My PDP

For my dissertation research, I have chosen to concentrate on gender, sexism, and race in the Disney films presented by the princesses and princes. I have also chosen to include cultural influences on the movies at the time of their production and also Walt Disney’s own upbringing and views that influence the creation of his characters. I want to look at how these factors have changed in the films over the years due to cultural and societies beliefs changing, for example, Snow White is presented as a slim figured, fair-skinned woman with short curly hair who cleans and does all of the housework for seven men who don’t do any housework and just go to work. In the 30’s the stereotypical woman had short curly hair and cooked and cleaned while the men go to work. this culture at that time clearly influenced Disney’s character and showed what he thought about women at that time.
However, in later films such as frozen made in 2013, the leading princesses do not rely on men and have become more independent and their true love is each other as family rather than with a man. This shows how much culture and views of women have changed over the years.
I believe that involving the current cultural ideas and also current issues in my personal practice of animation would be a really effective way of making people aware of different situations by perhaps making them emotionally attached to a character that’s going through a situation they weren’t fully aware of before. In my practice, I will definitely be looking at doing more work including gender equality and also homosexuality issues as I am very interested in this subject matter.
The book Walt Disney, Hollywoods Dark Prince by Marc Eliot explores different symbols in Walt Disney’s animations that represent his racism, sexism etc. For, an example Jewish organisations met with Disney to express their concern about a scene in which the big bad wolf disguises himself as a Hebrew peddler. Disney eventually removed the scene but it didn’t stop him from making similar representations in films like Pinocchio. In Pinocchio, the puppet master has a very stereotypical scary looking Jewish face. It’s this type of technique I would like to practice in my own animations, not using racist symbolisms or offensive suggestions but by using symbolic references to suggest something to my audience. In my constellation lectures, we have been looking at perspective, Composition, and lighting in an artwork. I have also attended a recent lecture in animation featuring the same concepts but also looking at framing and focus on artwork that can be communicated using animation as visual storytelling. In both my constellation and storytelling lecture we looked at fine artists such as Caravaggio and his use of light to create drama and realistic snapshots of certain scenes. We referred to the painting of “supper at Emaus” painted in 1601. We also looked at Vermeer and his use of lighting, composition, and colour to suggest a story we concentrated on Vermeer’s painting of “woman reading a letter” 1663. to demonstrate these techniques. We looked at how these techniques have influenced many filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese he explains that he is instantly related to the paintings as he feels that Caravaggio’s use of harsh lighting “illuminates” the story. He also mentions that “you come upon the scene midway and you’re immersed in it.” Filmmaker Dir Joanna Hogg also uses techniques inspired by both Caravaggio and Vermeer. In her film Archipelago made in 2010. In one scene she uses colour and cold lighting to suggest the time of day is morning and creates an uneasy feel to the room, the colours used are very blue toned and dull suggesting this is an uneasy, tense and maybe sad time for the family. The body language of the characters also suggests that there is tension in the room as no character is seemed relaxed. Hogg also uses triangular perception to draw the audiences eye towards a missing object on the wall.
In my own practice, I am keen to use all of these techniques in my animation to make my scenes more pleasing to the eye, interesting and to tell the viewer as much about the story as possible in one scene. I also want to experiment using lighting techniques to create drama in the scenes where needed.
We also looked at how characters can be perceived as very powerful and menacing the main theme of this appears to be having powerful characters sitting in a chair with their arms resting on the armrests looking into the camera perhaps and a message in on hand presenting that information is power.We looked at paintings and images such as Pope Innocent X by Diego Velasquez made in 1650, a scene from The Godfather a film made by Francis Ford Coppolla in 1972, and a Scene of the Evil Queen from Sleeping Beauty made by Disney in 1959. All villains in these scenes are depicting the same mannerisms of the throne and messenger. In filmmaking techniques such as camera angles are used to make a character look superior or weaker. using angles from down below or cole behind a character can make a character seem giant and/or towering over a smaller perceived person. This technique is very present in the short film Little Bandits by Alex Avagimian made in 2018. Using this technique the more innocent character that is being bullied by the more superior character is perceived as being smaller. the upward looking camera angle technique is used when they are looking over the bird they had just killed this makes the characters seem menacing and powerful as they tower over the innocent small bird. This film shows loss of innocence in characters by using very story storytelling techniques. This film has inspired me to use these techniques in my own films to distinguish between power and innocence in characters I will also be using techniques such as camera tilt to suggest that something is not quite right in a scene or that something bad is going to happen. and also using focus to help my animation convey a story in the most effective way.