BDM125, BDM126 Animation Reviews 3 June

Requiem for Romance

We watched this in class.  It was a really interesting short.  The action male ninja v. female ninja, fighting across rooftops. But the audio is an Asian Canadian woman trying to break up with her Asian Canadian boyfriend.  (I say Canadian based on the funding from sources in Quebec)  And this "disjointed" pairing of audio and visual really works.  The timing was expertly matched up so as the boyfriend goes on the verbal attack, so does his animated counterpart, and vice versa until the two end up quietly sitting at the end of a dock, just talking to each other.  Will they be able to get past parental prejudices and stay together?

The backgrounds look like watercolor being dripped onto the camera.  I wondered if this was stop motion, or live with black figures animated in a new layer.  It's making me think about the stop motion project next semester.

Mood is driven by pacing but also by the change of colour as the argument heats up, then cools down, and the changing weapons as the breakup conversation grows more pleading in tone.  

Then we watched Road Runner cartoons.  Meep meep!  I grew up with these and I've never seen them spliced together with 10 minutes of Wil E. Coyote getting his head knocked in when his  harebrained schemes went wrong.  Pacing, matching audio to mood and timing are to be observed and borrowed from.  There's that all-important pause as Wil E. considers what is just about to happen to him...

Road Runner cartoon