Last week's lecture had to be cancelled, but next week we're going to have two to make up for that, so in the mean time I have just thought a bit more on what I could do and attended the guest lecture on Queer Animation with Kate Jessop.
Kate has made several animated short films herself, including documentaries and episodic comedies.
I enjoyed the films shown to us, a lot of them played with imagery and colour in a fun way, and a couple used anthropomorphic characters which was cool. Here are a couple:
I've highlighted these ones because I liked the visual style, Manivald has some fun character animation, and Entropia's trippy visuals are awesome, even if the non-linear plot is a little confusing. Cut was the only film we were shown about gender, it was interesting but it was a shame that all the others films we watched were only about same-sex relationships. I would have liked to have seen more films about pansexual, bisexual, polyamorous and asexual experiences, rather than solely looking at gay or lesbian relationships. As a non-binary person I would have appreciated going into a lecture on queerness and seeing myself represented more too, we have a mostly queer class, including several gender-queer people, so I think we expected more. I have done research in my own time and found a collection of short films myself:
Most of these films are explicitly about queer experiences, except for the last one, Kapaemahu, which tells a historical story that happens to address the fact that gender non-conforming people have been present in several cultures throughout history and are not anything new. It is also my favourite of these films stylistically, the textures, colours, and lighting are all beautiful and create an incredible atmosphere. I did struggle to find any short films specifically about asexuality other than student films, but this could have been risen as a topic of discussion during the tutorial. The only good animated or live action depiction of asexuality I know of is in Bojack Horseman, so it was a shame we only looked into queer-made short films too, rather than looking at the representation of the LGBTQA+ community in all media, bad and good.
The lecture did make me want to make a film about gender and non-binary experience, seeming as there are few films on it, or at least, few films in the spotlight about it. But as addressed in my last post, I don't think I'll want to write an essay about it, I'm happy to make an attempt at visually explaining gender in an animated short, but using words gets a bit complicated, especially when the essay will mostly be about how little representation there is for gender non-conforming characters in both animation and live action media. Constantly falling back on Steven Universe gets a little depressing after a while.
I'm still thinking about how I could write about adaptation and how it often irons out any 'otherness' (e.g. white-washing characters, ignoring sexuality etc), but it could be a little too vague and broad. I could potentially do a comparison between two adaptations, Tales From Earthsea being one, and the other being something like Coraline, The Secret of Nimh, or Spider-man into the Spider-verse. A lot of Disney films are adaptations of books or fairytales, that definitely alter the original tale to fall in with their usual narrative tropes, but it would be great to look at a more positive adaptation of a book to compare with Earthsea if it's something I end up doing. Then it just leaves the idea of the film to go alongside the essay, which at the moment I can only think of as going through character descriptions in a book and having them slowly come to life through the design progress until they are a fully animated character.
I'm still looking forward to the lecture on disability, as I can't think of any positive representations of characters with disabilities that allow the disability to be discussed and be a part of the plot. I know that disability has an interesting role on fantasy and sci-fi, too, whether the lack of one sense heightens others to some fantastical height, become an object of sympathy for other characters ti 'save' or makes the character some sort of antagonist. There's a book I've had my eye on for a bit about disability in fantasy and fairy tales that could potentially tie into an essay I could write.
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