For this week’s blog, I want to talk about a great Academy Award winning animation about a father and a daughter. It is a bit long, but is definitely worth the watch! Here it is:

What affected me the most about this animation was its main plot.  It’s hard to sit through an animation with a bad plot behind it.  This plot was incredibly touching because it showed a daughter’s dedication to her father and his memory through out her life.

In terms of animation, I loved the simplicity the animation displayed.  There was mostly black and white color used with simple line drawings and shading with different shades of black.

There was also a zoomed out shot of the characters so their faces were hard to make out.  This makes the animation even more impressive, since it was able to connect emotionally with the audience without showing facial expressions.  There was use of shadowy silhouettes, where the figures were so zoomed out that they looked like shadows, reminding me of “Prince Achmed” from class.

Music played a central role in the animation to transition into the different scenes and convey the emotion of the narrative because no dialogue was used.  The zoomed in bicycle wheels that were shown spinning throughout helped to convey the passage of time.  Other things that helped convey the passage of time were the changes of the seasons, the changing of the water to grass, the flying of the birds, and the aging of the daughter as she rode up the hill and passed different sets of people each time.  The location in the animation also relates in conveying the narrative’s simplicity since the whole animation takes place up and down the hill where it began, with shots of the water that later gets replaced by grass.  Overall, this was a well done and very touching animation!

**I commented on Brenda Weber (#50) and Emily Witt (#51)