“Rooty Tooty Toot” uses flat, graphic shapes to represent their characters. Various characters could be simplified into the shapes as the rest of the line art just allows characters further expressiveness. The bartender could easily be represented with a burgundy round, squat blob. Frankie is represented by her pink hat brim and dress. Nellie Bly can be reduced into an elongated blue dress with blue eye shadow and lipstick. Designating certain shapes to different characters allows the viewer to know at a glance what is going on. Shapes tend to have inherent characteristics that are associated with them. I think that distinguishing the characters like this is really effective because the inherent characteristics of certain shapes are bestowed on the characters, which allows the storyteller to have a shorthand for the audience to quickly understand.
It’s interesting to note that when a character is telling a highly biased story, the background color of the scenes changes colors to match the character telling the story. When Nellie Bly tells her story, the entire scene is depicted in blue. It appears to allow the storyteller to disappear into the scene. When the lawyer spins his tale, the majority of story appears in bright white. I think it provides a very distinctive way to differentiate stories from each other.
I thought it was particularly interesting that throughout the film, the background had a particular spongy pattern for some of the backgrounds. The appearance of the pattern is somewhat minimized in the courtroom and in Nelly Bly’s tale. In these locations, they seem to just provide texture to add interest in the scene. However, the pattern seems to be particularly prominent in the tales of the bartender and lawyer. In the bartender’s tale, the pattern is partially muted and just generally seems to suggest a sense of seediness. In the lawyer’s tale, when he talks about the part that concerns Nellie Bly, the pattern is extremely prominent since it is colored indigo in contrast to the white background. The sponge pattern somehow makes everything seem seedier and more disreputable. The contrasts in the sponge texture is an interesting way to emphasize dishonesty and give a subtle way to communicate grime and possibly disrepute.
