Animation is one way to express emotion as well as imaginary worlds. A great company that has excelled using animation is Disney. Disney has produced forty-nine hit movies and is loved by many children over the past fifty years. The key to a successful animation is a interesting storyline, characters are able to express emotion, color usage, and music choices. In the short story The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe is brought to life using animation by Columbia Pictures. Designer Paul Julian and many others take Poe’s short story and bring it to life using still picture animation.
In the film Julian uses a lot of dry and dull colors to give a depressing mood. To enhance the story the music choice also helps by giving a scary and gloomy feeling. The background in this film is filled with shadows using different tones of black and dry colors (yellow, white, blue, pink). I would say an effective way to give a dark and mysterious mood is using a lot of dark colors and hiding the characters identity. Throughout the film the audience is unaware of the narrators identity and what he or she ‘s appearance maybe. This is a great technique because people in general are only interested in finding out what a story is about and who the main character is. In this film the audience is left hanging and never finds out who the main character is, except that he or she is an insane person who killed an old man. The way this film was designed reminded me a lot of the black silhouettes seen in Lotte Reinger’s production pieces because all you saw were the shadows of the characters excluding the old man. By using dark colors the old man’s white-eye stood out and was more emphasized. Any object that was white stood out and drew the eyes to that object. The importance of this technique is that it allowed the audience to realize that the killer was always thinking about the old man’s white-eye.
Another technique used was the use of black. When the old man awakens from sleep, the film is black. When the old man’s heart is beating, the film shows flashes of light red to represent a heartbeat and to give the audience a feeling of terror. When someone’s heart is beating fast it makes another person feel fearful because when you are scared your heart pumps faster because of adrenaline. I felt this was very effective because it gave a different scene by showing the insides of a character. Usually in a film we only see zoom in shots or wide shots. This showed us the internal picture of a character. This gave the feeling of a heart actually beating. The other technique that enhanced this heartbeat was the music. The music started off with a beat of a drum pounding and then sharp sounds as the heart began to pump faster.
I would say the most interesting technique used in his scenes was when they showed the police searching the house. At this point in the story the narrator is scared about the police finding out about the old man’s death. The film shows a lot of eyes and shows the police walking. The film also shows a man at the bottom of a staircase and to show movement the camera only moves up the staircase to represent the man searching the upstairs of the house. This technique saves a lot of work in animation. The moving of the camera up the staircase shows that you can show movement using the background scene and designers do not have to rely on the character itself to show movement.
From what I read online I found this a key role in any animation and found it in this story, “After going through the Art, Craft and Science of Animation it looks pretty convincing. However, we are still midway. From here the Animator will have to add 'Something' that cannot be expressed in words or visually. This Something is what makes characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck universally popular and loved across the barriers of 'Cast', 'Creed', 'Religion', 'Race' or 'Nationality. So what is this Something I would say it is the 'Soul',” (Thakur Vijendra). The something Vijendra is speaking of is the soul. He is saying that in order to make a character come to life and to allow an audience to connect with the character the animator must become that character when designing it. In the film I felt connected to the old man and the narrator because the artist made the old man look sorrowful and helpless. By drawing the old man like this, it is human nature to feel bad for any creature that is helpless. To keep it simple, by making the old man helpless, it allowed me to feel bad for him and gave the emotion of hate and sadness when the old man was killed. This gave the film emotion in my opinion. In animation you can create emotions by drawing it or using sound. But in this film the artist made emotion come out of how he drew the character.
In the animation I found this film to be very dark and intriguing because I have never heard of this Edger Allan Poe story before. By using dark colors to represent shadows and the characters themselves, made a picture that was mysterious and evil. This is right on point for an animation for this story because Edgar Allan Poe’s work is very horrifying and shady. The use of still animation, movement of the camera, and dark drawings made the animation unique and gave the feeling of gloomy to the film.
Bibliography
Thakur, Vijend. "Importance of Animation." Buzzle Web Portal: Intelligent Life on the Web. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. <http://www.buzzle.com/articles/importance-of-animation.html>.
"Complete Disney Animated Movies List." Web. 25 Sept. 2010. <http://homepage.usask.ca/~jjs142/movielist.htm>.
"YouTube - Tell Tale Heart Animation." YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. Web. 25 Sept. 2010. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4s9V8aQu4c>.
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