Written by Octavia, 2021 Cohort
These days, driven by market demand, over 80 percent of animation films are highly commercialized. It misleads most people to believe that animation is childish and always child-oriented. But as an animator, I believe animation is one of the greatest visual art media.
Animation is a powerful tool for expressive art and storytelling, the long history ( since the running bison painted in the “Burning City” in Paleolithic ) proves animation has a massive stock of different types of works. Nowadays, it can be divided into five major categories: traditional animation, vector animation, computer animation, motion graphic and stop-motion. Among them, my favourite is computer animation, because with the development of digital media, computer animation broke the limits of material and production equipment, which makes it more flexible and it is easier to use and obtain a highly artistic performance. The following is an example:
Tales of the Night
Tales of the night is a French animation which tells a story of an elderly person, a little girl and a boy. They gather every night in an abandoned movie theater, one for the costume design, one for the artwork and one for the story script. Together, they create six fantasy fairy tale shows.
This movie was shortlisted for the Golden Bear, at the 61st Berlin international film festival. As the only shortlisted animation film for that night, it was so special not only because of its attractive storytelling, but mainly because of the unique artistic expression. The movie was defined as a computer silhouette animation film. Because they used the CGI techniques to recreate the motion silhouette.Traditional silhouette animations are usually monochromatic. In Tales of the Night, the producer uses several fluorescent colors to create an intense contrast with the character (which is still visible as solid black). It makes each frame of the movie look like a highly artistic decorative painting. Worth watching and sharing with any art-enthusiasts!