Adam

“Private Snafu: Fighting Tools” uses humor and its story to make a point to keep your weapons in good condition so they don’t jam. Given that this message is directed toward the soldiers, I assume this is to make them feel humiliated if they’re not putting “the world’s most powerful weapons” to good use. It also advises them not to behave wimpy as the film characterizes the American soldier as smaller than the Nazi soldier.

Jiri Trnka’s “The Hand” sees a character who makes pottery approached by a floating hand that demands them to make a clay figure of the hand. There is a scene in the film wherein the hand shows the potterer sequences of the hand in various modes of implied power. A hand holding a judgment scale, a hand holding the torch akin to the Statue of Liberty, etc. The film seems to be making clear allegories to an oppressive government. Given the context of Czechoslovakia’s government, it seemed to be a response to what was going on. Later in the film, the hand literally puppeteers the potterer to make its statue for it while trapped in a cage. The clear messaging must have rubbed the Czech government the wrong way which was probably why they wouldn’t distribute it.

UPA’s style of circles, squares, triangles, and other geometric shapes to form its characters and background environments gives just the right amount of visual information to portray expressive characters and spaces. In “Rooty Toot Toot” the film takes advantage of the use of color to represent different spaces or exaggerate the mood of a scene. Some characters aren’t colored in and only outlined and other characters are only a single color. The movement of the characters in the film is snappy similar to Looney Tunes except for a lot less detailed. The film manages to create an interesting and funny story with all of these abstract elements. My favorite aspect was the shifting colors between the different testimonies being told and the bright red that showed up right when she was found not guilty. It captured the absurdity of the celebration and helps seal the gag by the end.

The anime “Chainsaw Man” resonated a lot with American audiences almost immediately after it came out last fall. It’s hard to categorize Chainsaw Man in any particular genre because part of its appeal is that it plays around with the audience’s expectations, but it might be most immediately recognized as an action series. The story is of a boy and his dog which is a devil who is down on his luck and is then killed, then brought back to life by his dog fusing its devil heart with his. He then joins a devil-hunting organization to defeat a massive threat called the “Gun Devil”, though very quickly the story unfolds beyond this premise. For one, this anime takes a lot of influences from American media such as film. The main characters all dress in suits inspired by “Reservoir Dogs”. The main character himself is inspired by “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”. And the speed and pace of the story are very fast almost like an action movie. The manga it was adapted from was popular in both Japan and America. In anime spaces, everyone was excited about the anime adaptation and Crunchyroll announced it would be streaming it when it came out and a dub would be made a week after each episode. In general American audiences have been loving anime for a while now, but Chainsaw Man is an interesting instance of Japanese story-telling aesthetics and American story-telling aesthetics coming together.