Pretty

....I'm siding with Matt!

It's interesting to call my view tailored to the squeaky clean CGI that I've grown up with or the nifty animation of Disney princess movies. While I'll be one of the firsts to stand up and say a lot of the animated shorts we've been watching the past several days in class turn me off because of lack of aesthetic appeal, I don't see myself as corrupted view from being fed Pixar films [I also want to note here that I've seen plenty of kinds of animation growing up: I wasn't strictly a Disney/Pixar girl, and never will be]. 

It's all about a good story, but I won't lie, even some of Pixar's films don't impress me in the least. While I've come here to HU and have been plenty open to having my view on films and animation altered in the aesthetic sense, there's a problem: I haven't changed a bit. 

I like pretty. I really do. I like aesthetic beauty and complexity and detail and big pictures that you have to make my eye and head wrap around. Sand on glass is creative, and it's admirable that Caroline Leaf made pretty spiffy animations using that medium, but that's something I will probably never watch again. 

Part of the magic I look for in media has to do a lot with aesthetic appeal. And this goes back to one of my posts from a while back when I talked about the definition of art not really existing because art is subject to opinion: you can't call an artist's piece good or bad or ugly or pretty and expect everyone else to agree. 

Well the same goes for animator's art. Personally, Caroline Leaf's simplistic style isn't enough for me. The stories are powerful, but the aesthetics are too weak to keep my mind absorbed in the story. Call me a child of America's senses-blasting special effects, but I'd be hesitant to label me that seeing as I haven't watched more than maybe five movies a year for the last three years of my life. 

Is it sad that I'd rather create fantastical worlds that are real and are something that I wish I could have stepped outside my bedroom window into at night as a child? Is it bad that I think shorts like "Two Sisters" might reveal an ugly truth behind them that we all need to know but doesn't deserved to be watched twice? Sure, I'm pretty stiff about it. 

So technically, Final Fantasy has very non-realistic elements to it; I definitely agree to that much. 

I understand the disturbing and unsettling animations we watched in class are meant to be that way. I understand that there are disturbing, ugly truths that humanity needs to get smacked in the face with in order to feel the need to do anything about it, but my raw, unedited and blatant nature is that I don't like these films. I understand abstract disturbing, but I also understand realism and fantasy, and really part of realism is disturbing. Real is gross. I like to think that real can be escaped, just for a moment, and that in that moment, one can figure out how to beat real. [Don't write me off as a "Thomas Kinkade" yet]

"Two Sisters" has a truth behind it. And a story. Confusing maybe, but that makes me think. But because the imagery was so bashing to my senses I don't want to think about it. I can't sympathize with the characters anymore now that I'm outside of the moment. And even "The Man Who Planted Trees" made my inner artist want to claw someone. Am I the only one who missed the inspiration of that short? 

I like realistic animation, I won't lie. And I do realize it's a huge challenge, takes a lot of time, money, dedication, and so forth, but don't give up on me yet, I never said I was going to go out and animate real looking people. Who knows?

*I appreciate all the different kinds of animation we've been watching in class though. While I didn't like some of them, I have respect for all of them, and I really, really enjoyed the style of some. Like somewhat mentioned before, I understand that some animation styles were geared toward unsettling the viewer while others were more children's tale like to evoke the sense of being in a children's fairy tale book. I enjoy seeing work of animators greatly.