Shapes and Props
Character animation and Camera movement
the main character: faceless, first person POV of the child who is continuously jumping
Animals and people: get surprised or confused when the camera (child) stop in front of them by eye contacts, dramatic jumps or attacking to the viewer.
Insects: grasshopper, bees
Animals: chickens, crows, mouses, gulls, cats
People: explorer, children playing on the ground, taxi chef and the person he was discussing with, nude woman, cannibals, soldiers
Demons: taking the viewer back to the surface
Camera Movement
- Mainly tilt down and tilt up: to highlight the jumping movement with so
- Pan right to left: changing directions of the jumping course
- Zoom out/in: to depict the height of jumping, specially when the viewer is jumping extremely tall
Colour and lighting
Transition from cold to warm tone.
- in the beginning, the colors were cold tone (mainly blue and green) with no high saturation to highlight a calm, quiet, nature daily
- In the middle, when it is jumping to different places starts to change some range of color (city is almost white depicting modern and tidy, dark blue of the ocean, etc)
- In the ending, the bright colors turn into dark and saturated warm color portraying the dangerous conflicts happening there.
The vivid colors, the comic drawing style (animals, peoples with exaggerated body and face proportions) and the imaginary characters in the end of the animation develop a cartoonish ambient which define that we are perceiving the breathtaking views from a child’s eye
The lights during the animation is changing from daylight to warm red light.
– Daylight to highlight the joyful and normal journey.
– Around 4mins 35secs the good weather turn into a storm reducing the brightness of the scene, signing something terrific/horror will being illustrated in the next scenes.
– Then from 4mins 49secs the daylight into warm orange lightening highlighting the explosions and fires lights adding terror/dramatic atmosphere
Jumping analysis- author
ASIFA: International Animated Film Association, stablished in 1960 in Annecy, France. Renowed by Canadian animation Norman McLaren.
“Animation is not a religion; neither is it a political movement in any sense. It remains a true contemporary art form which has been unrecognized for what it can achieve… we consider animation as a universal expression which is capable of immense contribution if given a chance.”
John Halas, President’s Letter 1979
McLaren John Halas founding members envisioned a world of peace and dialogue to settle our differences, with the art of animation serving as a bridge between different cultures and ideologies.
Working with UNESCO, sharing and developing international friendships, uniting the animation world, finding ways to meet animators from both side of the Iron Curtain.
“I was sometimes asked to help out at international board meetings, sometimes taking minutes, sometimes (inexpertly) interpreting, and thus witnessing Cold War relationships up close. Despite mutual suspicion and frequent high drama, agreements were slowly thrashed out, film exchanges, visiting delegations and new festivals organized.” Clare Kitson, ASIFA Member
Osamu Tezuka: 03/11/1928, Toyonaka- 09/02/1989, Tokyo
– Japanese mangaka, animator, God of manga
– manga: based on Disney’s cinematographic techniques
– short stories and simples vignette to long and elaborated comic stories
– story graphic adaptation of the literature Crime and Punishment
– New Treasure Island (1947) – the protagonist Pete finds a map of treasure Island that his father left after his dead. Then Pete, with his father’s friend started their trip to look for the treasure, but they were attacked and caught by Pirate. Moreover the ship get beaten by storm, and they are thrown into the sea. Occasionally, they reach at the Island that the map indicated,
– decade 50 : Kimba, Jungle Taitei, Astroboy, Ribbon no Kishi (first shoujo manga of the history)
– Black Jack (73-84), Buda (72-83), Adolf (83)
– themes around a strong social significance, for example MW (76-78) : politic corruption, homosexuality, chemical weapons,..
– 1989: stomach cancer,
– 1997 – Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize
Historic context (1928-1989)
La Gran Depresion 1929
WWII (1939-1945): Aliados (Fr, Polonia, UK, UUEE, Union Soviet, China) / Potencias del Eje (Gr, Jp, It)
Asesinato de Mahatma Gandhi 1948
War of Korea ( 1950 – 1953 ) : South (EEUU, United Nations) / North ( China, U.Soviet)
Cuban revolution (1959) :
Magnicidio de Dellas (Asesinato de J.F. Kennedy ), 1963
Asesinato de Martin Luther King 1968
El hombre pisa la luna 1969
Travelling: Town, Industrialization, Cities, Island (tribu, south America/Africa) War place (Europe, Korea, Japan), hell, loop
Loop Ending, Sudden downer ending
Jitter Cam – following the jumps of the child
Mood Whiplash- changing scenes between town to city, then flying between countries, mood changing when the child see the military army bombarding with chemical weapon (peaceful to tragedy)
Silence is Golden – there’s no character speaking and music singing around, just sound of the child jumping and what is happening around (traffics, animals, war, wind)
Experimental animation :
Animation need a touch of humour
As long as the human culture is advancing, improving in technologies, it is getting unstoppable until they end up in the hell.
Inspired by the experimental Hungarian animated film The Fly (1980) , written and directed by Ferenc Rofusz
1st person perspective POV
Human are Cuthulhu
Deliberately Monochrome
Downer ending
Jitter Cam
Mood Whiplash
Silence is Golden
Jumping animation analysis
Script writer & Director:
– Osamu Tezuka
Animator:
– Kobayashi Junji
Sound:
– Kurahashi Shizuo
Producer:
– Matsutani Takayuki
Style:
– 2D cell animation, cartoon
Duration: 6min 10secs
Publication on 1984
Concept:
– As long as the human culture is advancing, improving in technologies, it is getting unstoppable until they end up in the hell.
Synopsis:
– Jumping continuously from a child first perspective point of view. Every high jump, it changed to different places like traveling around the world (jungles, cities, any other places of the planet).
Inspired by the experimental Hungarian animated film The Fly (1980) , written and directed by Ferenc Rofusz
– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dclvvps5u8Q&t=18s
Narration:
– Mood whiplash
– Silence is golden
– Set up: begin on a daily journey jumping on a neighborhood town: peaceful, calm, free, joyful
– Confrontation: Changing directions, jumping to other places like cities jungles, ports in a middle of a conflict where several frames were depressive, dangerous
- Resolution: Dead in an atomic bomb and fell down to the hell. Taken to the surface by the figures, reviving the viewer and finishing on the first frame of the outcome forming a loop
– Shots from the animation inspired with similar narrative. Starting with their living place flying to a new place and exploring there. Then the calm journey become disturbing or dangerous and ending up pinned to a display panner by the human.
- The sepia monochrome give reality to the range color perceptible by the fly
Colours and lighting
Transition from cold to warm tone. in the beginning, the colors were cold tone (mainly blue and green) with no high saturation to highlight a calm, quiet, nature daily
In the middle, when it is jumping to different places starts to change some range of color (city is almost white depicting modern and tidy, dark blue of the ocean, etc)
In the ending, the bright colors turn into dark and saturated warm color portraying the dangerous conflicts happening there.
The vivid colors, the comic drawing style (animals, peoples with exaggerated body and face proportions) and the imaginary characters in the end of the animation develop a cartoonish ambient which define that we are perceiving the breathtaking views from a child’s eye.
The director mentioned on his interview that he tried use cells to outline the picture and then paint in water colour underneath, however it was changed due to the fact that it was time consuming.
The lights during the animation is changing from daylight to warm red light.
- Daylight to highlight the joyful and normal journey.
- – Around 4mins 35secs the good weather turn into a storm reducing the brightness of the scene, signing something terrific/horror will being illustrated in the next scenes.
- Then from 4mins 49secs the daylight into warm orange lightening highlighting the explosions and fires lights adding terror/dramatic atmosphere
Scenes
There are amount of scene along the animation to highlight the large traveling with the jumps.
Town -Jumping several places of the town like farm, forest, lake- nature, house, comfortable place
ASIFA: International Animated Film Association, stablished in 1960 in Annecy, France. Renowed by Canadian animation Norman McLaren.
City – visiting the industrialized city with suffocated and stressed people living in the building
Port – taking the boats as transport to travel places around the world
Jungle – jumping from the whale hole and landing in front of cannibal tribe
War zone- the viewer is involved in a war zone with corpse and explosions around
Imaginary place/ hell- by the leading of the chemical weapons’ smoke, the viewer fell into a deep hole stopping at the hell
Character animation:
the main character: faceless, first person POV of the child who is continuously jumping
Animals and people: get surprised or confused when the camera (child) stop in front of them by eye contacts, dramatic jumps or attacking to the viewer.
– Insects: grasshopper, bees
– Animals: chickens, crows, mouses, gulls, cats
– People: explorer, children playing on the ground, taxi chef and the person he was discussing with, nude woman, cannibals, soldiers
– Demons: taking the viewer back to the surface
Camera Movement
– Mainly tilt down and tilt up: to highlight the jumping movement with so
– Pan right to left: changing directions of the jumping course
Zoom out/in: to depict the height of jumping, specially when the viewer is jumping extremely tall
Shapes
lines- silhouettes for the clouds and layers of buildings, shading of the clouds, trees smokes, one point perspective- guiding the attention to the man pressured to suicide
round- smoke, clouds
Squares and regular forms forming buildings and modernization of the city, a gap between the starting point (nature, house, farm)- boring, serious, systematic and closed ambient
Squares and lines of the building plus cold tone of the window developing pressuring story frames of different journey of people in the city: people chatting, office worker doing their job, animation company, yakuza’s office, people discussing and people stressed who end up suiciding
Props
Birds and transports that almost bump into the camera – giving more interactions and reality for the experimental animation, being attacked indirectly since in the end of the animation turn the calm daily into conflict places, thus the viewer is being involved in conflicts just because it is staying there. Cannibals and soldiers attacking the viewer with their weapons
Planes coming from behind of the viewer- attacking and invading the place
The most repetitive animation is the jumping, jumping on the main character and the credits which refers a lot the title of the outcome.
Jumping analysis: scales and heights
When I was watching the animation, I observed that the jumps were animated truly realistic, then I had curiosity about the scale in the animation world, if it fit almost perfectly with the real world or if it double or half size of the reality.
“A 30-story building typically ranges in height from approximately 300 to 450 feet (about 91 to 137 meters). However, the exact height can vary depending on the design and function of the building. On average, each story in a commercial building is around 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 meters) tall.”
Furthermore, I had tried to calculate the height of the building to check if the height of the jumps were real or just a simulation.
Having the formula “caída libre: h=vt-1/2gt^2+H”, g as gravity=9,8m/s^2, v as initial velocity (where we are counting from 0m/s), t as time between 2:46 (high point mostly above of the plane) to 2:52 (landing) which is 6 seconds.
h=vt-1/2gt^2+H
0= 0- 0,5*9,8*9+H
H= 176m
The plane average flying height is between 10000 to 12800meters
Thus if it is scaled, 1m=xm, 10000m=176m, then xm maybe 0,0176m in the animation world.
Also I tried to calculate the height of the building:
0= 0- 0,5*9,8*9+H
0=-44,1+H
H=44,1
Jumping: title of the animation
As we can observe in the animation, the title of the film is deeply connected with the main action movement which is all the time “jumping”. The presentation of the credits at the start and the end is referencing the title also, implanting the movement into the spectator’s mind.
The mixture use of different camera movements, mainly tilt up to down, built the impression of someone jumping without having a character doing those movements. Moreover, there is an exact timing and spacing on the action to show different intensities and heights. Having separating the stages of the jump in four parts: a pause when the character is preparing; going up slowly; a stop on the high point, sometimes it had slow motion for changing directions; and finally, a fast landing with a small bounce on the floor if the jump was too high.
For example in the scene of the building from 2:49 to 2:59, when the character was going down faster, even the windows of the building were filled with lines, on one side working as action lines and on the other side to express that there was not time to capture the happenings throw the window. In contrast, when the character was going up, the contains of the building were visible through the window framed like a comic pages.
Some of the jumps have different camera movement, like panning right to left, close up and out for changing directions or enriching different viewpoints of the environment.
Nonetheless, to apply more reality to the jumps, the animation portrayed many reactions of animals and people reacting to the character’s landing. On one hand, animals are mostly surprised and then walk away nervously; on the other hand, people were obviously confused of the sudden apparition, however in the scene of the cannibals and war zone, the child was treated like a threat and was being attacked by them.
Jumping – Social-political aspects and framings
In the Industrialization part of the animation, from 2:10 to 4:00 it is almost a reflection of the Showa era (from December of 1926 to January 1989), the period that the Tezuka Osamu lived (1928-1989).
“The dominant foreign model for Japanese aesthetics in Showa era was European, both avant-garde and traditional. Japanese arts remained strong, but their significance fluctuated greatly as the nation experienced periods of nationalism, war and defeat. In the current era of economic renewal, the threat to a distinctive Japanese culture is not Western dominance per se but international pop aesthetics and commercialism.”(J. Thomas Rimer (1990) Vol. 119, No. 3, Showa: The Japan of Hirohito (Summer, 1990), pp. 265-278 (14 pages).)
Tezuka Osamu is a Japanese mangaka, animator. He was recognized as the God of manga by his innovative manga structure based on Disneys’s cinematographic techniques. He was able to illustrate short stories and simples vignette to a long and elaborated comic stories which lead to a story graphic adaptation of the literature Crime and Punishment. His famous works are New Treasure Island (1947); Kimba, Jungle Taitei, Astroboy and Ribbon no Kishi in the decade 50; Black Jack (1973-1984), Buda (1972-1983), Adolf (1983). From the 70s, his themes were starting to focus around a strong social significance, for example MN (1976-1978) which talks about the politic corruption, homosexuality and chemical weapons. In the end he passed away in 1989 due to a stomach cancer.
Character design
The characters designs have some similarities with Disney’s characters. On one hand, it is the exaggerated shaped on the human body structure, the fat parts are round, curvy and wide distance between opposite lines; and the skinny parts are straight, descriptive lines to point out the bone stretching out of the skin. For example, in the second image from the last line in the Jumping’s character compilation screenshot, the taxi driver and a policeman are having a discussion. The most perceptible difference, apart from the clothing and coloring, is their face features, the driver has lot of curvy lines, specially the chin, a casual clothing which gave an impression of a loose person toward the rules; and the policeman has more structured face anatomy and a formal costume which illustrate a strict and a responsible character.
On the another hand, the way of portraying the animals’ expressions are almost identical as well. Both of them personified their expressions to catch easily their feelings, especially the eyes, a pair of ovals with a small dot as the iris, leaving some blank for making flexible eyes signs. In case of the birds, their eyes in the reality are in side view when they are looking to the front, however in Disney and the animation, all their features are in front view from both sides to capture their expressions, in those cases, are surprised by sudden apparition of the jumping character.
Social aspects reflected on the building’s windows
From 2:52 to 2:58, the story are framed in building’s windows showing people’s daily routine, working life, troubles and history advances. Through the windows, the scenes are mainly people working engaging some troubles in the middle, however the troubles are getting more stressful and depressive as long as the camera is going up, starting from physical aspects (toilet in the third and fourth floor), continuing with working pressure, discussions and ending with relationships problems.
The group of windows are settled three by three except the first two floors, almost of them illustrated the main and important happening in the middle (the toilet problem in 3rd,4th floor, the for sale sign, animation company workers, international yakuza, robots, etc). On the other hand, the two other window are random or descriptive vignette to enrich the floors content and to portray continuously the happenings (for example, the water leaking in floor 3 is connected with the bathroom problems of the 4th floor; in floor 19th, the characters were so pressured that one of them suicided, then on the next floor the foot on the left window is the suicided man, and on the middle he has a couple of people crying for his death).
The green-blue monochrome tone is not only representing the color of the glass, it also marks the mood. By using its contrast color (light creamy yellow), it separate the windows’ frames and the building structure. The cold color tent to depressive plus the structured framing with the lack use of colors, it makes more repressed, monotone, boring, people locked by their troubles, works, worries.
The building story framing structure remind me to a comic vignettes. In the animation is more simplified due to the fact that it just a few seconds and the camera moving was so fast to observe their contents. Moreover, in the animation, there were separations in yellow between the windows lines to catch the storytelling more easily.
Jumping travelling
The background scenes are connected continuously during the animation by the jumping. Those places also lead the drama of the film. It starts in a peaceful, calming place, then it is followed by the industrialization highlighting a healthful evolution. As long as it is going forward, the scenes are jumping to dangerous places (the jungle), ending up in the hell where the protagonist got involved in a war bombing. However, the character return to the first place connecting a loop with the beginning, indirectly, it portrays the rise and decadence in a era, metaphorically, the Showa era in this case.
The colors are flat purposely, as the director mentioned on his Jumping interview that he wanted to focus on the jump and not get distracted by any harmonic colors.
The animation overall, the characters design and animation style are similar to Disney’s works, but the drawing style (marked thin black lines, shading lines, flat colors with no obvious light contrast) are near to American comics.
Jumping – Norman McLaren, experimental animation
The animation chosen has some themes similarities with the Norman McLaren (Neighbours 1952) is an anti-war film, telling the story about two people fighting for the flower possession, same as Jumping, starting quietly and ends up in a conflict. He used pixilation (filming moving people and objects a few frames at a time) as animation style, giving a panicking and unnatural look.
“I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People’s Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao’s revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. (…) I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war.” — Norman McLaren
Norman McLaren is a animator and filmmaker who studied set design in Glasgow School of Fine Arts in 1932. His firsts experiments in animation were scratching and painting on the film stock since he did not have access to a camera. In the early 30s he worked as a cameraman in Scotland and England, and in 1936 filmed the Civil War in Spain. After that he emigrated to the US, avoiding the war, and moved to Canada to work for the National Film Board when he got the invitation of John Grierson in 1941.
Different ways of describing conflicts that lead the main characters into death.
In Neighbours, the audience is observing the neighbours having an argument when in jumping, the animation involve the spectator in the conflict audio-visually.
Bibliography
Animation principals: Kong fu panda analysis