Thursday, January 12, 2012
(notes on) biology
This video is best watched at fullscreen.
I'm not sure how I found this but I've loved it for a while now. The stop-motion photography at the beginning is a little difficult to get used to but prepares the viewer for what is to come. The story told in this video is one most people can relate to-- being insanely bored in a science class. What happens though is so unexpected that you keep watching, through the tedious beginning, for the enormous payoff at the end.
The protagonist, the boy who starts drawing in his notebook, is a character I immediately connected with, though his artistic abilities were actually able to meet his imagination's expectations which was impressive. And the thing he chooses to draw-- a robot elephant that blows things up with its cannon trunk-- is so absurd yet so fitting that you hardly question it. (But it's such a guy thing to draw.) The addition of sound effects and the numbing and eventual disappearance of the teacher's voice completes the effect until we too forget that he's in class and he's drawing all over his notes.
While it's a boring story at its bones (kid gets bored in class so he draws on his notebook) the medium allows a completely new story to be told, one that wouldn't make sense in another form.
I don't think the story is trying to tell us anything specific except maybe that biology can be boring and robot elephants are the shiz. What I gained from it was that a simple fun idea can be worth the large amounts of work you put into it-- they had write hundreds of believable yet unique and hilarious pages of biology notes before they could begin the animation. That amount of work for little or no financial benefit is inspiring.
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"ROBOT ELEPHANT!" I could relate to the main character because I too got bored in Biology. The simplicity of the animation made this video seem familiar while the amount of the notes and the level of detail made it impressive. I really liked the almost complete first person perspective and felt that I was really watching the world through the main character's eyes. It's nice that they used this medium to deliver this story because I think that it will span generations due to its broad appeal. It was also refreshing to have the character answer the question correctly because it showed that he wasn't missing the point of the class but rather expanding and surpassing the point of the class.
ReplyDeleteI think you chose an awesome example of a film that could really only be produced in this--the "digital age." Stop-motion animation has been around forever, originally carved into thousands of stone tablets by big-fisted neanderthals (a joke!), but without digital cameras and other resources available to the creators, this movie would have been a massive, studio-level effort in a more primitive era. Instead, we are lucky to have a small, independent delight for our undeserving eyes. What times we live in! Computers! Robots! Elephants! etc.
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