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.