When you're born in the Bayou...

1927 - The Animals and Children took to the Streets from British Council on Vimeo.

I was initially interested in 1927's The Animals and Children took to the Streets because the animated portions have a visual style that is similar to Machinarium.  The environments are all rendered with shaky line-work, muted colors that almost look like stains, and beautifully incorrect perspective.  So, when two of my professors, and my dad and step-mom recommended I go see this play, I figured I probably should take the time to do so.  I was most certainly not disappointed.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets uses a mix of live theatrical performances and projected animation.  Mixing live theater performances with animation is not a new idea.  It is in fact a very old idea.  Many of the early animators were popular Vaudeville performers, and it was not unusual for them to include their animations with their acts.  Winsor McKay's early animation Gertie the Dinosaur was specifically animated to be part of a theatrical performance.  From what I understand, stand alone animations won out as Vaudeville began to disappear and animators realized it was more financially sound to make a film they could copy and sell rather than to do repeated live performances.  The use of projection and animation is of course, much more sophisticated now.  The mixture of performance and animation had the interesting effect of making the play seem to be somewhere between theater and narrative dance.  The actor's movements needed to be precisely timed in order to match up with the animated projections; thus the movements became dance-like.

The Animals and Children took to the Streets focuses on poverty and the systemic structures that prevent people from improving their lot in life.  The children who terrify the adults are reacting to legitimate injustices. The children know there is something wrong with their living situation, but they don't fully understand what it is or why it is.  So they do the only thing they can think of to do; they act out aggressively.  The adults in the slum known as the Bayou understand the problems that keep them in their miserable conditions, but they also understand their own powerlessness.  Agnes Eaves is the one exception.  She naively thinks that she can change the Bayou for the better, but she is not from there and does not truly understand the problems and doesn't have the power to facilitate improvement.  The Mayor arguably does have the power needed to help the people of the Bayou.  However from his point of view, the only real problem is that the children in the Bayou have yet to learn their place.  The problem with the society in The Animals and Children took to the Streets is that the people who have the power to create positive change don't care to do so, and those who do care, lack the ability to cause change. 

Near the ending of the play, the lone male protagonist stands at a cross roads.  To one side is an idealistic ending, and the other is a realistic ending.  Audience participation is called for as the protagonist contemplates his paths.  In the performance I attended, the audience cheered most loudly for the idealistic ending, but the actor took a perfect 'why bother' posture just before walking down the idealistic path then ran down the realistic path.  I suspect there is only one ending to the play.  The moment is about asking the audience to consider what they want and expect out of the story rather than actually offering a choice to the audience. 

I mentioned at the beginning of this post that the visual style of The Animals and Children Took to the Streets reminded me of the game Machinarium.  It may seem surprising, but the stories are actually quite thematically similar as well.  The main character in Machinarium is so far down on the social ladder that he is literally treated like trash (and I do mean literally - the game starts with him being thrown in the town dump).  The game itself is a find-the-object puzzle game.  The player spend the entire game scrounging around for any discarded object that can help the protagonist get the better of the three bullies who personify the social forces keeping him powerless.  However the endings differ between Machinarium and The Animals and Children Took to the Streets. Machinarium has a happy and unsatisfying ending.  It feels as though Amanita Design didn't really know how to end the game, and as a result the ending was unrealistic.  As much as I may have preferred an idealistic ending in The Animals and Children Took to the Streets, the realistic ending was obviously, and unfortunately, more realistic.

Ohio Shorts

My short animation, Tale Type 510A, has been selected to be shown at Ohio Shorts. The screening will be at 7PM, Saturday April 20th at the Wexner Center.  I'm looking forward to seeing all the great work included in the show, especially the film produced as part of a new class at CCAD, where I completed my undergraduate studies.

Ghost in the Game

This weekend I went through a pile of papers that had been collecting on my desk.  Among the old bills and flyers I found a program note from Evan Meaney's Epilogue: The Well of Representation that I saw at the Wexner Center's the Box last semester.  Epilogue was probably the only piece I've seen in the Box that both drew an audience and that the audience seemed to actually enjoy.  People were even dragging their friends in to see it; usually telling them that "it's like a game".

Given that the Wexner Center describes Epilogue as elegiac, and the film does center on death and decay, it may seem a bit odd that the audience seemed to have fun watching it.  I believe the enjoyment comes from the fact that it is very much like a game, and has a dark humor element to it.  The program note compares the film to the classic adventure game The Legend of Zelda, but it actually bears a closer resemblance to Japanese role playing games such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.  At one point the "player" character dies, and the "game" is restarted.  The "game" restarts with the character rising as a ghost at his funeral, although we would expect the character to simply restart at the point before death.  The film plays with our expectations of how a game should progress.


A Better Ghost [interview w/ Evan Meaney] from Nick Briz on Vimeo.

At several points the "game" crashes, and we spend what feels like a rather long time watching the screen glitch out.  I suspect these glitches are meant to be the heart of the work, but it never became clear to me why the glitches matter.  They tended to be tedious, and felt oddly staged.  In interviews Meaney likens his work with glitches to seances.  Seances are, in fact, staged events created through the use of explainable techniques.  To an extent, the contrivance spoils the mystery.  Glitches can be interesting.  The click and drag on the floor glitch from one of my first interactive experiments was the most interesting aspect of that project.   However, something about actively creating glitches and overly dwelling on them, feels false to me.  This falseness is similar to seances which present stage magician's tricks as supernatural.

When I was watching Epilogue, I couldn't shake the sense that I was watching someone play an interesting game.  The problem with that is that a game is always more interesting to play than it is to watch.  I'm finding it difficult to be motivated about my current project despite my interest in the style and subject matter.  I'm afraid I feel the same way about my project as I felt about Epilogue.  It could be a good game; unfortunately it's a film.