Gravity Falls

Gravity Falls is a show about two siblings, a brother and a sister who go to live with their eccentric Grand-Uncle Stan in the strange town of Gravity Falls. Throughout the series the pair embark on bizarre adventures and get themselves into extreme situations, often due to poorly thought out schemes (strange how similar all these animated series sound when I describe them. I guess if you find a formula that works you stick to it.) 

I really like the show because it gives us something different. The plot lines are completely wacky and I love shows that have well thought out universes. Often my problem with cartoons is that the world around the characters is given hardly any thought, it just seems to be set in two settings, the characters house and a local bar for example. But I love how in Gravity Falls the world is so large and there are so many different places that are explored in every episode.

Attack on Titan

Apart from being incredibly depressing to the point it'll put you in a bad mood for the rest of the week. This Japanese anime series is an incredibly good watch.



I actually found a pretty lighthearted photo which is good because wow, is it depressing. Attack on Titan is about a small society of people who live in a walled city protected from Titans. Titans are giant people basically who like killing humans for apparently no reason. One day the Titans break through one of the walls and after that event three friends Eren, Mikasa and Armin must join an elite group of people dedicated to wiping out the Titans once and for all.

What I like most about the show is not the beautiful, painstaking animation or the breathtaking action sequences of which I imagine is incredibly hard to create in animation, but is actually the characters. Throughout the one series we see these characters age five years and are given more and more back-story.

Every character is significant and complicated. Its not just a case of humans-good, Titans-bad. Frequently the three protagonists are up against everyone else as well. It covers everything, its a coming-of-age story but its also about finding your place in the world. To me even though it's called Attack on Titan it isn't really about the Titans at all, they just symbolise 'the enemy'. The Titans could just as easily be war, famine or an ecological disaster. What the show is actually about to me is how humans deal with these sort of situations and how human nature can sometimes become just as bad as the big evil.

The Amazing World of Gumball

The Amazing World of Gumball is an American animated series about a blue cat called Gumball and his adopted goldfish brother Darwin. The two characters frequently get themselves into weird situations due to poorly thought out schemes. I really like the series because to me, nothing is less interesting than a central character who is cool, popular and smart. I cannot see how anyone would find this concept interesting. One of my main problems with Adventure Time, to me an otherwise great show is that the main character is too cool and popular. To me your protagonist needs to be a bit of a loser because it gives you something to root for.



The character Gumball is likable to me because he is a bit of a loser, and an idiot.



When I began watching the show, initially I didn't like the animation style. As you can see from the images, the show uses so many different styles of animation and design. There are characters that are rendered in 3D and there are simply 2D animated characters with outlines (see Gumball's family). When I began watching the show I felt this was not inventive, it just made everything look messy. A friend of mine who loved the style explained to me that it's a show for Graphic Designers. Since then I have come to appreciate and love the style, now I understand messiness is kind of the point of it.

South Park

South Park has always been one of my favourite animations, if not favourite shows. I've watched it, got bored of it, went off it, rediscovered it, loved it etc. so many times now I've lost count. It's still on the air, I don't know what season it's on now, fairly certain it isn't too far behind The Simpsons which I'm sure many will find hard to believe. I'm sure a lot of people who loved it in the early days probably don't know its still going.



To me the show has peaked, there isn't a particular series to me that comes to mind, just every so often there's a masterpiece of an episode. What I love about this show is yes it's incredibly crude with it's rigid paper cutout animation style, it's incredibly rude with endless fart gags and many consider it incredibly offensive; it seems like every week the creators think up someone knew to annoy. But it always has a point to make.



To me it's not like something like Family Guy where its rude gags, rude gags and if you look underneath it all to try to find some sort of beating heart, you're just going to find more gags. In South Park, something I've only come aware of in the past five or so years is that if you look past the crudeness and approach it with an intelligent perspective you will see that every episode has a point to make.



My favourite episode of South Park is probably Imagination Land where terrorists bomb the magical world of the kids imagination and after chaos unfolds the US government think about the possibility of nuking Imagination Land for good. Now many people who might be slightly stubborn might just see this episode as plain offensive because Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the show's creators) are having terrorists blow up stuff in a cartoon. But I hope most intelligent people will understand the point of that episode, to me anyway is that terrorism has become such a massive thing in the public eye that so much hysteria has been created it's almost successfully invaded our imaginations.

The Life and Times of Tim

The Life and Times of Tim is an adult animated HBO series that revolves around Tim, a normal guy who frequently gets into bizarre situations. With only three series,the show has been off the air since 2012 but to me it remains memorable due to its humor and style. The animation is incredibly basic. The characters rarely move at all apart from their mouths, I can't remember actually ever seeing any of them walk.



But even though the characters look rigid and paper-thin, I never found it boring to watch. I liked the style because to me it fit the tone and added to the comedy. In fact I don't think it would have been anything like as funny if the style was more 3D for example. It's like to me if something like South Park was drawn in a much more dynamic and complicated way it wouldn't work to me because the reason both these shows work is because they can get away with such crudeness because they are so crude.

Adventure Time

Adventure Time is an American animated series about Finn the human boy and his best friend Jake the dog. Jake can talk and has the power to stretch himself like an elastic band, Finn is just a kid and has no powers.As you can probably imagine from looking at the above image, the show is completely bonkers, makes zero sense but is insanely fun.

The animation is also gobsmackingly beautiful so you can watch it, and even if you've completely lost track of the plot you can still enjoy it for its incredible colour pallet and amazing scenery. It isn't all wacky weirdness though, at the center of the show is the strong beating heart of these two central characters. One of my favourite things about television series that sets apart from the movies slightly is character development. One of my main complaints about cartoons, even my favourite of all time The Simpsons, is that there is not enough character development. In Adventure Time we're almost watching this kid grow up in this surreal world and the writers have aged him.

Obviously I'd like more character development, things pretty much go back to normal after every episode but at least over the years there has been character development to some degree.

Bee and Puppycat

Bee and Puppycat is a bizarre animation I was shown on YouTube. It is a cartoon developed by the Cartoon Hangover web channel and the show was created by Natasha Allegri. I've only seen one episode so far but from what I have seen, I have really enjoyed. The story is incredibly bizarre and the characters are very likeable, especially the main character Bee. Although she lives in a slightly surreal setting the show succeeds in making her realistic and relatable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOG_UtLxh58

I also really like the style of the show and it reminds me of a similar show of which fans of Bee and Puppycat I'd assume would be more than aware of, Adventure Time, created by Pendleton Ward. It just so happens that Ward and Allegri are friends and Allegri also works on Adventure Time so to me it is fairly easy to see where some of the inspiration comes from.

Gorillaz Do Ya Thing

Jamie Hewlett's work is going to appear on this blog a lot, sorry but he is one of my favourite artists. And to me it doesn't get better than his work on the band Gorillaz. Here I'm going to talk about the most recent music video he directed for the band before they went on a massive, unbearably long hiatus. I've loved this band for around ten years now and in that time its been amazing to watch something like this evolve and grow. The characters have changed. Rare in animations the characters have aged with the time as have their creators.


(Gorillaz band member Noodle age ten to 20)

Not only have the characters changed in their looks to keep things fresh and interesting but so has the animation style. We're now at the point, around Phase 3 where the characters are rendered in 3D CGI. At first I didn't like the style. I was annoyed because I felt that everything was turning 3D and traditional animation was dying out so it was nice that in 2010 a massively successful band like Gorillaz still animated in good old 2D. To me it felt like trying to appease fans instead of doing their own thing.



Eventually I grew to like the style and feel that it particularly works in this video set in the band's new house. To me what I feel the charm is of Gorillaz and why to this day they are so popluar is not just the music, but how these characters co-exist in their own slightly surreal universe in the music industry. They are slightly separate but kind of always want to be accepted.




To me now that these band members look more life-like they fit in a tiny bit more with the real world but still keep their insane cartoony-ness. E.G. 2D does have a more solid look and his movements are less rigid, it actually feels like if you touched him it would be more like touching a person than a piece of paper. But don't get me wrong, his eyes are still massive black circles.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit

One of my favourite films of all time is Who Framed Roger Rabbit. To me it is absolutely incredible for many reasons, great plot, characters, incredible inventiveness. But just from an animators point of view the film is breathtaking. Now, in this day and age young viewers have been exposed to CGI characters acting alongside live action people e.g. kids cereal adverts and basically most adverts with a mascot, the movies e.g. Space Jam and Looney Tunes Back in Action.



But in 1988, no one had seen this sort of thing before. I mean cartoon characters have appeared on screen with live action actors before e.g. Mary Poppins...



...but those characters were drawn in traditional 2D style so did not have the same effect of the characters in Roger Rabbit that, rendered in 3D, look like they naturally co-exist with the humans.



I also love how Bob Hoskins interacts with the toons. The chemistry between Eddy Valiant (Hoskins) and Roger in the movie is just brilliant. That is why I admire the film so much because Hoskins basically had to create chemistry with nothing and act with nothing, something that had barely been done before had been done with incredible quality. It paved the way for not just animated movies but also movies in general.

Fell in Love With a Girl Animated Music Video

The music video for the White Stripes song Fell in Love With a Girl is perhaps my favourite music video of all time. It is all animated with Lego bricks and directed by Michel Gondry. I personally love the video because even though its animated with Lego bricks so you would think it could look slow and rigid played back like so many amateur Lego animations on YouTube, it actually runs incredibly fast with amazing pace.



I also like how even though its a Lego animation, it doesn't go with the technique I for instance would think of the most obvious way to animate, with actually Lego people as the White stripes. Instead the band members are made up with bricks which I feels gives them more fluidity. The faces of these characters have no features and the arms and legs barely look like arms and legs at all yet you can tell they are arms and legs and you can tell Jack is singing even if he has no mouth. I feel the way this is achieved is through the quality of the animation.



With very few bricks the animators have created characters that are incredibly life-like. Where they needed more emotion in a Lego characters face they did use CGI to get a better effect (see below) but for the most part it was all done with a box of bricks.

Pixar's Up

So last night I watched Pixar's Up which I've seen before once, but watching it a second time confirmed for me that it is a masterpiece. To me Pixar have made a good few masterpieces, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc, The Incredibles etc. but the thing I feel about Pixar movies is (and this is what I heard from a movie talk show) is that Pixar doesn't make kid movies, they make kid friendly adult movies. What I mean by this is that there are plenty for kids to enjoy in these movies but the themes are often very adult.

For example the above two screen shots are from the opening of Up and can be considered very adult with the themes of what these two characters, Elly and Carl go through throughout their relationship. I wont ruin how it ends but I find it almost impossible not to cry at it. I think much of the stuff that happens in these movies, particularly the opening of Up might go over the younger viewers heads but the reason kids don't get bored is because there is so much for them to enjoy such as hilarious gags and engaging characters.

Hayoa Myazaki's Ponyo

The other day I watched the Studio Ghibli animated film Ponyo. I had seen Hayoa Myazaki's other works in the past such as Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and The Wind Rises, all three great films so I went in with a certain level of confidence. But, I had heard that the film was perhaps more childish than his other films. I've learnt from watching his movies to not always expect Spirited Away. Totoro is a very innocent film with very few adult themes, whereas The Wind Rises is obviously aimed at a much older audience and generally covers adult and political themes.



But when it came to watching Ponyo I went in expecting something very, very innocent with almost no sense of danger. What I got actually surprised me because the film does contain adult themes. To me its not just about a goldfish (Ponyo) who comes onto land and turns into a human. It's about deciding who you want to be in life, growing up and taking on responsibility.