So I came across a video on youtube about a year ago when it was first posted, and I think I have watched it about 200 times since. Something about it makes it so interesting to me, and I hope it is interesting to you. For this blog post I decided to look more in-depth into this stop-motion animation. It is called Western Spaghetti by PES films.
According to Wikipedia; Adam Pesapane is the Director of PES films. He studied at UVA, and got into film because of his major, English. He uses stop-motion animation in his work, which to me is fascinating. Stop Motion animation has been used for many years, and some of the first films used this medium in the works. Usually clay is involved since it is easily formed in order to show the character or object moving on its own. Gumby is a classic example of that. But PES’s shorts are not like that. He takes ordinary everyday objects and creates something out of them.
In this film he is using such interesting objects to show the simple action of making the Western Spaghetti dish. I love watching the tomatoes, for instance, smash in the pan…or the rubiks cube, being used as garlic here, being cut into smaller pieces. His attention to detail is amazing, and the sound effects really help with understanding the animation. He even involves human hands and arms in this short which is difficult to do. and not one beat is missed. If you watch, there are no gaps in the sequence of pictures or obvious mistakes.
Western Spaghetti earned an award at the 2009 sundance film festival, an audience award and was voted TIME’s 2009 #2 most viral video.PESfilm is the directors channel on youtube. He has uploaded 25 videos so far. Some of them have even become commercials on TV. Bacardi and coinstar are the most notable commercials he has made. I encourage everyone to go check out his channel and this video! He truely has mastered stop-motion animation in the modern day!
I realized that while I revised the blog posts (3 and 5) and changed the Title, it may be easier to reference this action with a blog post. With each of those I added more information and took out some that I thought was a bit redundant to the post, also added a video 🙂
I have always been a Disney fanatic, and while I realize the majority of my posts are about Disney films, I have to admit…this one will be no different. I started thinking back to the first weeks of class when we discussed the villains of the Disney films. When I think of the villian that got to me the most when I was younger, it always goes back to the Queen in Snow White. Why was she so evil? In this blog post I want to attempt to answer that very question.
[The Queen: Pre-Apple Making] She is introduced to the Audience as a step-mother figure, which has a negative connotation to it to begin with. (in previous blog posts I discuss this a bit). Everything about her can give someone the creeps. Her look itself is dark, with dark clothes and a cape. No hair is shown. She has long fingers and fingernails, and very heavy makeup. The eyes of the Queen are small and squinty, which are great for that evil look. Although her facial expressions are limited, the over-exaggeration of her features help with her look. And her voice is deep and haunting. But it is not only her appearance that makes her one of the scariest Queens that Disney has produced, her personality is also an extension of that terror. She exhibits two of the seven deadly sins…she is vain and jealous. Obsessed with her looks and those of her step daughter she plans to kill Snow White in order to be “The fairest in the land”. I believe that these traits are among the top reasons this woman scared so many. The lack of compassion is a characteristic that all of the “evil” women in Disney’s movies portray. They are on the extreme other side of their very compassionate counter-parts (the princesses) who generally love all things living and strive for true love with a prince.
[The Queen: Post Apple Making] The differences here are pretty obvious. She starts with the voice change, and the cackle of a laugh. Her eyes are now much larger and yellow. We see her white hair, showing her change in age appearance .She still wears dark colors and still has the long, and may I add, creepy fingernails. The whole wart and no teeth thing really add to the whole image I think. her facial expression and body movement also improve here. We see the eyes change shape as well as the brows moving. Some of these movements are choppy, and in no way compare to those Disney is capable of today, but they are classic, and the first of their kind for this feature length film. What is so ironic about this part of the film is that she leaves her vanity aside to try to seduce her step-daughter into eating an apple from a poor innocent women. Vanity and compassion apparently do not go hand in hand to this queen. She really shows her lack of compassion in these scenes. She does not believe in love, and makes that apparent after she reads how the spell will be un-done. She also succeeds in feeding the apple to Snow White after convincing her that all her Dreams would come true. It is scary to think that a woman so evil could corrupt some one so pure, but that is what makes the Queen so frightening.
As this was Disney’s First feature length film there are some technical aspects that are left to be desired but on the whole the success of scaring little children with this evil woman is breath taking. She is the first of her kind, and she would later share some of the characteristics that the other evil women of Disney had.
Below there are two clips that I found on Youtube of the Queen’s Transformation.(I know they are longer, but I enjoyed watching them to write this)
So I realize that I have already made a post on a version of Alice in Wonderland, but I have to do another one. Over the break I went to see the new version of Alice In Wonderland. And I must say, It was amazing. But as I watched I thought “Hey I could do my special post on this! There is A LOT of animation”. I have to warn you…if you have not seen this film and care about spoilers…this post may upset you. If not, please keep reading! 🙂
When Tim Burton took on the task to re create this fantasy the world knew that it would be different than all the other versions of the tale. It is known that he stated that this is not a sequel to the original Alice in Wonderland, or an adaptation of the original story, but something completly different and new…which I dont really believe. A lot of the same characters are in this film that appeared in either one or both of Carrolls original books, and he films previously made. There is more of an in-depth look at these characters, and explanations of why they are the way they are, which IMO is pretty great to see. The world that Lewis Carroll created in his books have always fascinated me. They are whimsical and dream like with characters that can be different depending on ones imagination. In the popular animated version of this film that Disney originally released, all of the characters were animated, and given life like qualities to the best of the animators ablilty at the time. As more time went on and other non-annimated versions of this story were released the made up characters were portrayed in many different ways. I have seen every version (I think) of these storys made so far, and each has a different take on certain charaters. The clip below, which is not one of my favorite versions, shows the different characters and the lack of animation used. These characters, like tweedle dee, are played by real people with great makeup.
Tim Burton did not use this technique and instead chose to use a lot of CGI and Motion Capture Technology. The majority of the film was shot on green screen. There were live actors in the few beginning scenes when Alice was not in “Underworld” and some characters while in the fantasy world that were real. The live actors in Underworld, such as Johnny Depp’s character The Mad Hatter (who was AMAZING by the way), were almost always enhanced with Motion Capture technology. IMDB states that Motion Capture Technology is “Motion capture technology is a type of CGI, that utilizes the ability to read a performer’s physical performance and create a fluid life-like wire frame and eventually a textured character”. There were many different aspects of animation in this film that I noticed. I had thought that the real live characters that were ehnanced for theatrical purposes would look very…unreal. But I was pleasantly surprised that when I saw the Red Queens head, that was enlarged to be three times the size of a normal head, that it looked almost real and after watching for a while, it became almost normal to me. This was not the case however with the characters that were not played by real actors. The caterpillar, the march hare, tweedle dee and tweetle dumb for instance looked very unreal, unlike the hallmark version of this film above. I thought to myself, did Tim Burton do this on purpose? This land that Alice returned to was one of fantasy for us. It was a real place for her however. The characters that need to be created had fluid motions and all, but they looked obviously fake. In a time where films like Avatar and The Polar Express come out with AMAZING animations, why do some of the characters in Burton’s film seem lackluster to me? The detail on the characters were amazing, but as a while…they just seemed fake. I believe that the White Rabbit and the twins stood out to me. Others however, like the Jabberwokey were great and believable. I was not able to find any information online that could explain this, but I figured that it has to do with the Fantasy part of the film. Underworld, as Alice finds, is a real place and not a dream. But to us it is something that is out of a story. In our world there are not magical talking and smoking caterpillars or monkeys that hold up tables and act as furniture. These things can exist in our mind, but they will never be as real as in real life. I was not overly upset with the animation. If my theory is correct, I would love the film even more. This story was never intended to be real, and if the animation were such that the differences between real and make believe were blurred, the amazing story may not have gotten across to the audience.
I really believe that Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass are timeless stories that are meant to evoke the imagination in everyone. The characters and emotions that manifest from this story are different for everyone, and that is the appealing part to me. The characters can be interpreted in many different ways depending on the person reading, or watching the story in this case. Tim Burton’s way of keeping some very real and some fake aspects of the film was a focal point of why I liked it so much. And while I don’t believe it when he states it is not a sequel to the original story, he does take this new part of the story and make it his own with these techniques. And to leave you…just one more clip…mainly because I love it so much!
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