Abdul Sami

Star Wars Visions is one of the product driven show that has been recently streamed on Disney+. the animated anthology series eschews canon and the Star Wars house style and instead spotlights the work of a number of Japan’s top animation studios. The series expands the definition of what a Star Wars tale can look like with its complex storytelling. It utilizes some key iconography, and presents the mythology in a brand new way. “Lucasfilm”, the production company recruited seven top tier anime studios and tasked them with creating nine short films. All of them stand on their own and none of them were required to adhere to any pre-established canon.

The Garden of Words was created using a combination of hand drawn animation , rotoscoping and CGI, with the latter facilitating the realistic appearance of the film’s rain sequences. The director of the film, Shinkai made half of the film’s backgrounds by using his photographs as a base and then drawing over the top with Adobe Photoshop, while the other half were fictional settings created with traditional animation and computer graphics. For the rainy scenes at the park, the color palette was toned down, and pale green shading was used to match the gloomy, rainy weather, thereby increasing the detail and defining the characters. Matching the tones to the background and lighting helped highlight the characters’ faces. A novel coloring method was chosen from other coloring methods following careful testing. The method involved integrating the coloring for each character with the background, a “new innovation of sorts” that mimics the refraction of light on the skin as seen in nature. This was accomplished by coloring the outline of the character, including the lines drawn for the separation of lit and shadowed surfaces, and then incorporating the background color onto the surface.

Trnka made his last animated short an indictment of totalitarism, which is what caused him trouble in his native Czechoslovakia. The elements are few and the symbolisms to be simple, and his trademark ornaments are almost absent here, allowing the viewer to concentrate on the fable. A man in his room dedicates to pottery and to take care of his only plant. But suddenly a huge hand enters the room and orders him to make a statue of itself. The man refuses and he’s persecuted by the ominous gloved hand. In these days, where the impression of reality factor seems to be erased from most animations that try to replace the real world. The Russian government were doing the same actions towards the people as the “hand” did. Going against the law would mean execution of those people.

Around the time of the second World War, animated films were showing stereotypical versions of the enemy in a damned manner. The short film, “Bury the Axis” depicts Hitler and his troops to be very fragile and futile when in terms of dictatorship as whatever they do, it turns out be foolish and that they are always outsmarted by the Allies. When it comes to “Momotaro no Umiwashi”, as they are recreating the scene of the Pearl Harbor attack, they are showing the Americans to be very idiotic as well as they are spilling alcohol everywhere on the floor in the ship being irresponsible in their work where as the Japanese on the other side are seen to be resourceful to each other unlike the Americans. Each side shows how their enemy is clumsy and stupid and them being the opposite.

Steamboat Willie has been known for it being the first animation to have sound. Sound is mostly important in this short film because the characters play music in relationship to their actions for the significant part of this film. As Mickey the protagonist starts to play with his surroundings in the ship, he uses anything he can to make rhythmic sound to create the music. The instruments include not just the objects he finds but the animals boarded on the ship as well. Each of them makes a different sound meaning they all had a role here. Besides the music there is background sound for the other actions done by characters, the ship and the sound effects. Also, there was a bit of music playing already since the beginning of the film in the background to built up the picture of a comedic show.

In the early animations of Winsor McCay’s “Gertie the Dinosaur” and Emile Cohl’s “Fantasmagorie”, both have black and white colors and that the main characters use the background for their actions. Gertie uses it for eating and drinking whereas the stick man in “Fantasmagorie” uses it for cosplaying into different people by taking and wearing whatever he is surrounded with. The difference between the two is that the background is white and the lines to be black in “Gertie the Dinosaur” but for “Fantasmarie”, the background is fully black and the lines to be white which means the animation’s background is only objects but not any specific places like for Gertie, where there is a landscape. Another difference is that Gertie has interactions with the animator and the audience but the person in “Fantasmagorie” acts on its own and has makes no difference no matter what the audience’s reactions are. Besides these two differences, the two are pretty much common in all of the styles.