Kubo and the Two Strings (SPOILER FREE ♥)

For all of you peeps who are interested in Kubo and the Two Strings and have not seen it yet DON'T WORRY, I will not spoil the movie for you! I will merely bite into the animation a little.

Earlier this week I ended up, quite ex tempore, watching the new stop motion animation film Kubo and the Two Strings (Laika, 2016). The movie tells the story of a young boy named Kubo who has to embark on a quest in order to find a legendary suit of armor and defeat evil spirits from the past. To be honest, I wasn't overly excited for the movie as pretty much everything I knew about it beforehand was that it's a new animation movie coming to cinemas that maybe has something to do with Japan and mythology. There you have it, I'm an uneducated swine at first when it comes to modern animation movies unless they have been already sold to me.

Well, naturally that fact was to change as I heard a tiny small detail about the movie - that it's completely made with stop motion animation. Wait, come again - stop motion??? I was awestruck because my knowledge in stop motion animation movies is pathetically narrow as I haven't seen a single stop motion movie since...last decade, I'd say. I was shown a behind-the-scenes time lapse video (WEE-OO-WEE-OO it is a bit spoiler-y) revealing how the story was brought to life and needless to say I was immediately more intrigued with the movie!

Watching Kubo was fascinating as I paid double extra attention to the animation to see the stop motion in action. Surely, for an animation student or anyone who has already experience with animation and especially with stop motion, understanding the physics behind the scenes can be easier to understand but for me it was just fantastic to watch and follow. What especially captivated me were the animation of water and the smoothly changing facial expressions. How they did the water - I'm still not entirely sure but it looked fantastic and I will find it out. And as for the facial expressions, later research into the trivia of the movie revealed that the main character Kubo alone had 48 million possible expressions and 23,187 prototype faces (1). If the artists who created those beautiful expressive faces don't get their dreams invaded by said faces, I tip my metaphorical hat at them.

The Hall of Faces vibes are real, I tell you.

I was keen on seeing if I could catch a moment that would reveal the characters being actually dolls moved by humans but when the animation actually did "glitch" it just made it seem all more alive. And the textures, man, don't even let me get started on the textures. You could pinpoint that what you saw was real materials caught on video but on the same time imagining it all in front of you on a table in doll format was just not possible, even after watching the time lapse video and seeing the characters being built with your very own eyes. What I saw was something technically tangible but at the same time almost magical. Go figure.

How to get realistic textures in your animation?

Just use real materials and stop motion, d'oh!

Due to being so invested in the animation I didn't really watch Kubo for the plot which, in my opinion, maybe was for good. Don't get me wrong, it is not a bad movie - yes you should still see it - but personally I found the plot slightly disappointing at times. What started as a good and promising plot later made decisions that I would have left out. That being the case I ended up watching the movie rather as an art experience than an epic adventure story, which is actually very refreshing for a while.

Conclusion? Animation is fucking crazy business, man, and you should go see Kubo and the Two Strings if you're even a little bit interested in the field because this movie is gorgeous.

(It's an official trailer so it doesn't spoil more than is necessary to fish for attention.)

(1) source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4302938/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv

#animation #movie #Laika #Kubo #mediadiary

Memes - what's their meme-ing?

Before I actually come up with something proper and interesting to analyze here I'll just stick to pondering about seemingly meaningless things I encounter in my life. So, bear with me for a bit more.

So, anyway. It's meme time.

...or do they?

By this point I'd assume majority of people are familiar with memes, but in case you aren't - let me quickly enlighten you: memes are ideas or things (pictures, videos, quotes etc,) that have gone viral online for reason or another. Majority of modern memes are pictures captioned with funny texts that people recognize as a reference to a popular source, as the Lord of the Rings meme above. However, memes can also have deeper and more philosophical meanings - a good breakdown of more philosophical memes can be found here. Memes come in different formats but what makes them special is that they spread like a virus online.

As a Tumblr user another notable trend of memes nowadays is reactions through text, images or gifs that people start using in certain contexts. So far year 2016 has seen the rise of many popular reaction memes like the History of Japan and Caveman Spongebob:

New reaction memes are born all the time and sometimes it's hard to pinpoint where exactly did the craze start this time. Since I'm not an active Reddit user (where memes apparently are hatched the fastest) I usually get introduced to memes as they appear on my Tumblr dashboard, all the way until I realize I've been seeing the same thing repeatedly so many times it must be something more than a single post.

Last week I witnessed the rise of yet another reaction that caught my attention and prompted me to stop and think about memes in the first place: gif featuring a woman entering the runway very enthusiastically.

Without any context for the gif I first passed it as a single reaction someone had created, but after seeing the same reaction multiple times posted by different people within ten minutes I concluded - so, this must be the new hip reaction meme for now. A brief research told me that the gif features Da'Vonne Rogers entering the brand new season of Big Brother U.S. where she starred already one year earlier. However, an unofficial meme database KnowYourMeme.com didn't have an entry on it so it made me wonder if it actually is considered as a meme, and where does the line of being a meme even go. Without KnowYourMeme's entry (which aren't necessarily 100% accurate anyway) I don't know when and where the use of this gif kicked off. All I know is that it has been on my dashboard for over a week now in posts that have nothing in common except the reaction. It's being used in contexts where a situation should be over but something unexpected appears, which the gif represents very animatedly.

So is it then a meme? Lets think about the definition of a meme again: an idea, behavior, style etc, that has gone viral online.

Well, has it? From my point of view it has. From a simple Tumblr search it also seems it has (when you search for "Da'Vonne" 5/10 first search results are already the gif in different contexts).

Going viral also includes the underlying implication of causing emotions, even negative, in people so has this gif done it?

Seems like it has.

It can still be debated if the gif has really gone viral when you look on a world wide scale, but who said that memes can't also be personal? If I feel that something has become a meme for me or my closest group of friends isn't it then as valid as a meme as any other? I'd say this is a question that still remains and that we can all ponder in our own minds.

Because memes are just as meme-ingful as we make them to be.

#memes #personal #mediadiary #pondering

Textual Analysis in Games

This time, folks, we take a look at the analysis of video games. Take a good seat since this is going to be fun fun fun-fun-fun FUN!

Diane Carr wrote an article about textual analysis and its importance in analyzing video games, which I will now reflect upon in order to get a better understanding of game analysis. More often it is analyzed what makes the game - what are the elements, design, gameplay - than what are the reasons behind those building blocks.

If we take a video game and look at its basics, it's always constructed in one certain way. Sure, there can be different choices on how you can modify your gameplay but in the core the game itself stays the same - and this is where the role of the player comes in. The meaning of the game changes according to the person playing it, according to the unique choices they make during their journey. For example, even if the look of the character doesn't make any real difference in the plot itself it does affect the experience of the one playing the game. Player makes their choices based on the ideas they have based on their experiences and preferences. Does the colour of the character's hair really matter all that much? Not necessarily for you, but for someone else the difference between having brightly coloured and natural hair might be important.

The role of the player can also be crucial in setting the overall mood of a game. There are games that let you decide between different storylines that change the whole ending of the game (most often this is the case in visual novels). Considering those games, the outcome of each player's decisions cannot be anticipated beforehand since they all make their decisions according to an individual pattern, and though those patterns also the meaning of the game can change drastically.

What we can deduce from all this is that games are not isolate like many other forms of media, e.g. traditional art and television, are. Playing a video game affects you both externally and internally, since in most cases you don't play a game just for the sake of completing the game but also to get something for yourself personally. What that something is is different for every player - some play games as a stress relief to take a break from their everyday lives, some enjoy the feeling of success they get from problem solving tasks. The reasons are personal and different with every player. When you think about analyzing other forms of media you can't look at the question in the same depth as video games are considerably more interactive to the user. Advertising, be it television or printed advertising, affects the audience and prompt different reactions but does not engage the audience to the same level since they cannot actually control what happens in the advertisements. Video games hide numerous elements inside that you have to look at on their own and related to each other when you're making an analysis on them, which is why the depth of such analysis in considerably larger.

Now, how is the meaning constructed in a video game? Sadly I don't feel like my experience through actually playing video games could be considered broad enough for answering this question since most of my game knowledge comes from watching others play and reading the backstories, but I could always try to look at it through a game that I'm rather familiar with and that doesn't actually give all that much freedom for the player to modify the gameplay: Professor Layton and the Azran Legacy, the final game in a series of six by LEVEL-5.

The Layton series tells the story of an almost stereotypical English gentleman Hershel Layton and his young apprentice Luke Triton who are situated in London solving mysteries, but also travel around the world in the span of the series. These mysteries are presented within the game in the form of puzzles that on their own are separate from each other but add up to the story as they are solved. There is a certain amount of puzzles you need to solve in order to advance and finish the game, and extra puzzles you can solve if you want to but that are not necessary for completing the journey. Simple and straightforward, isn't it? These games don't really leave much room for the player to modify the story as they go. Then what is it that makes the game series as popular as it is - 15.5 million sold copies worldwide and one of the most popular Nintendo DS series overall(1)?

Beneath the seemingly basic and boring surface of cliché character profiles and simple gameplay format lays the revelation that the plot is not about happy-go-lucky puzzle solving for fun. Game after game unveils the backstories of not only the main characters, but also the antagonists and support characters and their actual relations to each other. Azran Legacy finally gives an answer to a question that players have had since the fourth game in the series (Professor Layton and the Last Specter) regarding the main antagonist - and that answer is a turning point for the protagonist's story as well.

Besides the deeper plot hidden beneath a veil of simplicity, the game series also challenges the player to actually think and use their brains to advance. The key to getting players intrigued in the problem solving business is that you get graded according to your performance.

Each puzzle grants the player picarats (currency in the game) according to how well you did in the puzzle. Wrong answers reduce picarats, and in some challenges you may have a time limit you need to keep in mind. Picarats can be exchanged to extra goods in the game, like character profiles and music, which keeps the player active, wanting to achieve more of these "trophies".

How I see the question of meaning being constructed in the Layton series is through keeping the player aware and active by challenging them to actually think, not just skim through the tasks, and by giving them a plot and setting that seem simple enough at first to be easy to approach but that actually hide a much more complex story of each character involved.

This could just be my opinion but I mean - there are 15+ million people who apparently agree with me - so why not give the English gentleman and his top hat a try?

(1) source: http://layton.wikia.com/wiki/Professor_Layton_series

#textualanalysis #videogames #analysis #meaning #professorlayton