Chapter 5 of Understanding Animation

The chapter Issues with Representation spoke about how forms and characters are used both positively and negatively to represent human traits, ideas, and abstract concepts. The form of the character takes place of the 'actor' in the framework of an animated film, but animated forms are not subject to the same laws of physics that actual, physical characters are. In their contexts, animated forms are able to carry powers of abstraction and symbolism that human beings cannot. In this way, animated characters can surpass and ascend their social, biological, and political limitations.

Something that is becoming more and more apparent throughout this course is that animation cannot be analyzed in the same manner as traditional film. It's hard to imagine Mickey Mouse or Tom and Jerry as objects or things rather than "people" or "characters." But that's what they are. They're formal entities made of line and paint. Mickey Mouse is an idea before he's a mouse or a man. This is both disheartening and liberating, as it allows an analysis unique to animation, but it also dehumanizes my favorite characters and destroys the suspension of disbelief. After reading the section on gender bending, especially, I doubt I'll be able to simply ignore the underlying gender tensions any longer. It's difficult to not see the overtly sexual undercurrents within many classic cartoons, especially as my own personality and sexuality are constantly being defined and developed.

What about everybody else? Does anybody else resent the fact that the more theory that is read, the further from the material the viewer is pushed?

Animation and Fighting Games

This is something I've wanted to write about for some time now, because, as a psuedo-animator, I find this highly technical talk very fascinating. I don't think there is genre of video game in which animation is more important than the fighting game. The fighting game is such a technical, well oiled machine that even the slightest inconsistency will make or break an experience.


Guilty Gear Accent Core

Like other older video game genres, the original fighting games were defined by their art design and animation. In many ways, fighting games at their inception were interactive cartoons. You choose an animated character and you choose what animations to play out. You have to react to your opponents decisions and counter his attacks in order to deplete his life bar. The scene that plays out often appears as though it could be taken directly from an anime.


Case in point: BlazBlu

But what makes fighting games, and the professional community, so interesting is the knowledge that one must have in order to be competitive. Fighting game pros often analyze specific character animations down to their frames and the speed at which the movements play out. This is incredibly important when trying to plan and memorize a combo for actual use during a tournament. In some ways, a true fighting game master has to know almost as much about animation as the actual animators. This makes it especially easy for people with an understanding of animation to understand the terminology of fighting games. Here's an example:



In order to parry (the blue flashing animation), in Street Fighter 3, a player must hit forward at the exact moment of impact. This makes parrying risky, as missing means you are certain to get hit. This is simple to see and perform when blocking a slow moving or predictable attack. What makes the video so famous is that Daigo (Ken) was able to block multiple attacks from Justin (Chun-Li) in quick succession. The first hit would be difficult enough to time, as there are multiple frame variables to keep in mind when attempting to parry (which is hard to do, and after a successful parry a player is stunned for several frames which resets the animations) Daigo had to press forward once for each specific hit of that move. That means not only memorizing the animation, but also knowing the exact timing of each individual kick.

People might find it hard to believe, but in fighting games people really do look at frame and animation data. I can't say for certain that Daigo studied the data (though he is currently world champion, having beat Justin *USA* AGAIN this year and I wouldn't be surprised if he eats and breathes stuff like this) but it is vital to know because it helps show potential openings in combos and specific moves. For instance, if an opponents punch takes 12 frames to complete, and the move hits in the opening 6, then the other player has those 6 frames to launch a faster attack in order to cancel out the first one. This is very important in knocking an opponent out of a combo string. And all this information is literally useless if you don't actually know a bit about how the characters are animated in the first place.

Still, it's not like a player HAS to know the frame information in order to play, it's just extremely helpful at higher levels of play and when planning and testing combos. For everyone else, the animation is, if anything, simply fun to watch.

Heavy Rain Impressions: Immersion and Animation

I recently had a chance to download and try out the new Playstation 3 game Heavy Rain, an adventure game created by ___, the studio behind ___. Though the demo is short, it illustrates a type of video game that seems to focus heavily on cinematic storytelling and player interactivity. Yet, as I play the demo, I'm not sold that this form of gameplay is actually as immersive as it presents itself to be.

E3: Heavy Rain 'Casting Call'

As for what the game does well, the animation in the game is a level of realism that is absolutely incredible. I don't quite know how to emphasize this properly, because there have been many games before it that have toted lifelike visuals, but this is the first game I've seen that actually uses motion capturing (which I find generally comes up looking awful and unnatural in video games) to an extent that presents realistic facial movements and body gestures. In this way the game does very well in suspending the disbelief of the viewer, and pulling the audience into its world. Every detail in the game has been absolutely slaved over, as nothing in the environments seems unnecessary or trivial. The developers clearly put a lot of time and effort into building their virtual mis-en-scene elements. For instance, in one scene of the game, you find yourself in a woman's apartment- every bit of the environment can and should be meticulously analyzed, as it all helps to build character and solve the mysteries within the storyline. Compare this to a game like Halo where more often than not we see the same rooms, textures, and objects repeated over and over again in order to bring variety to a game that's based upon repetitious, action based problem solving.

So the game is visually impressive, but what about the gameplay? Well, the honest truth is that the gameplay serves to run opposite to the visuals. Before I continue, I should note that there is room in the world for many times of games and gameplay mechanics, and I'm sure that the game I'm going to describe will seem appetizing to some players. But when I see the excellent character models, settings, sound, and animations, I am baffled that they would structure a game model around such stilted mechanics. In the game, you rarely have direct control over your character. When presented with an action, or a situation, you are given few options for interactivity. We have several types of actions available, first being ratations. Rotations of the thumbstick that are used in place of motion controls. An example would be pressing up on the right thumbstick (when indicated) in order to push open a door or even rotating the stick to simulate turning the doorknob. Another action is pressing the R2 button in order to walk forward. The movement is awkward and clumsy, as turning a character like a car is difficult in claustrophobic environments. Finally, we have quick timed events that use the shoulder and face buttons during choreographed sequences. Missing buttons in the sequence changes the outcome of the scene, but it's a fairly disconnected way to interact with the game.

What all of these mechanics have in common, however, is that they serve to disconnect the player from his character. More often than not, I feel like I'm simply directing the player character in a specific direction and watching the action take place. Though what's happening on screen is often interesting and exciting, it's not a terribly immersive experience. I have to ask, when playing this game, why this story was not just made into a film. I can't help but wonder how having more control over my character would have hurt my gameplay experience. In fact, I don't see why the right thumbstick controls were implemented at all over industry standard button presses.

Still, I only played the demo, and I hold onto hope that the final product will provide an experience that is more than an interactive film. Video Games have a lot of potential for interesting storytelling, and they probably still have a long time to mature, but games like this beg the question: Specifically what is a video game, and what is it that games do best? Is it interactive storytelling? Is it delivering an experience through immersion? The problem I see with this kind of storytelling is that subjectivity is lost when the player becomes detached from his avatar. You are mostly an observer at this point, and I believe a certain amount of empathy is lost when in this disconnection. It's a much different experience actually controlling and becoming your character rather than simply pointing your character in the right direction.

Comics and Animation

Comics, film, and animation have long been intwined in their creations. Both film and animation owe much to the comic strip like set up of storyboard, which both looks and acts like the comics it mimics. But what hadn't occured to me until reading this is that much of the film and animated comedy we see in early film history is directly influenced by the comic strip serials that ran before film had even found its base.

The example given in the reading is the hose gag from the Lumiere brother's short. Sitting next to it is comic strip by Cristophe showing the exact same gag from at least six years before the brothers filmed their bit. It makes me wonder how many other classic jokes got their start in comics before making the jump to silver screen.

Still, this reading shows that comics have had a long lasting relationship with film that goes back to it's basic beginnings. It's strange that it took until the past decade for the relationship with mature, serious comics to really take off into anything that is beyond campy and hokey.

On "Notes Towards a Theory of Animation"

I just finished this chapter of Understanding Animation, and the first thing I would like say is that I appreciate the vocabulary developed in the beginning of this chapter. Something that I always found difficult when talking about animation in film theory was the lack of defining terms in describing animation vs live action film. Here, we see a set of terms and conditions that we are able to use to describe traits unique to animation. For instance, the idea of configuration in describing the formal qualities of characters or narrative objects. Because an animation's mis-en-scene lacks actors, and animated characters act differently from true to life people, it's necessary to describe them from their formal qualities.

The same goes for the idea of a set, or setting. These are constructed illusions, not actual objects in real time space. Therefore, when talking about narrative animation, it's necessary to describe the evolution of context, the building of a logical, imaginative world as opposed to the colors and materials that make it up.

I'd also like to point out a few animated pieces that seem to straddle the line between Orthodox and Experimental. There was an anime released several years ago called "Gankutsuo." It was a retelling of the Count of Monte Cristo (in exaggerated anime fashion, of course). But something unique to this series was it's use of traditional 2D techniques, coupled with a digital coloring that is difficult to describe but very unique:


Watch The Count of Monte Cristo: Gankutsuou - Box Set Trailer in Entertainment | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

They were experimenting with many different techniques, the two most noticeable being the combonation of 2d and 3d animation and the use of static textures/colors that were used to fill and color the characters. When the characters moved, the colored patterns on their clothing would stay static, allowing the patterns to shift and move as the characters interacted. This technique is very materialistic, clearly calling to attention the fact that what we are seeing is artificial.



As a side not, I also couldn't help but notice that this kind of speech and investigation is exactly what is missing from modern video game analysis. Something I find extremely irritating is the lack of a vocabulary for describing and talking about video games. How are games supposed to be analyzed and treated as art if we still don't know specifically what a game is?

Well, some of the terms described in this chapter could be used to describe video games as well. In the case of "evolution of context", when speaking about video games, a game world that is created to be realistic and imersive would be one that strives to be constructed, while a game that calls attention to it's mechanics and graphics would be materialistic. Though it's not perfect, I think that when investigating animation, I'm one step closer to understanding game analysis as well.

First post (do over)

First post! Hooray!

I thought I’d share one of my all time favorite animations for my first post- It’s from a studio in Canada that I found on Drawn, an illustration and animation blog.

A little bit about myself:

I’m a senior here at SIUC and I love animation. Ever since I started attending SIUC I’ve focused on building animating, starting with Prof. Rowley’s 2D animation class. Since then I’ve done Computer Animation, Claymation, and Flash Animation as well.

But my true passion is Video Games, and I’m hoping to enroll in a good game design program (focusing in animation, ofcourse) after finishing here at SIUC. I have another blog on Destructoid.com, which I have been keeping to post my thoughts on Game Design and other game related topics. I generally don’t share the link, but would be happy to send someone in the right direction if they were interested.