Week 2: Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

I have never read Understanding Comics before, but I have heard a lot about it from my roommate who read it a ton as a kid.  There was on topic in there that I really found interesting as soon as I read it, and I wanted to elaborate more on it.

Scott McCloud talked about our mental image of ourselves and our abilities to relate to cartoons so well (p. 31-36); when we think of ourselves, we only have a vague idea of how our own face is looking like, a simplified idea.  Therefore, when we see really realistic depictions of faces, we see it as someone else, but simplified cartoons we see as ourselves.  I also believe that we project thoughts, feelings, and emotions onto simplified characters, depending on the context of where they're presented combined with our own thoughts and feelings.  This is why animated movies have a way of really touching audience's hearts in a way that live action sometimes can't.  This might be because I'm super enthusiastic about animation in general, but when an animated film such as Frozen becomes the 5th highest grossing film ever (reaching around $1.219 billion in the box office), you realize there has to be more to it.  The reasoning can be that both children and adults alike can look at overly simplified characters and see themselves within them.  Because this is true with comics, I believe this is only intensified in animation, since now we have motion to go off of.

The first example that popped into my mind when I read about this is a character from the most recent Disney film, Big Hero 6.

Baymax is a robot, and he doesn't have a mouth or eyebrows, just two black dots for eyes.  He has a voice, but it doesn't have much inflection within it-- so technically, we shouldn't be able to get any emotive clues from him other than some slight variances in his posture.  Yet, throughout the film, you're able to feel how Baymax is feeling.

Here, Baymax is "happy", which we read from the half circles of his eyes.  This fortifies the idea of Scott McCloud's icon; two half circles are read here as happy eyes, simply because humans are just always looking to put a face on things.  You even image that line across his face as a little smile.  The scene I feel Baymax is the most powerful (Spoiler if you haven't seen the film) is where Baymax and Hiro have to be separated.

Spoiler to anyone who hasn't seen the film, don't watch the clip below!

I personally love this scene, and I cried both times I saw it in the theater (and, if I'm going to be honest, I teared up rewatching the clip).  I read a quote once (but unfortunately couldn't find it to link it... if I do, i'll post it), but the creaters of Baymax talked about how since his design was so simple, the audience projected whatever feeling and emotion he needed on him; he ended up becoming whatever the audience needed him to be.  It's such a beautiful thing with how simplified Baymax is; there's a couple of shots in the scene above where I'm not even sure if anything is animated on Baymax, yet they're so emotional.  We feel Baymax's sacrifice, yet he doesn't even blink in these moments, thus supporting Scott McCloud's point.  Scott McCloud says, "If who I am matters less, then maybe what I say will matter more."  Since most of the target audience is for kids, this works well in their favor in reinforcing good morals, which is what the earliest cartoons aimed to do.

Another example in which we are able to do something like this is with the movie Wall-E.

Reading the script for this movie is pretty funny, considering that the only words these characters speak for most of the film is "Wall-E" and "Eva".  But even though they don't have most characteristics of faces, we project their movements to mean things -- the tilt of their eyes, the way their eyes are focused, etc.

Another example of CG that fortifies this point is the term uncanny valley.  This is when a CG character looks too realistic, thus giving the audience a creepy feeling.  Good examples of these are Tintin and Polar Express.  Though the characters look realistic, the effect is creepy; in the animation world, we understand tend to caricature moreso because you will never achieve perfect movement or design with realistic looking figures.  Simply, humans know how humans look like too much.  That is why we're more willing to believe how an animated character is feeling moreso than a weird hybrid.  Simplified characters are easy to create believable motion with, and as Tabia stated in class, give you more room to stray away from strict human rules.

I'll wrap this post up since I could probably go on for ages about it, but I thought it was super interesting to read a bit more of the reasoning behind a lot of my favorite comics (Peanuts, Mutts, Calvin and Hobbes, Zits) are pretty caricatured, thus causing the viewer (like me) to be able to relate to it better.