Computer Animation Arts

Well, it's a bit late/early for meta-fiction related content on this blog, but I saw this and it made me 'laugh out loud'.

Just when the second years thought they'd seen and heard the last of postmodern meta-ness!  Check out this short, sweet exploration of a) the meaning of life or b) the labour-of-love that is animation...

I want everyone to watch this Bafta-winning animated short by Will Anderson.   It will inspire you - fact!   It's funny and sad and beautifully shot and in its central premise of the antagonistic relationship between animator and animation, it harkens back to the classic Daffy cartoon, Duck Amuck (1953) . I particularly liked the 'meta-fictional' aspects of the film's conceit, the way it first purports to be 'factual' and then unpicks itself entirely by the final shot.  This is clever, innovative and inspiring stuff - and proves to me that animation could and should be playful in terms of form.  Have fun!

I was fully prepared to hate this movie on principle - I mean come on - but discovered to my growing disquiet that I was rather charmed by the faux-stopmotion CGI and the meta-gags.   The LEGO Movie - harmless fun, or another symptom of our cultural bankruptcy and enslavement by mega-corporations?   Discuss!

Following on from this weeks lecture, I have found these Meta jokes (also known as anti-jokes). As you will see, they rely on your previous experience of the joke's format, for example the 'Knock knock' joke...look here  ! :)

"...Rock Hudson plays Bob Merrick, a reckless playboy who is indirectly responsible for the death of a kindly and much-beloved doctor. The dead man's wife, Helen Phillips (Jane Wyman), refuses to accept Bob's apologies. When Helen is accidentally blinded, Bob decides to "do right" by her anonymously, illustrating author Douglas's curious edict that the best sort of good deed is the one for which you're not rewarded. In record time, Bob becomes a brilliant physician, and it is he who performs the sight-restoring surgery on Helen. Rather than fade into the woodwork unheralded, Bob is at last forgiven by Helen, who has fallen in love with him during her sightless months without even knowing it..."  http://www.moviefone.com/movie/magnificent-obsession/14201/synopsis “You’ve got a one in a million chance” is the line spoken to Bob Merrick, former millionaire playboy turned brain surgeon just as he performs emergency surgery to save the lif...

Is this perhaps one of the earliest example of the mockumentary? The rather obscure, How to Make Movies directed by Charlie Chaplin in 1918. The film was never released or finished, which explains the lack of a soundtrack and the rough editing. Sadly too, it’s not particularly funny, which may explain why he never completed it. Still, it’s an interesting piece of cinema. Despite his comical tendencies, Chaplin was always known as filmmaker who dared to challenge his audiences. Interestingly, in Chaplin’s later, supposedly semi-biographical 1952 film Limelight you can just about whiff some faint odours of ‘metafiction’ in so much that it could be interpreted as a film about showbiz and Charlie Chaplin directed by Charlie Chaplin, with the main character played by Chaplin (Buster Keaton appears too!).

Analysis: “Within Scream 4, the ever-diminishing quality of the “Stab” franchise allows the characters to muse on the quality of horror film making. This allows Wes Craven to take clever jabs at himself, the overrated “Saw” franchise, and most importantly remakes. Hollywood has had very few original horror films in the past 10 years. Instead they have chosen to massacre (pun very intended) beloved classics like “Dawn of the Dead,” “The Fog,” “Halloween,” etc.” (BU Culture Shock, 2011) BU Culture Shock (2011) Scream 4: Postmodern Masterpiece http://bucultureshock.com/?p=9589 (Accessed 01/11/2011) Release: 2011 Director: Wes Craven Screenplay by: Kevin Williamson Produced By: Kevin Williamson, Wes Craven, Iya Labunka Genre/subgenre: Horror, Slasher Country: United States Cast: David Arquette, Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, Emma Roberts, Hayden Panettierre Selected Director Filmography: The Last House of the Left , The Hills Have Eyes , Nightmare of Elm Street , Scream series, Red Eye , N...

A venn diagram illustrates shared attributes between different topics or groups.  Improbable though it may seem, the now-notorious sequel, The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (2011) lurks in the intersection between CGAA Unit 1 Anatomy and CGAA Year 2's current Postmodernism  unit.  I haven't seen the original The Human Centipede   (Dir. Tom Six, 2009) - not yet, anyway -  but I know enough about its good-taste baiting premise to slot its scatalogical shenanigans into the compartment marked 'body horror' and sub-genre 'torture porn'.  Of course, in a departure from the CGAA Anatomy project, these titular centipedes are not an inter-species hybrid created accidentally by teleportation like poor CGAA student, Andy McDowe , but rather luckless humans co-joined surgically by psychos. As some of you will know, The Human Centipede 2, again directed by Tom Six,  has achieved the sort of infamy no amount of marketing dol...