942). What is more, the letter also says the key areas that many eastern animators could research and get inspirations from. From my opinion, these areas could be recognised as the most Chinese or Eastern art areas consisting of the drama, ink paintings, traditional patterns and clothes, and even classic architectures. And all behind these areas is the main eastern philosophy and imaginations from the people. For example, in the film Princess Iron Fan, Mr Wan drew several transition scenes like the Sun Wukong flying through the clouds and escaping from the fire, morphing into an insect and chasing the enemy without any perspective rules and lens. They look like the characters could move from any angles, making the drawing more free to the imagination. This could be considered as an infinite stretching way that most ancient Chinese people could think and observe the world, as well as the Japanese people. Therefore, from many Japanese animators mentioned in this essay, they thought they got an effective encouragement and inspirations from the content of the Wan brothers’ letter and their animated film Princess Iron Fan, driven remain the traditional Japanese spirit when facing modernisation of the Western technology and industrialisation of the Western world.

Personally, I think the ideas from this letter can also be a help to most Chinese animators nowadays. Due to the rapid developing economy and the money-oriented society, there are many crucial cultural elements and philosophies fading away and losing their spirits. We may need to delve for these eastern elements that Wan brothers already paved the way for in Chinese animations, which can actually flourish our animation like the Japanese did before.

15/02/2020, an half overview of the book Japanese Animation

Since Japanese animation has been succeeding around the world, as well-known as American animation nowadays, I think it is worth studying the precious experience of developing animation from Japan. So I searched a book Japanese Animation and have been reading some articles from this book for weeks. Now I am giving a brief overview of these studying essays below.

There are four main periods in Japanese animation developing history since the first animated film by Japanese released in 1917.

From 1910s~1920s, which we could call the pioneer time, both Japanese cartoonists and entrepreneurs began to make animated films when inspired mostly by French and American animation shorts. Cartoonists representatives were Shimokawa Oten (1892-1973) and Kouchi Jun-ichi (1886-1970) who made few films a year but soon went into financial crisis. And the other was Kitayama Seitaro (1888-1945), the painter & entrepreneur of art magazines, who established the Kitayama Film Studio in 1921 with ten films produced per year. He finally succeeded through devising new technology and establishing mass production system on a commercial basis.

Then came to 1930s~1940s, two different accesses to animation production—-collective and individual productions—-appeared into the competition of Japanese animation, leading two categories of animation’s developments later. The animator Masaoka Kenos (1898-1988) acclaimed as “the father of Japanese animation” to Japanese public introduced cel animation and talkies, and developed a system of collective production, having a tremendous impact on Japanese animation but remaining unknown to the international society during the postwar time. Meanwhile, Ofuji Noburo (1900-1961) bringing new genres of animation and colour films insisted on individual production and was highly praised overseas due to his personal works containing absurd stories and many elements of eroticism which have been being criticized for decades. Thus, their efforts towards different standpoints of animation production have been producing differences in the style of the finished works in Japan. And the content of works from collective production tended towards popular taste and large capitals while the individual works went into the independent area.

The third period 1950s~1970s is the significant part of Japanese animation, which resulted in a totally different way of development in animation we called anime later when comparing the west and American animation. Under the background that many Japanese audiences and producers were attracted by the latest released Disney’s animated features (like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and American TV animation series, some Japanese producers wanted to imitated this kind of commercial model of animation. For example, Toei Doga (in his Toei Animation Studio) in 1956 followed this trend to make its first animated feature Hakujaden, but failed to compete with Disney’s featured films in popularity.

However, later in January 1963, Tezuka Osamu (1928-1989) released his TV serials work Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy) which changed people’s taste of Japanese animation and created a new style of animation we call anime nowadays. This time was a competition between featured animation films and TV serials.

Unlike Disney’s mass production based on huge industries and large capitals, Tezuka found TV series could be better produced under a lower budget and less time. He also found that American TV series were short and therefore could not express any great variety of narrative or character emotions. Thus, he set up a new principle for Japanese animation production connected with pop culture and merchandise—-a system that could possibly produce long, complex and diverse stories in animation forms, and leading a twofold approach that of pursuing story interest and that of emphasising the emotional expressions of characters, achieving preponderance very soon. While this could also be causing problems like increasing the burden of animators’ works and a shortage of animators, bringing the poverty to many Japanese animators.

Form 1980s~1990s, Japanese animation went into a new market including mass market and “mania”. In 1984 Studio Ghibli founder Miyazaki Hayao released feature film Kaze no tan no nausicaa (Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind) and soon made themselves become mass-market brands, reviving Japanese feature animation films and appealing a much broader ages of audiences. Meanwhile, some Japanese animators did not want to be limited by large capitals. Therefor, they made some animations bringing their thoughts but not following the mass taste. For instance, Shin-seiki Evangelion (1995) and Ghost in the Shell (1995) attracted a wider interest and became a hit in America. Thus, “mania” had been created to describe certain works that are produced for only a limited fan base and a constant interest.

Now, many Japanese audiences are already divided into diverse areas of interests from animation, and the commercial animation has become one of main props of economy in Japan. Probably owning to the diversified tastes from anime fans, Ghibli’s output has lasted a long-term decline in industry.