The Iron Giant - Lessons Learnt PART TWO - Storytelling (OUAN402)

PART TWO - CHARACTER AND STORYTELLING

"The Iron Giant" is my favourite film because no other piece makes me laugh and cry so consistently and keeps such a good tonal balance, nor can I think of a film that I can watch over and over again and get more out of each time. EVERYONE can learn a lesson about storytelling from this movie. It doesn't beat the audience over the head with backstory or get bogged down with overused clichés. Everything in the film is there because it tells us more about the characters or builds the relationships between characters and as such, nothing is wasted, the story is very tight and I was left really emotionally satisfied at the end.

FOR INSTANCE, this is a brief shot of a picture of a bloke hopping into a military jet, placed on Hogarth's bedside table. It is a really nice visual touch that tells us a tonne about Hogarth's character and doesn't talk down to the audience. If Hogarth had picked up the picture and then looked at the camera and said "THIS IS A PICTURE OF MY DEAD DAD WHO I OBVIOUSLY ADMIRE AND FROM WHOM I DRAW MY STRONG MORAL COMPASS" then it wouldn't have worked so well. That's how I'd have directed it, though, with the "no drooling moron left behind" attitude to film-making.

The themes in the movie are another example of amazing storytelling. They are subtly woven into the film constantly and they pay off really well at the end. The concept of being what you choose to be, rather that what the world projects onto you, is presented really touchingly without coming across as saccharine. The characters of Kent Mansley, the government official who's job it is to protect the people, and the Giant mirror each other really well as they both have to fight their programming. The Giant succeeds. It's implied throughout the movie that he is designed to destroy, and he battles with this concept for the whole film before deciding that he is "not a gun".

Meanwhile, Kent Mansley loses sight of the right thing to do, protect people. He becomes so fixated on killing the giant that he decides to bomb an entire town full of people as a means to that end. The emotional climax comes in the end, when the giant must die for doing the right thing while Mansley gets to live. It's a complex and captivating message. You are who you choose to be, but it sometimes comes coupled with great adversity.

The Iron Giant - Lessons Learnt PART ONE - Animation (OUAN402)

PART ONE - DESIGN AND AESTHETIC

The Iron Giant is, and I'm not speaking in hyperbole, my favourite film ever made. Re-watching it recently, I learnt a tonne of  lessons that can apply to my work. I'm hesitant to analyse this piece in depth for fear of ruining the WONDER and WHIMSY that it makes me feel. The character design is top notch. Everyone has a slight exaggerated look to them that gave them a great deal of energy and personality without seeming alien, distorted or creepy.

Each face is distinguishable from the others and has oodles of character

The character design reminded me of the characters from Team Fortress Two, a game well known for having a wonderful aesthetic with characters who could be identified from just their silhouettes, which is key to iconic design.

 

   

I chose to draw a few quick face designs myself.

Using basic shapes like raindrops and rectangles as guidelines, I tried to draw faces that were aesthetically appealing with minimal features that stood out. I'm not a fan of largely inflated caricatures, the likes of which you'd see drawn at a pier or something because I find them not pleasant to look at, so the hard part was finding a good mid point between boringly understated facial features and overly exaggerated features.

I think that this flippy hair guy on the bottom is my favourite of all of them.

The characters in The Iron Giant have brilliant eyes. I found I was constantly drawn to them during any scene which had talking characters which made me relate to them far more.

 

When I was in Disneyland they have this well ace thing called "Animation Academy" where they would teach everyone how to draw Disney characters which I went back to five times or so. Every single time the person running the workshop would tell us all to make the eyes the darkest point on the drawing as it draws attention to them. That's what the eyes in "The Iron Giant" are like.

I've only scratched the surface of why the film's aesthetic is so great. There's plenty to cover from the props, costumes and scenery that give a quintessential fifties vibe to the phenomenal sweeping landscape shots, but what's worth mentioning is the fantastic camerawork that is done to convey the enormous scale of the giant from a human's point of view. 

It's powerful, looming and really scary at first.

My First Anime (OUAN402)

DISCLAIMER: This is an extra long bumper blog post, as I have not done one in yonks.

I thought I'd step outside my comfort zone and make an effort to be a little more worldly in my viewing habits. I watched the first two episodes of "Black Lagoon", a 2006 anime series based on a manga novel.

The black lagoon boom crew

Some people (some CRAZY people) will say that you need to watch a few series of a show before it gets really good to convince you to watch it. They're like "watch series three, that's when it gets good" or something. But I'm a busy boy! I'm not going to watch something terrible for three series just on the assumption that it'll get good at some point, based on the testimony of just anybody. What am I, an idiot or something? A show needs to grab me from the offset to retain my attention!

That's what I WOULD say to someone who was having this discussion with me.

The point of that paragraph was to establish that I am making all my judgements about this show, that I probably won't return to, based on only two episodes. That may annoy some. I don't know if that's unfair or not. Either way, I did enjoy this show! I enjoyed it far more than I was expecting it to, considering I've always had a lot of preconceived notions about anime that put me off the genre, like the fact that every character in an anime looks stupid and acts stupid and is stupid. But that was BEFORE I actually watched an anime.

"Black Lagoon" LOOKS awesome. I especially like the colour scheme, the clever use of blacks to accentuate the other colours and the shading. It is nice and bright. The shading is the most detailed I've ever seen in an animated TV show and it's awesome and, erm, depth-ly*? Also, the detail on the clothes and the bold, black lines remind me a lot of The Red Turtle, another kind of Japanese film I watched and raved over for the art style. Anime (in general) has this weird thing where the backgrounds look exquisite but the studio execs must've run out of board meeting tea and biscuits before allocating any budget to the animators in charge of lip syncing, because the mouths are shockingly terribly animated. This annoyed me because the viewer's eye is drawn to the characters before the background, and I am more engrossed by a character if they are animated smoothly.

That background is awesome!

I always assumed that anime characters had really dumb hair, but the hair in this show was pretty on the level.

Especially this bloke's hair. Shows that he doesn't mess about. Good for swimming fast.

The plot was really entertaining. As previously established, I love a good rip roaring adventure with balls to the wall action and a slew of interesting characters. The characters bounce off each other very well and the premise is really fun and it keeps quite a brisk pace. The only thing that took me out of it was the fact that I don't speak Japanese so relied on subtitles and if there's one thing I hate, it's when a show lures you in with the promise of moving pictures and then shows you some words instead.

But that is my own personal battle, and unrelated to the show.

I really really hate the way eyes are drawn in anime. They're so weird and angsty looking and they make every character look like they're about to burst into tears all the time. A lot of the characters are drawn very well but the lead character looks very generic, I think because of the way his eyes are drawn.

Ugh too sad

This is much more cheerful

The main lesson I learned from watching this was to always give new things a try, and to shade better I guess. RIGHT! Now I can go back to watching my REAL favourite thing with "lagoon" in the title, "The Creature From The Black Lagoon".

"I know that you are from a rich family and that I am a lagoon man, but I love you. Even if society doesn't want us to be together, we have each other" - Creature from the Black Lagoon

*depthly - having depth