Monkey Time

The Olympics 2008 Monkey Movie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yr5ZWYRaAyw) animation has a lot going for it. It is beautifully drawn, it has style, a good story, and the camera angels and color are fantastic. After watching this a few times, I really got reminded of the Gorillaz, a fictional animated band. the animation and facial expressions on the monkey and ocean guy really resemble the band members. The story seemed to follow a theme, and that theme being the fact that the monkey’s friends saved him on his way to the olympics. It is simple yet the animation makes it work, and I think it is a good way to introduce new characters.

The camera angles are fantastic, ever changing and always using perspective to its advantage. At one point, the pig jumps of a cliff, and the camera changed to being under him. I thought it was great. I found that movement was something that was trying to be expressed, and it truly came out. The camera would show the characters moving even when they physically were not.
Color in the video was beautiful and vivid. The color choices were ones that would remind you of the fall. Brown, red, and yellow, to name a few. In one scene, they are running through a forest next to a sea and it is probably my favorite part. The color of the leaves were fantastic.


Timing in this movie is pretty spot on. I really does add a sense of urgency and the matter at hand. Not to mention, sometimes it adds suspense too. All in all I think this is a fantastically created animation, and I know it gave me some inspiration.

Poem in Flash

The first of the two poems I found appealing was The Search for Lost Lives by James Tate. The animation of the characters and backgrounds are really well done, but what drew me to this was the use of the poem itself, and how it was implemented in the animation. The text would come and go in a different way every time I felt like the text adapted to it surroundings. It helped explain the story too. I hope use text in my animation the same way it was used in this one.
The second animation I looked at was Bowl by Valerie Martinez, struck me as interesting because the guy looked hand drawn, and most of the story took place in the bowl. That is what I found the most interesting. I think that the fact that the story took place in an object in the whole story was really a nice idea. Maybe my animation will be that clever.