Month: October 2015

Animation is a very intimate thing in people’s daily lives. Animation gives us pleasure from the cradle, such as watching educational animation, TV animation as well as watching animated films. However, as we growing up, it is easy for us to have preconception about animation. Usually animation is considered to be a thing of children. This kind of thinking tends to place a limit on the animation industry.

However, it is just as well that appearing and manufacturing 3D animated films makes people feel interesting, moreover, the theme of 3D animated films is getting wide and variety. For example, Toy story series, Tangles and Frozen were big hit and enormously successes around the world, consequently brought glory days of 3D animation industry. Currently, by Disney and Dream works, representative companies of the animation industry, plenty of 3D animated films are creating.

But even with the positive change, I personally feel bad that people still regard animation culture as an exclusive property of young generation. There is a word ‘Kidult’, refers to adults with childish tastes. And the so called ‘kidult culture’ has become a popular rising cultural phenomenon around the world. Movies like ‘Up’, “Ratatouille’ or ‘Wall-E’, make lots of adults to enjoy watching animation.  Therefore, I wish many animation films will be manufacture for different age groups.

It is quite interesting to appreciate masterpieces from many artists in the book. As the article mentioned at the beginning, the use of technologies in art field has increased. The artists in this book also work with various types of media to express themselves, simply from photographs to 3D printer.

The most interesting work of art to me was ‘Last Day of the Holidays’ by Patricia Piccinini in 2001. The work is a form of photograph with editing. In this photograph, one boy with a state board meets an alien creature. The creature is very small and cute, looks like a baby alligator without a skin. The boy also not afraid of the creature but he seems interest of it. This picture feels like one scene from science fiction movie. Especially the work reminds me of the film ‘E.T.’ by Steven Spielberg. Like the boy when he first sees E.T. in the movie, the boy in the photograph also wants to be a friend with the creature.

I searched the artist’s the latest  pieces of works, and he works are usually about sculptures. She focusing on creating new living things named ‘Helper’ that does not exist in the world. Helpers look all different on each of her project, but all of them are somewhat between human and animal. The creatures look weird because their skins are like human or pig, have many wrinkles, with unrealistic faces. Because of the appearance of the sculptures, her works were really hard to feel at the first time. However, after few times of observation, I used to them and started to enjoy her works. Through the works, Patricia wants to address her concern about biotechnology especially experiment with human genome.