This article is from WeChat official account: Animation Academic lie (ID: babblers) , Author: Taka Xi, Editor: Ji thinking, problem drawing from : “Erase Over/Undone”
In recent years, the entry of European and American investors seems to have set off a wave of challenges to the traditional definition of animation in the animation industry.
Restricted animations represented by “Devil Man” and “Alien Beast” not only challenge the comfort of the eyeball, but also break the traditional concept that “animation is for children”.
In 2018, the limited-level animation “Devil Man” directed by Yuasa Masaaki and exclusively broadcast on Netflix
The limited-level animation “The City of Alien Beasts” produced by MAPPA in 2020 and started to play
“Love/Death/Robot” has a big brainstorm, providing audiences with “fantasy” entrances one after another, making the audience aware of the infinite possibilities of animation as a means of expression.
The restricted animation “Love, Death and Robots” produced by NETFLIX in 2019
As a dark horse that broke out in the animation industry in 2019, it was produced by Amazon. The writer Raphael Bob-Waksberg and Kate Purdy wrote Undone (also known as “Unfinished Things”) explored the definition of animation from another angle, opening up the possibilities of animation.
“Undone” poster
This TV animation has received a lot of praise once it was broadcast, and it still maintains 98% freshness on the professional film review website Rotten Tomatoes.
Comments and praises about this work mainly focus on two aspects:First of all, this work breaks the “young age” and “flatness” characteristics of the animation concept represented by Disney, and has a thought-provoking story core and complex and full character images.
Secondly, this work uses a relatively rare animation transfer technology in mainstream animation production today (rotoscoping, hereinafter referred to as ROTO technology) , The producer captures the actions of real actors and transforms them into hand-drawn animations frame by frame. While showing a hand-painted texture that is not available in live-action movies, the producer portrays what is difficult to control by ordinary 3D or 2D animation Extremely realistic movements and facial expression details.
“Erase Over Again” heroine Irma’s micro expression
There have been too many discussions on the connotation of the film and the ROTO technology used on the Internet. As an “old two-dimensional” who has been immersed in the aesthetics of Japanese animation and manga for a long time, the author is watching During this film, there is always a question in my heart——
Why does the author of this film love ROTO technology?
Compared with other fashionable animation technologies, what is the unique charm of this ancient expression method born in the early stages of animation industrialization?
However, this article is not a purely technical post.
This time, I will start with the interpretation of the text of the animation itself. And this is because the author realized after watching this work that the reason why the creator chose ROTO technology instead of other methods is precisely because ROTO technology can perfectly show the creator’s ingenuity about this story.
(The following content involves a lot of spoilers, please read carefully)
The two key words of “Erase Over Again”: “opposition” and “cross-boundary”
Let’s first understand what kind of story this adult animation tells.
Due to time travel and dreams involved, “Erase Over Again” uses a lot of interludes and flashbacks.
Fantasy scenes of travel and dreams in animation
In order to facilitate understanding, the author summarizes the plot in timeline order as follows:
The heroine Elma is an American of Mexican descent. Her mother is a Mexican immigrant, her father is a Jew, and she has a younger sister. Her personality is very different.
Elma’s parents
Elma’s sister (left)
Irma lost his hearing due to a childhood illness and regained hearing through cochlear implant surgery. One Halloween night, his father took Irma out to ask for sweets, but he left Irma at the intersection because of a phone call and never returned.
Elma waited at the intersection all night, and when Elma was sent home by the police the next morning, she heard the news of her father’s death.
The sudden death of her father has always been a thorn in Irma’s heart. She tried to commit suicide because of guilt, and her personality became impulsive and extreme.
Many years later, Irma has grown up and has her own life and boyfriend.
One day, my sister announced the wedding date to her, preparing to marry a white tyrant. Life seemed to go by step, but Irma felt inexplicably anxious. She broke up with her boyfriend, quarreled with her sister, and drove away after the quarrel, which caused the car accident at the beginning of the story.
After the car accident, Irma found that the world in her eyes was completely in chaos: the same scenes were repeated, reality and illusion were interspersed with each other, and the ghost of her father also appeared in front of her…
Under the enlightenment of the fooling father, Irma has mastered the super power to control time, can freely shuttle between different points in time, and can even change the past and the future.
However, in the eyes of others, Irma, who behaves strangely, is more likely to have schizophrenia. The mother asked Irma to see a doctor and take medicine. Irma obeyed on the surface, but secretly accepted the entrustment of his father’s undead to find out the truth of his father’s death.
After a series of investigations, Irma finally discovered that the chief culprit of his father’s death was not someone else, but the father himself, who was enthusiastic about research and did not hesitate to experiment with his daughter.
Elma persuaded his father to face the facts, and his father went back to the past. This time he chose the latter between the experiment and his daughter. According to the plan, his father will be able to return to the world and return to Irma and his family. Beside.
After returning from the journey through time, Elma drove to the Mexican ruins where she had visited with her father, looking forward to her father’s awakening from the ruins.
However, Irma sat in front of the ruins all night, but could not wait for her father to appear.
Dawn fell, and my sister persuaded her to give up and return to a normal life. When the first light pierced the sky, Irma opened her eyes wide, and no one knew what she saw——
The story comes to an abrupt end here
Does Irma really have superpowers, or is she really schizophrenic? This problem also stagnated in the hearts of the audience.
As a TV animation produced by an American team, “Erase Over Again” is completely in line with the “political correctness” that American literary and artistic works have focused on minority groups in recent years: fewEthnicity and immigrants are not only physically disabled, but also mentally unhealthy.
The story shows her mental journey of facing the psychological shadows and reconciling with herself and the world.
The producer of this film Kate. Purdy(hereinafter referred to as KP) admitted in an interview that part of the heroine’s family background and experience is based on Yourself.
She has lived in Mexico, has many Mexican friends, and her parents come from different cultural backgrounds. She hopes to show the life of Mexican Americans through her works, and portray the inner feelings of the younger generation of American immigrants who grew up under the common influence of plural cultures.
Kate. Purdy
Different cultural backgrounds and different growth experiences have created different ways of thinking for people, which leads to prejudice and friction between people.
In the work, Irma and the people around her live in a society full of hidden prejudices. Prejudice is the normal state of their lives. It penetrates into their souls like ink penetrates into cloth and shapes their personality. In the end, even they themselves can only see the world through the filter of prejudice.
For example, Irma’s sister Beka is engaged to the white local tyrant Reid. Reid’s parents approve of it on the surface, but between the lines reveals a kind of Aryan superior, unconscious contempt and contempt for minority culture .
Alternatively, Elma was deaf when she was young. Her mother thought without thinking that the life of a deaf and mute person was miserable, and decided to let her undergo artificial ear transplantation without authorization. But in fact, Irma had a very good time at the school for the deaf. What really saddened her was not the deafness itself, but the fact that her mother forced her to transfer, which made her lose a precious friendship.
Prejudice creates barriers, which intensify contradictions, and most often lead to confrontations between people and groups. Contradiction and opposition are undoubtedly one of the key words of this work.
There are a lot of opposing images in the work, and the tension between characters and characters is obvious.
For example, Irma has an impulsive personality, is bored with the same, and is hostile to mainstream society. The younger sister Becca hates all accidents that are not in line with the plan, and tries to integrate into the mainstream society constructed by whites through marriage. The two often quarreled because of one sentence, pushing each other into the fire pit.
Alma’s mother and father are also very interesting comparisons. The mother is a devout believer, but she is so rational about her children. Although Irma’s father is a scientist, he firmly believes that there are superpowers in the world, and even uses his daughter as his experimental object. .
Parents quarreling
But it needs to be emphasized that the ambition of this work is not only to emphasize or even exaggerate the contradictions between different groups and individuals. In fact, the core idea of the work is exactly the opposite.
Quoting a quote from KP’s speech in an interview, the purpose of her creation of this work is “to show the universality of people by depicting the particularities of different characters”(make it universal in its specificity).
It is true that there are more or less contradictions between almost everyone in the work, but no matter what the opposition, there are always commonalities between characters and characters.
For example, although Sister Irma often quarreled, when her sister was most helpless, it was her sister who found her first and gave her comfort and a reliable arm.
Although parents have different personalities, they share the same love for their daughters.
For another example, although Irma and her boyfriend Sam come from different cultures, both of them have experienced parting from their childhood partners, and both have suffered from being oppressed by the power elite as a minority and excluded by mainstream culture. Pain…
Such a commonality guides individuals with different personalities from opposition to reconciliation, and also sublimates the theme of the work from the focus on personal emotions to the discussion of common human emotions.
The “person” in modern civilization originated from the empowerment of the “self”. The awakening of the “self” guides people out of the collective called “family”, “nation” or “country”, and makes people become A relatively independent atomized individual pursues diversified self-worth.
But at the same time, the pursuit of “self” also leads to alienation between people, causing individuals to fall into a state of incomprehensibility and isolation. It’s worthy of affirmation that this work is not content to stand still in the “self”, but has been trying to “cross the boundary”.
The so-called cross-border is to cross the barrier called “self” to find commonalities and achieve empathy. It’s just that, facing the same world and the same things, each of us has different cognitions and feelings due to personal experience, situation, mentality and other reasons. Everyone is a lonely soul trapped in our own skin. .
It is so difficult to understand others, and some people even suspect that if there is no “Human Completion Plan” and if all humans are not turned into orange juice, there will never be true empathy between people.
The reason why “Unfinished Things” uses ROTO technology is precisely to build the Tower of Babel called “Compassion.”
This work attempts to use ROTO technology to dissolve the boundaries between “fantasy” and “reality”, “subjective consciousness” and “objective world”, realistically and concretize the abstract and isolated individual feelings, and finally break the human relationship The emotional barrier between the characters fully guides the audience into the role of Irma, allowing the audience to have the illusion of “empathy” with the character, and establish a strong empathy with this character.
ROTO technology: from action performance to emotional expression
Although ROTO technology has received considerable attention in recent years, and new animations using this technology have been released, but this technology itself is not new.
It was invented as early as the beginning of the last century, the inventor was Max FreySchell (Max Fleischer). “He used this technique in his series “Coco the Clown Jumping Out of the Inkwell” (Out of the Inkwell). His brother Dave Fleischer (Dave Fleischer) wore a clown costume and played the role of Coco the Clown in an animated script movie.”
Coco the Clown
After the Frecher brothers, Disney also applied ROTO technology to the creation of works just right.
For example, in Disney’s first feature-length animated film “Snow White”, a smooth animation of Snow White dancing with the dwarf is done by rewriting the actor’s dance in the animation using ROTO technology. By using ROTO technology, “Snow White” is far superior to Disney’s early works in portraying the character’s movements. (such as “Steamboat Willie” ) Realism.
It is not difficult to see that at the beginning of the birth of ROTO technology, it was first used to meet the needs of industrialized animation production, so that animation practitioners without system training can successfully produce more realistic and smooth character movements.
In other words, ROTO technology was originally a technology oriented to “production” rather than “expression”. It was an auxiliary means to make up for the lack of manpower and experience in early animation creation.
With the development of animation technology, the use of ROTO technology has been questioned. Some people think that ROTO technology is only the transformation of the actor’s movement into animation, not really creating movement. Disney also gradually abandoned ROTO technology in the process of improving its own painting style.
In recent years, with the development of digital animation technology, ROTO technology has been transformed into a digital version, which has regained the attention of creators and ushered in a new spring.
But the creators of the new era are no longer obsessed with the realistic portrayal of characters’ movements. Their goal is no longer to make the objects they portray “realistic” through realistic movements, but the opposite— Creators use ROTO technology to cast a fantasy mask for the performance of real actors, creating a peculiar effect of coexistence between reality and fantasy, subjective and objective.
For example, in the following animation of a ballerina dancing, the creator uses ROTO technology to capture the ballerina’s physical movements to create a group of “dancing lines”.
Ballet
In the work, the real dancers and the creator’s fantasy lines appear on the screen at the same time, giving the audience a special visual experience.
The 2006 movie “A Scanner Darkly” uses ROTOTechnology portrays the world that a drug addict feels.
At the beginning of the film, the drug addict woke up and found that his body was covered with “bugs”, but in fact, these “bugs” were just his hallucinations.
ROTO technology has produced a certain distortion in the objective world the character is in. Under such a distorted background, the boundary between subjectivity and objective becomes blurred. The illusion invades reality in an intuitive way, and is combined with reality. together.
Go back to “Erase Over”.
In the application of ROTO technology, “Erase Over Again” is similar to the predecessor “Dark Scanner”, and both use this technology to show the inner world of the character.
But “Erase Over” is obviously more crazy, and it makes better use of the strengths of animation technology.
The creators give full play to their imagination, portraying the fantasy in the protagonist’s mind, and using ROTO technology to seamlessly connect this fantasy with the real world.
ROTO technology casts a mask called “Elma” on the objective world, making the audience seem to be standing in Elma’s brain, observing the external world through Elma’s eyes, or, It is to observe the world named “Elma”.
Through this layer of mask, the audience can gradually establish an emotional bond with Irma, understand her feelings, accept her abnormalities, and use her super powers with her in the end——< /p>
Or go crazy together.
Conclusion
Whether Irma gained “superpowers” or simply had a mental problem, “Erase Over Again” did not give an answer until the end.
While the work shows Irma’s “superpowers”, it also frequently implies that maybe everything is not true, maybe everything is the imagination of a madman.
But in my opinion, superpowers are still crazy, and the answer to this question is no longer important. Because the purpose of this work is not simply to tell a story that travels through time, nor is it simply to describe the world in the eyes of a schizophrenic patient.
As mentioned above, the purpose of this work is to “cross the boundary” and to arouse the audience’s thinking about “empathy”. The author believes that it is for this purpose that the work deliberately selects a person whose behavior is beyond common sense, and chooses a “madman” as the protagonist.
Michel Foucault pointed out in “Madness and Civilization” that psychiatric hospitals are a means for public power to discipline each individual under its control. As long as there is a “madman” as the target of crusadePeople will always be vigilant, for fear of crossing the boundary, for fear that they will become “abnormal” and be locked up as “lunatics”.
And “Erase Over Again” is a questioning of this self-discipline and self-castration–isn’t a “madman” worthy of sympathy? Isn’t the “lunatic” one of us?
At the beginning of the work, Irma told her sister that “Broken people will hurt others” (Broken people break people), but with As the plot develops, she finally realizes the fact-mother, father, sister, boyfriend, no one around him is complete. In the process of growing up, people always face loss, loss of loved ones, loss of love, loss of friendship… Loss makes people become fragmented, the so-called “madman” is just the one among us who has lost more.
But on the other hand, it is precisely because everyone is broken that there is commonality between people, and it is possible to understand each other and achieve empathy. So at the end of the story, Irma chose to give up her stubbornness, accept her sister’s suggestion, and return to the lives of ordinary people.
This may be a compromise of order by a madman, but in the author’s opinion, it is more like the sublimation of the protagonist’s mentality-Irma finally realized that her broken self is still a member of all living beings, and she accepted this In fact, I understood my sister and reconciled with the world.
But obviously, the creators are not satisfied with a happy ending. The mother’s paranoia towards Irma still exists, and her boyfriend also betrayed Irma. The younger sister confessed to the white local tyrant about the fact that she had derailed after being engaged and was asked to dissolve the marriage contract. The father did not come back…
The troubles in reality have not been resolved, and the empathy between people seems to be fleeting like morning dew. Can Irma get her father back? If she can’t find it, how will she face her life in reality next? If you find it back, how will they get along…
I look forward to the answers to these questions in the second season of “Erase Over”.
Reference materials:
https://tv.avclub.com/bojack-horseman-s-kate-purdy-on-inclusivity-and-ambigui-1838155928
https://mossan99.hatenablog.com/entry/2018/06/08/022830
https://www.cinra.net/interview/2013/05/22/000000.php
https://www.cinra.net/interview/201409-iwaishunji
This article is from WeChat official account:Animation Academic Party (ID: babblers) author: Taka Xi, edit: Thinking Ji