Fatty issue is a hand-drawn 2D animated short film by Candy Guard. The story of the film is that a woman asks her boyfriend if she is fat. When he replies, ‘not really’ she decides to go on a diet. After this decision, she makes excuses to indulge in the snacking, and this leads to her breakdown. Finally, she gives in altogether.
Guard’s characters are minimally drawn. However, these are rich observed comic skits on women’s everyday experiences. The drawings are elementary, boil animation in a cartoony style with loose lines. This technique helps Guard bring the narration forward, and this focuses the audience on the story. The drawing is very flat and 2D based to show quick humour from the characters in the film.
Each cartoon shows a dry, observational sense of humour. Guard’s dialogue seems plucked from everyday conversations: much of the comedy derives from a fast-paced delivery of utterly mundane material, with one true-to-life exchanges being rattled off after the other. http://msenscene.com/tag/animation/
The drawings in the shots are loose and pored-down and befit every woman even though the characters do not look like women. Guard has drawn her characters with beak-nosed feature and wearing clothes to help identify them. The simple visual style and stylised characters invite the identification of the audience with every women protagonist.
Some Protection is an animated documentary by Marjut Rimminen about the true story of a young woman who is sent to prison for her own protection. The film shows the women in prison and in the outside world through the character’s eyes and gives the audiences a harrowing account of her experiences inside.
The drawings are very well designed to represent the unpleasant circumstances the character is in. Even though the characters look cartoony, they still portray the power of cruel people. The main character Josie is a pale, skinny woman with a small chest with short hair. It could mistake the character for a male. The character is shown as a tough woman because she talks and acts like a male character.
The drawings are not attractive, looking; they tare quite roughly drawn and quite frightening. In this way, they show the horror that’s accruing with this character. They also help represent the seriousness of the topic in this animated documentary.
The film is designed to show deep anxiety of the main protagonist, Josie, and effectively show the perception of reality.
During the film, the audiences can see how the character is cracking up because she is locked up from the world. She is tortured and slowly despairing. In the end, the character ends up in a mental institution.
When the central characters are isolated and placed naked against a plain white background, it shows expressionist elements. The film also uses symbolism. The outside world is colourful funfair to present freedom. Then the women get grabbed by the policemen and sent back to a dark cell.
The Characters story is becoming potentially representative of any number of women with similar experiences. The film is presented with a strong drawing style that helps embrace the feelings that the audiences are gaining from the film.
Even though the imagery is risqué, it still serves a purpose and helps carry the narration thought-out the scene.
Girls Night out is a 2D animated short film, directed by Joanna Quinn.
In the film, we are introduced to the anti-heroine character Beryl, who is a quiet middle-aged housewife, who goes on an all-girls night out in the pub to see a male stripper.
Despite the humour of the characters, this is not the only topic that this film is exploring. Quinn has designed these characters, such as the main character, Beryl, to show a realistic outlook of women in female society.
The design of Beryl in 1987 was quite cartoony; she had blonde hair, a curvy body with big glasses and a pearl necklace. Then in 1991, character design went into a more realistic look, still keeping the main features, only with bigger lenses. You can see this dramatic change in Quinn’s other two short films, Body Beautiful 1991 and Dreams and Desires: Family Ties 2006. The latter is a perfect example of representing a middle-class woman in the 90s. At that time in film and television, women were mainly drawn with a skinny finger, big bums and breasts to show this was the perfect representation of women from the male perspective.
The character Beryl stood out from other women characters in the film. They were middle-class women who were presented as slim with big breasts. Whereas Beryl’s character was working class, and that was her crucial ingredient. Drawing women as caricatures show the shocking reaction and reality of a group of middle-aged women going crazy over man’s private parts. By designing Beryl this way, Quinn gives a positive representation of women who are a plus size.
In Body Beautiful 1991, she gets harassed with her aerobics instructor, and she is even with him in a contest. This is shown with squash and stretch animation, and it implies that women should be proud and happy no matter what size they are. I think this is one of the reasons why the character is not shown as an offence to big women.
The character is not based on one particular person, but it is made up to portray a lot of women, such as a mother and an auntie. Therefore, she is described as a positive role model in the film.
Subject: Feminist Film Theory, how women are presented in the film industry.
Review 1
Melanie Bell (2011) Feminism and women’s film criticism in post-war Britain, 1945–1959, Feminist Media Studies, 11:4, 399-416, 11 April 2011.
In the article, Melanie Bell highlights that there was feminism in the year of 1945 to 1959. A lot of people such as myself thought that feminism in cinema started in the 1960s. Bell argues that cross-media focuses on productive methods for generating insights into women articles agency. And women in film are presented on a broader scale when it comes to gender in British society.
In 1930s Hedda Hopper and Louella O.Parson who were columnists for film reviews were powerful American women. The famous film stars at the time were quite frightened of these film critics due to what they were going to publish about them in the newspapers. During the 1950s feminist film theory and female authors trailed off and did not re-emerge until the late 1960s.
By reading this article, I can see why a lot of women with respectable jobs were fed up with having negative stereotypes in films. The world was so dominated by men in the film industry that women were over-looked, and Men presented women as housewives and mothers who had to give up their employment opportunities.
This part of the article was quite sad to read because although women could do much more, it was all down to characterised gender and sexual politics.
The representation of women in film was negative and derogatory and was a product of Male fantasy witch lead women to be presented as either helpless and passive or as sexual objects.
Not only did Smith call for “women to be shown in a much wider variety of roles” which would “provide more constructive models for film viewers,” but she also expressed the hope that women’s active involvement across all filmmaking roles would go some way to correcting negative stereotypes (Smith [1972]1999, p. 15).
Review 2
Jean-Anne Sutherland & Kathryn M. Feltey (2017) Here’s looking at her: an intersectional analysis of women, power and feminism in film, Journal of Gender Studies, 26:6, 618-631, 04 March 2016.
Jean – Anne Sutherland and Kathryn M. Feltey analyse women in power and feminism in film. They explore what makes a film feminist from a sociological perspective, by looking into Gender, Race, Ethnicity and Social class in films about women.
The article researches on how much power do women have and how they are depicted in film. This revolves around stories about the ability of women finding the courage to confront challenges in film and individually. So when a strong woman is in a film, they are always represented as middle-class white women. But when there’s a woman of colour. They are mostly featured as having less power.
In the 1970s films always tackled the image of women and represented them as either in stereotypical roles or as positive role models depending on the narrative.
Some women show solidarity in their mutual circumstances, such as in the movie Thelma and Louise 1991. They know women and men filmmakers with feminist values will give women actors better roles. However, this unfortunately is not always the case.
Press and liebes-Plesner (2004) identify four key features: (1) women are present in central roles; (2) there is variation in age-range, size, sexuality, race, and appearance of women on screen beyond the usual narrow parameters; (3) women are seen in roles with power and status, and (4) there are variations from the hetero-normative depictions of family (14). Aside from the occasional independent film, Hollywood, according to Press and Liebes-Plesner, has not delivered feminism on the modern screen. Hollywood, in fact, ‘pays lip service to feminism’ by inserting stronger women characters who are limited by sexist stereotypes (p. 16).
Strong women in Hollywood films are sometimes not portrayed with traditionally feminine features such as compassion and sensitivity. They are sometimes described as successful but struggle with loneliness, and Isolation like Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada, 2006.
If they get more women as writers and directors, there would be more speaking roles for women and girls. Some black directors such as Spike Lee, although tell stories with black women actors the lead male actors still lead the story.
Overall this article concludes that women who are white middle class are never feminist and are often engaged in the exploration of others which is defined “The power over women”. Then there’s “power too”, where women find they no longer need to be dependent on men. And the last one “power with” where women struggle within the constraints of the oppressive system and show solidarity.
Review 3
Gilpatric, K. (2010). Violent Female Action Characters in Contemporary American Cinema. Sex Roles, 62(11-12), pp.734-746.
This article researches the content of the violent female action characters shown in American action films in 1991. Katy Gilpatric focuses on the three aspects of gender stereotypes, demographics, quantity and violence.
Women were portrayed in a submissive role tom the male hero in the film, and women characters were romantically linked to the hero. The women in the film were young, white and highly educated and unmarried. They engaged in masculine types of violence but still retained a feminine stereotype due to their submissive role.
The 1979 film Alien is a good example, starting Sigourney Weather playing L.T Ripley which is an icon in American pop culture. It was commonplace to see female action characters engage in combat by using weapons as this was the domain of male roles.
This representation has moved beyond traditional notions of feminist theory. There is a debating if these characters are empowering images for real women. Gilpatric has examined the gender stereotypes displayed by female action characters. Gilpatric’s research helps to reveal the contradictory nature of female characters appearing in mainstream American cinema.
This is worth looking into because of the potential influence on young target audiences and their idea of gender and violence. There is an imbalance between active/male and passive/female ways of looking at characters in the film. Gilpatric says in her article, females images serve as a design of visual pleasure for the male gaze.
However, in the article, she also provides evidence that the majority of female action characters shown in American cinema, are not empowering images and they do not draw upon their femininity as a source of power. Instead, they are operating inside socially constructed gender norms and rely on the strength and guidance of the dominant male action hero which re-articulates gender stereotypes.
Dziga Vertov is a Russian Soviet documentary filmmaker and a newsreel director from the 1920s. He is also known as a cinema theorist whose practices in the film and theories are used as references by modern-day filmmakers. His style and methods have influenced Cinéma verité from 1922 to 1968.
What stands out in Vertov’s film making is that he has used the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects that are hidden behind crude reality. This is known as Observational Cinema, Michelson (1984) This was the first-time soviet cultures have seen this type of cinema. Furthermore, Vertov and his collaborator Aleksandra Medveadkin created a new non-fiction genre which pushed the boundaries to the point where it was life-threatening.
German expressions (1920) evoked people emotions with strange nightmare like visions and settings, they were heavily stylized and extremely visible to the eye.The French impressionist cinema crafted the essence of cinematography as it shot case the medium invented by the Lumiere Brothers.
Vertov’s Cinema Montage shared similarity to the German and French cinema movements in the 20s and created famous film editors known as the Kino-Eye affect. Vertov is different from German filmmakers in the 20s and that he didn’t use actors in his films, but he just filmed everyday people going about their daily lives.
Vertov’s most popular works of film were Man with The Movie Camera and Three Songs about Lenin. Before 1917 and after the Bolshevik revolution Vertov was a newsreel editor for Kino Nedelya a cinema committee film series shown in Russia. Lenin’s often quoted in 1922 that film is the most important of all the arts probably surprised contemporaries, not because he ranked film first, but because he included it among the arts at all. This distinguished early Soviet film from movies elsewhere in the world and helps to explain both early innovation and subsequent stultification. The Soviet Union was the first country to insulate domestic filmmaking from the give and take of market-based consumer demand. This is not to say that movies were not shown to make money. Although the Bolsheviks were in power, film was presented in several conflicting views of art, Brooks (1991)
Vertov liked to compile his newsreel footage into a documentary style. This made him interested in the mechanical basis of cinema. He liked to film the public in secret as though he was the eye off the camera. Vertov’s main filming techniques is montage. This means selecting and editing scenes to piece together to form a continuous whole. This was a very popular method used in silent films in the 1920s. Vertov’s main idea behind the Kino Eye was that the eye of the camera saw life more accurately than the eye of a human. The man with a movie camera is an excellent example of the Kino Eye effect and is considered as one of Vertov’s masterpiece. Vertov’s film shows complexity in both filming and editing without voiceovers or titles. It uses visual language to tell the story of the Soviet Union in 1929.
By watching the film Man and the Movie camera I was inspired to try out Vertov’s film techniques and his effects. I was impressed by the three main cinematic effect he used, and I wanted to achieve and explore them in my short film. These are the Dissolve, Split Screen and Double Exposure which bring dynamism in the film and are presented in a visually playful nature.
The way I did my film was that I took my canon camera with two zoom lenses picked three London locations that had a top-rated tourist attraction. This method enabled me to film the public secretly as though they were actors in a film. The central locations I picked were Waterloo, Trafalgar Square and Great Portland street Station. Although my short film shows modern-day footage, I changed the colour to black and white as I wanted to show a lot of timeless quality. This also shows that my film is a throwback to photographic past and it shows the audience that it is a representation of Vertov’s work.
The 1920s increasingly used the Dissolve effect which has multiple occurrences in The Man and The Movie Camera. Its final frame of one image is briefly laid over the introductory of the next frame; it is the oldest form of film transition. In my film, I was able to achieve this effect easily and quickly with modern day technology.
For the Split-screen, nowadays we have the editing software like Adobe to help us achieve this effect quickly. But in the 1920s, Vertov used his hand cracked 35mm camera and would have to cover the part of the lens to create the first image with an empty half, and then reshoot the same strip to fill in the gaps. I enjoyed using this effect in my film as it focuses on different actions at the same time and is a very eye-catching effect. In my film I took two different shots and placed them next to each other and used a feather effect in the middle to help blend in the footage.
Double exposure was where my knowledge of editing was put to the test. I have never done this effect before in my films, so I was very eager to learn it for my film. Moreover, I admired how Vertov used this effect in the scene with a cameraman going into a pint glass. In the 1920s, this effect was achieved by exposing the same strip of film to different moving or still images and overlaying them. Nowadays, in the 20th century, computer trickery, Adobe, helped me to achieve double exposure by having a camera image over a moving image of tourists.
By exploring Vertov’s cinematic techniques I was able to learn a lot about the cinema in the 1920s. This helped me create my own film that has a good representation of those techniques.
References
Jeffrey Brooks (1991) Russian Cinema and Public Discourse, 1900–1930, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11:2, 141-148
Michelson, A. (1984). Kino-eye. Berkeley: California University Press.
Dziga Vertov, a guide to references and resources, Feldman, Seth R.; 1979, Boston: G. K. Hall
Over the summer, I was asked to research selected aspects of film language. The core purpose of this was to help me understand the relationship between moving image form and the meaning this form helps to convey.
Paloma Baeza’s Poles Apart, released on 28 June 2017 in the UK at the Edinburgh Film Festival, is an imaginative story of an unlikely friendship between a grizzly and polar bear in the Arctic. It was inspired after the filmmaker read a surprising article about how grizzly bears were now breeding with polar bears due to the melting ice caps forcing them out of the woods and then them becoming stranded on the ice.
On February 18 2018, Poles Apart won the BAFTA award for the best short animated film. This is Baeza’s first animated film and although she is originally from Mexico, she is a British actress and director and has starred in the popular TV series A Touch of Frost, Waking the Dead and also the film Sunburn 2007. She has also directed two films – Watchmen in 2001 and The Window in 2006.
Baeza admires the work of Wes Anderson, especially Fantastic Mr Fox, as she liked the look of the furry puppets and this inspired her to create a stop-motion animated film. She was influenced by reading an article about the animal’s struggle and becoming extinct because of global warming.
Baeza only wanted two characters for the film; two bears that can talk. We are introduced to Nanuk, an arctic bear, voiced by Helena Bonham Carter, who is a very tough character and takes to her environment seriously as she is desperate for food. Aklak, the Grizzly, voiced by Joseph May, brings the humour to the film with his little bobble hat and a backpack full of camping equipment. His charming personality warms our hearts and lets us see the funnier side of the bleak situation these bears find themselves in.
Baeza contacted Mackinnon and Saunders who are animation producers and the world’s best puppet makers and asked for their help and advice. She showed them an animatic of her idea and they agreed to make the puppets. Baeza sculpted a rough version of the two bears which were re-sculpted to make changes for their final design.
It was a challenge to animate the stop-motion puppets as when they are touched, in order to given them movement, the fur would be displaced and sometimes finger-marks could be seen. The sets are designed by Paula Gimenez and her designs are breath-taking and beautiful. The audience is given an immersive perspective on the harsh Arctic landscape, so effective that one might feel the biting cold and shiver!
The landscape was given a realism by using a blue screen background. After effects were added to show the harsh weathering effect of the wind and snow against the characters and to help the stop motion look smoother. The big challenge for the team was getting the scale right because they were in such a tiny studio they had to try and get a sense of scale in a small space by putting tiny mountains in the background and big objects in the foreground, to show how epic the location is.
The communication between the two characters is well written and brings out a sense of humour which was unexpected given that the storyline and message of the film are serious and at times portrays what is in reality, a bleak situation. In one scene where Aklak tried to set the tent up and you can see on the painted snowy rocks bits of cotton wall blowing of the rocks and they kept it with the special effects to show how you can use home materials to create a realistic effect.
This film is current because it addresses the global warming and environmental changes and how this affects bears in the artic and grizzly bears in Alaska and northern Canada, forcing them to change their habitats. They now travel north to the Arctic tundra were two species of bear are breeding and producing hybrids known as “Grolar Bears” and “Pizzly Bear”.
This film is recommended for any age group.
References:
Laura Beth Cowley (2018) Interview: Paloma Baeza and Ser En Low discuss the BAFTA- winning ‘Poles Apart’. Available from http://www.skwigly.co.uk/poles-apart/ Accessed 12th January 2018.
My Dog Tulip is an American Independent Animated feature film, based on J. R. Ackerley’s memoir. In 1956, Ackerley rescued a German Shepherd dog and the two became fast friends .The film was directed and animated by Paul Fierlinger, with the backgrounds painted by his wife Sandra Fierlinger.
Although this film is a Documentary, in order to make it more entertaining for audiences, the film makers include animation and fiction. The film is based on a true story and so the events you see are realistic and targeted at an adult audience.
In the film and the novel, the dog’s name Queenie has been changed to Tulip. This was changed because of the fear of causing mirth about the author’s sexuality. The film, portrays the fifteen years Ackerley spent with Queenie as his happiest and the dog as a great companion who eases his loneliness. Although his love for Queenie is truthfully portrayed, the fictional elements of the film include portrayal of society’s disdain for the working classes during that period. When Ackerley has to put Queenie down in 1961, he loses interest in life.
I would really recommend this film. The animation by Fierlinger and Christopher Plummer’s narration brings J. R. Ackerley’s story to life. It is a successful construction of reality and fiction and the use of TV Paint and hand drawn elements convey the emotions of the characters very successfully.
Animated cartoons from 1930s to early 1950s, Tom and Jerry featured racial stereotypes.
Mammy Two Shoes
Mammy Two Shoes is a middle aged African American housemaid created by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, and was voiced by Lillian Randolph in 1940 until 1952.
Mammy takes care of the house, and is often caught in the middle of Tom and Jerry’s scuffles. She’s also Tom’s owner ; he gets told off by her and she wallops him with a broom whenever he is misbehaving.
It was never clear if Mammy was the owner of the house, but by her appearances of wearing a white apron , red slippers and a broom in her hand, it would suggest that Mammy is a housemaid.
Characteristic, what does Mammy mean?
Mammy is known, formerly in southern United States, a black nursemaid or a nanny in charge of white children. They are usually portrayed as an older women that’s overweight with dark skin.
Mammy archetype comes from the memoirs and diaries that emerged after the Civil War with recordings and descriptions of African-American household women slaves who were considered by family members as their black mothers.
This in today’s society is offensive.
Mammy’s face was hidden in most of the episodes and was only seen by the lower half of her body. Mammy was only just a supporting character so the artists were worried that the audiences would draw their attention away from the main characters.
Mammy also appears in Walt Disney cartoons, it’s the same character from the MGM’s Tom & Jerry, and used the same voice actor, she appeared in the Orphans Benefit 1934, Three Orphan Kittens, More Kittens, Pantry Pirate and Figaro and Cleo. Her other name is Ant Delilah.
When Chuck Jones was under supervision of the MGM animation studios he created a censored versions of Tom and Jerry featuring Mammy. They edit Mammy out with rotoscoping techniques and replaced her with a white thin women with a Irish accented in the episode Saturday Evening Puss. The voice was provided by June Foray.
Mammy’s last appearances in the cartoon shorts was in 1952 Push-Button Kitty. In 1954 Mammy was replaced by two white couple Joan and George were the audiences could see the characters faces.
Joan
George
As Mammy was partially seen in the cartoon shorts, she was briefly seen in Saturday Evening Puss and Part Time Pal.
Mammy was originally voiced by Lillian Randolph. But in 1992s MGM animation studio the cartoons that featured Mammy were edited again, this time they replace the voice actress to Thea Vidale, because the use of potentially offensive dialect.
Lillian Randolph 1940–1952
Thea Vidale 1989–2001
Gene Deitch who directed Tom and Jerry shorts in 1961 said “ The stereotypical black housekeeper, didn’t work in a modern context”. Mammy was removed from production, and Tom had new owner Clint Clobber, a corpulent white middle class man, who is more brutal in punishing his pets when they make mistakes. From 1962 to1964 Toms owner was changed again, to a modern white women, who had her own apartment.
In Tom and Jerry Tales 2006 Mammy return but was redesigned and know as Mrs Two shoes, they kept the aspects of her personality but changed her skin tone to white, to avoid any controversy.
Mammy Two Shoes, after all she is the archetype of the black women working for a white family from the South USA, in the mid 20th century. When such women did not have the vote.
It’s us deeply patronising to suggest that modern day families are watching historical cartoons when values were different. Does certain people think by watching Tom and Jerry and seeing Mammy it will turn our children into racists. Believing she is the norm, this is a part of our history its no good airbrushing it.
The Eagleman Stag is a stop motion animated film by Mickey Please. The story is about a man who goes to extreme lengths to counter his accelerating perception of time.The Film won a BAFTA for the Best Short Animation in 2011.
This film contains a dialogue in order to tell the story. The dialogue does support the film though out the story, if this film didn’t have dialogue it wouldn’t make sense to the audiences whats happening on screen. When you watch the film you really have to observe and listen to understand whats happening in each scene.The dialogue also helps the audiences to understand how the character is feeling, and helps you guide through Peter’s imagination from the beginning of his life.
The story does sometimes match the dialogue throughout the film, it explains what the character is feeling and thinking and takes you through the time of his life and rewinds back to the past.
When the characters are talking, Please does not illustrate what they are talking about, for example, the scene when Peter is talking to Phillip over a drink, “The entire world is defined by context, even the way we are passing through time, every second is smaller.”
He spills the pint on the table and when his friend Phillip replies to him, he shows him a book while saying, “Got some beer in your beard”. And then it cuts to the next scene.
Despite the dialogue i really hard to understand, I really enjoyed the animation and the creativity with it. You can tell Please put a lot of hard work and imagination to his film, and i can see why this film won a BAFTA for best short.
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