MultiModal Narrative

          Its like watching a mid life crisis, where one feels lonely with no salvation. The thoughts that you have seen it all, I had all these dreams, and I am not where I thought I’d be. Everyone sounds the same, everything in boring, yet he suddenly finds something different. Both the film and the novel followed this theme of a mid life crisis. The feeling of loneliness and the way you can suddenly stumble into an intimate relationship when traveling are large themes also. When traveling, one is open to new experiences, everything is different, thus opens people up to more intimate relations. The puppets have a split in the face that the film makers decided to not try to hide and this add a visual identity to the characters, as if they are all wearing masks. All of the characters have very similar faces, except the main man and the woman he becomes infatuated with has a different face compared to everyone else.
         The pacing of the piece is very slow overall, with stop motion the audience needs more time to read what is happening, thus effecting the overall feel of the film. The juxtaposition between the voice acting and the media is interesting, for the voices are super gestural in tone where as the puppet’s expressions are not very expressionistic, but their overall body language reads. Authorship is not pure, almost always when creating a work it is collaborative. For example, Dickens would work with his illustrators to help figure out the story or writers will work with editors who can help a lot with a work. Authorship now is more about celebrity status than its quality. Shakespeare is another example, we know that he had collaborators, many had played the parts, all we have are the stage manager’s play scripts for Shakespeare never published his work. As far as we know these versions of his plays may be completely different than what he had originally written.
          With the two films shown in class, one raises the question on why they were animated for they are so realistic to life. There seems to be a few scenes that show fantastic imagery like with the man's face glitching out in the first film and the car wrecking in the store. With the cuban film, the character design enhances the overall film for the fluidity of the drawings match the fluidity of the music. The rotoscoping is very evident, and I am not a fan of that style, but appreciate the outcome of the film. The overall content of both films is very adult, from having sex to cussing to fighting. 
       From the reading, I found the overall style of the graphic novel to be very interesting. I enjoyed the juxtaposition between the character design on the man vs the woman. The architectural design of the man enhances his inability to change where as Hana is drawn completely different, but the characters work together. The narration was written as if one could hear him, and the narrator was very different for it was his still born twin brother. The ending was frustrating, but the overall comic was enjoyable. There are three separate parts, the now, the past, and his fantasies. The fluidity of the narration and storytelling made the novel interesting and though the overall story is not the happiest one it was still a good book.