Previously, I was talking about characters and specific designs I enjoy handling and studying the most. I want to talk about my love for the stories and emotions from my favorite films.
In my opinion, animation seems to have more original and conceptual ideas to their films, since you could do anything with it. It's your imagination. The Tex Avery cartoons were well-known for their vivid motion and sharp slapstick and gags, and while I still love those cartoons to this day, they didn't have a deep and motivational premise, it was all for comedy and jokes.
I felt like I could understand more mature and appealing concepts when watching non-animation films, it was difficult to manage but I could finally see why they were impactful and iconic. I didn't like Casablanca at first, but re-visiting a few moments and knowing a more relatable and serious story makes it more intriguing and heartwarming.
My favorite films of all time are mostly focusing on a structured plot and deep emotion. A few mentions are The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Heavenly Puss, and Pluto's Judgement Day.
Pluto's Judgement Day has a ton of eerie and haunting imagery. Usually the Mickey Mouse characters tend to be tame, but in scenarios like this I can live for. I could imagine these characters actually feeling frightened in these horrifying situations, and for it's mild runtime it actually works.
I'm not only influenced by stories from animation obviously, which is why I tend to collect books. Little Golden Books. If you were going to tell my all-time favorite story it would be Matilda. I loved the Roald Dahl stuff when I was younger, not all of it but I do like James and The Giant Peach as well, but Matilda in particular interested me more than any other story, the movie is one of my all-time favorites as well.
Same with Bambi, instead I haven't read the original story at all, but there's an undeniably dark and sometimes cruel element to the movie. It focuses on a good protagonist followed by real-life situations. Animal vs Man, and it is that character to be challenged and take responsibilities.
Something like Fantasia, and An Optical Poem has a great abstract sense to it, but it barely shows depth and structure, they have great animation but that's it. Take more character-oriented films like The Secret of NIMH, Pinocchio, and The Goddess of Spring and add those elements but not for too long, that way we can focus on the character's actions as well, they don't need alot of dialogue or zany energy they can just connect to the environment.
Sometimes a movie can take on another level of story-telling, take It's A Wonderful Life, the ultimate movie.
What makes this movie incredible in particular is how extremely real it handles life as a whole, you don't know what could happen, yet you have to be careful, and be prepared and honest whatever the situation may be. That's what I love about George Bailey. The scene with the guardian angel was just tear-jearking and so beautiful. The acting was just impeccable, as well as the message.
I could kinda see animation having human emotion and deep understanding like those movies. It just doesn't happen in short films it's more in movies and that's kind of a shocker.
Animators like Rod Scribner, I truly love not because it's funny drawings, but those drawings actually show off human acting and alot more distinctive expression, and with short films like The Great Piggy Bank Robbery I could live with. It's mostly chaotic but it's well-thought out, there's a ton of imagination and unexpected possibilities, and the color schemes were unique.
I love looking into different variants of illustrated art. I love alot of vintage paintings and magazines. My favorites are the two-tone colorized illustrations and paintings by Edward Hopper, Maxfield Parrish, Claude Monet and Albert Bierstadt.
I could just imagine an animated film with this sorta style and having traditional 2D animation, with a serious but interesting story and I would've loved it.
I felt like story-telling being simple and novel was the best. I don't really enjoy movie franchises, or TV shows as much as other people, I tend to like a short journey onto the next, it's more fun that way in my opinion. Some exceptions are The Backyardigans, my favorite episodes were some of my younger childhood experiences like International Super Spy, A Giant Problem but also liked episodes recently like Who Goes There, Fly Girl, and Escape From Fairytale Village, even with title names like that, you would be invested in them.
Now I definitely know that people have different interests and they prefer more complex stories, and that is totally fine, like what you like, I don't force people to enjoy what's best for me.
I do think what I'm interested in feels unique and interesting in my tastes. I find myself liking these dark, sometimes cynical but positive outlooks of life.
When creating something myself, I don't revert to past experiments, I tend to love the old stuff, but since quality has evolved over the years, I want to use those inspirations for a modern approach.
The older Disney movies for example. 1937 to about 1953, had some excellent and wholesome energy to them, but they weren't always flawless. I do tend to count some moments I didn't specifically like in those movies like the War-Time era movies mostly being package shorts, the songs can sometimes come off as silly, or one long overdue scene, but those happen rarely and I'm happy for that.
If you want to know what Disney era was best, it was the Dark Age. Yeah, no kidding.
The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rescuers, Robin Hood, heck even The Black Cauldron, an extreme guilty pleasure of mine are all classics, and guess what? (gasp) No sign of Disney princesses! No silly prince! The one unexceptional film from that era was The Aristocats, but even then that's ok. What I loved about those movies was that the story-telling and characters were at their absolute finest, they had more darker imagery, and interesting villains.
Anyways, I feel like I'm fine with what I've talked about today. If you want to check out my previous post of focusing on cartoon characters, feel free to check that out.
