Author: Jiawen Tan

Cutout animation uses paper-cut to represent the plot. Use paper to cut or carve objects and background props, paint colors and assemble joints. When shooting, according to the needs of the plot, the activities of the characters and scenery are decomposed into several different postures step by step, which are placed on the glass, manipulated by the human, and then the joints are pulled in turn. The movable images are taken by the method of progressive photography, and are formed by continuous projection.

Chinese paper cutting is an ancient art form passed on from generation to generation. Therefore, Chinese paper cutting animation combines traditional paper-cut skills to create exquisite scenes.

The Fox and the Hunter (1978) is a Chinese cutout animation. The film tells the story of a cunning fox who uses legends to disguise himself as a monster to scare young hunters into losing their guns and fleeing for their lives. Old hunters see through the fox’s tricks and kill them. At the beginning of the creation, the designer failed many times when he designed the fox, because he loved the fox very much, so that the fox that was supposed to be cunning and treacherous became more and more lovely. The director said he wanted to hug it. So the designer drew more than twenty pictures before they passed. But the wolf’s shape is a success, because the designer hates the wolf deeply. This worries me a lot about the cutout animation project we are going to do. I think Janelle will certainly be unable to make up her mind about the final design of animal characters.

French animation has its own style, unlike the animation in the United States, Japan and other regions (mostly commercial), French animation usually has connotative storyline, and philosophical thinking. French animation has always been dominated by short films with fresh or profound connotations. Its unique character style, color style and overall sense of artistic form can leave a deep impression on the audience.

Unlike Disney animation, French animation is stylized, which reflects the individual style of artists combined with local traditional culture.

In French animation, there are more absurd plots, more exaggeration in the style, artistic form and expression techniques of the picture, and more exaggeration in the character modeling. The overall style of the film uses a large area of white, black, monochrome or homochrome, usually using color psychology to foil the development of events.

For animated short films, simple and contradictory stories are particularly important. In just a few minutes, we need not only simple and easy to understand, but also a strong explosive point. Proper design of some turning point, suspense, or trigger some resonance, will succeed in attracting the attention of the audience.

The movie The Idea (1932), which lasted for nearly half an hour, was hard to understand when it first watched. The film is made up of multi-layer transparent films, and the effects of halo and smoke are produced by the use of soap bubbles and glass panels. Although the picture is slightly blurred, it retains the graphic style of the printmaking while bringing special effects of light and shadow to the film. In addition, the short film is considered to be the earliest use of electronic instruments in the history of film. The music, Arthur Honegger, uses Ondes Martenot, invented in 1928, the earliest electronic organ.

A beautiful and naked woman was created in the starlight. She symbolizes a new thought. The creator sent her to the public. But feudal thought could not accept such purity and nature, and tried to judge and disguise the woman. The woman who fled the trial met a bosom man and she gradually has many supporters. Because of that, the man was sentenced to death. However, women were soon publicized, and high-ranking people used the army in the face of increasingly taller and bigger woman, under the ineffectiveness of coercion and lure. In the sound of gunfire, many supporters were killed. Among the sad crowd, women are transformed into light, shining above the stars.

The production of the film refers to the Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed created by German silhouette artists in 1926.

We saw many examples of stop motion animation in class. The one that shocked me most was the one made on the wall of the building. After class, I found a lot of interesting stop-motion movies to watch.

It’s really interesting to use stop-motion animation to make cooking videos, especially when different materials are conceptually substituted for ordinary food used in everyday life. In Julia’s blog post, the producer of stop-motion animation treats the grenade as avocado and the note paper as butter. The ingenious combination of special sound effects and scenes makes people feel like “nothing’s wrong with this” and “these things look delicious”

It’s a video of sushi making with stop motion. The producer even cut the iPhone. I’m really curious about how it can be neatly cut into several segments! It also has a funny plot design, which I really think is a successful stop-motion work.

In class, we learned about trick films and watched many example movies. At the beginning, I thought trick films were just a silent comedy. But with a deeper understanding, I found that trick films emphasized surprising ideas and incredible plots more than jokes or dramatic plots. The absurd sense of humour is my new evaluation of this type of film.

With interest, I found more trick films for Georges Melies after class. Among them, I was most impressed by Le Cauchemar (A Nightmare) 1896. I am embarrassed to admit that this film makes me feel a little scared. This feeling overturned my previous experience. I felt very uncomfortable when I saw the moon suddenly enlarged in the background and a strange face like a human being, just as I was startled by a sudden change in my daily life when I had nightmares. That huge, weird moon really surprised me. However, this kind of surprising weird element makes trick films full of special sense of humor and attraction.