Author: Jiahao Yang

The best animated documentary in my mind is Waltz with Bashir.

The film is based on a scene in which Shmuel Frenkel, one of the interviewees and commander of Foreman’s infantry unit at the time of the film, grabs a general purpose machine gun and “does a crazy waltz” (to the tune of Chopin’s Ballade in C minor) in the midst of heavy enemy fire on Beirut Street, which is covered with huge posters of Bashir Gemayel . The title also refers to Israel’s brief political waltz with Bashir Gemayel as President of Lebanon.

A documentary is a film or television art form that responds to objective reality, takes real life as its source material, uses real people as its object of expression, and processes and presents it artistically, in order to present the truth as its essence and use it to provoke thought.
The inclusion of animation in a documentary makes it somewhat less serious, but increases people’s curiosity about the content of the story, which is good for promotion.
Some may question whether animated documentaries may distort or misinterpret historical content due to the subjective element of the director. I think this is a question well worth exploring, but I think its advantages outweigh its disadvantages.
Firstly, the normal filming method requires time and manpower to capture a lot of day-to-day content, which is undoubtedly boring and tedious. Animation, on the other hand, makes up for these disadvantages, with animated characters and stories that capture people’s attention in a very short period of time, while being able to carry out the detailing of the characters’ expressions.
Secondly, traditional documentaries take a long time to shoot, taking 1-2 years or more. Moreover, documentaries are an art form without detailed split scripts, and sometimes it takes a lot of luck to produce highly compelling footage, which undoubtedly makes it more difficult to shoot a documentary. With the addition of animation, this can all be done in a short period of time, saving a great deal of ineffective expenditure.
At the end of the day, any film or television production is a reflection of the director’s thoughts and feelings about something, and anything that is put on the screen has been artistically manipulated to some degree, even if it is a documentary. I believe that the point of a documentary is that ”the film introduces and explains to the viewer a piece of footage that really happened, and guides and directs the viewer to think about and discuss that piece”.

I’d like to recommend an animated short film I saw 7 years ago —Missing Halloween.

A little boy waits to meet his best friend to celebrate Halloween. When she at least appears, boy’s mother makes a photo in her tablet and both walk house by house looking for trick-or-treat. Meanwhile he obtains several candies, she obtains no one, and he shares his candies with her, as well as both did the previous year.But when the two returned to the boy’s house, the boy’s parents were talking to a doctor and the boy joked with the doctor, snatching the diagnosis of his hand.When accidentally the boy reads the diagnosis, he surprises with the words “Imaginary friend”. Although the doctor and his parents says that she friend isn’t true (showing him the photo of the tablet, where he’s alone, instead with her at side of him), he claims her for real. After boy and girl run away returning to the hill, parents and police looking for the boy, making a macabre and unexpected discovery.

This cartoon is really great, with simple black and white lines yet it accurately expresses the characters’ emotions and even mental activities.

1.At their first meeting, the boy sees the girl’s lonely and forlorn back and runs to make a ghostly face to scare her, while the girl, who has not been seen since her death, is so frightened that she instantly, with the basket in her hand, smashes the boy.

2.The girl’s expression at the beginning when she and the boy went to ask for sweets was one of unhappiness and reluctance, for she had tried many times before, but not once had she been seen, and she knew that the result would remain the same today.

3.But the boy could see her, she thought, could it be that today was her lucky day? So with the boy’s encouragement, the girl asked for sweets with a glimmer of hope, but the adults still couldn’t see her.

4.On the hill, the boy is puzzled that the girl has not asked for a candy, but the girl is calm and indifferent. If there had been a line, she would have said, “See, I told you, no one would give me candy.” “I got used to it a long time ago.” She herself knows why, but at this point the boy and the audience don’t and probably think it’s a story about a girl being ostracised and discriminated against, or a boy fantasising about his friends.

5.The boy shares his candy with the girl, who finds her candy paper with the same words – the same ones she was holding on her deathbed: “You found me.” The recurring phrase gave her some touch, and she looked back at the woods and later paused as she left the hillside; she may have had some idea, but at this point she chose not to do anything about it.

6.she and the boy returned home, the boy learned that he had been mistaken for delusional by his parents’ doctor, and found out that there was indeed no girl in the phone photo, at this point must have been both aggrieved and confused, emotions came up and he and the girl ran back up the hill.

7.The boy is clearly upset at being misunderstood, but the girl also looks sad, because she realises that if she doesn’t ‘show up’, the boy won’t be able to explain himself as a friend and will definitely be misunderstood by the adults. The boy’s worries come and go quickly, and he soon puts them behind him, teasing the depressed girl instead, which boosts her determination.

8.So the girl deliberately leads the boy into the forest in the hope that her body will be found. And I presume that after her death she had already explored the paths of the forest and knew how to walk without running into traps, so the boy followed her all the way and was not caught (compare this with the adults who had to use sticks to test the grass afterwards; this has little to do with day and night, the forest is also very dark during the day and the grass is so deep).

9.The boy is still smiling in his sleep, because before he falls asleep they were eating sweets and watching the “eggs” under the tree, laughing very happily, and then they fell asleep tired, and must have continued this good time in their dreams.

10.”You found me”, the core of the play, several times the main idea: last year, the boy found the lonely girl (ghost) in front of the house, is “found her”; this year, the boy followed the girl’s ghost, found her remains; and the boy which has This year the boy followed the girl’s ghost and found her remains; and the boy’s candy note at one point was “Be my friend”, and the girl’s “You found me” could be interpreted as finding such a good friend – in fact I always felt that the short film had implied that both the boy and the girl were more withdrawn and The two lonely souls collide on Halloween and, it must be said, they save each other.

The setting of the work begins with Halloween, a joyous holiday, yet against this backdrop the lonely boy meets the equally lonely girl.

The boy appears in the story as a cheerful, lively and mischievous figure, while the girl appears as a silent, cool and quiet figure. The author gives the audience an embodiment of contrast and sets the scene for later in the story.

Instead of using dialogue to lead the story, the author focuses on the animation itself, using the details of the characters’ changing expressions in their features and costumes to bring out the differences between the girl and the boy.

The whole production is giving a sense of amazement and revealing eeriness.
1.The boy’s parents don’t actually care about the boy as much as they do in the film. They think the boy has a lot of friends and that’s why he didn’t come home on Halloween night.

2.It is clear from the whole film that the little girl has been lost for 2 years and yet there is never a single image of a missing person in the film. The police manual is full of lost children, and the woods are not very far from the town, but it is surprising that the police have not gone in to search them, while the burglar guards are broken and not maintained.

3.The girl is also a member of the town, however, the boy has never met or heard of her, otherwise, the first time he sees her, the boy feels that he has seen a portrait of her somewhere.

The soundtrack is very relevant to the whole production, with the music adjusting to the rhythm of the story and the tempo of the music varying in an orderly manner to keep the audience engaged.

Analisis Cerita:

1. Frank is a genius and he is a great learner.During his youth, he witnesses his father’s many techniques for conning people.
2. Frank that her parents are divorced and runs away from home.Needing money, he turns to confidence scams to survive.Finally He impersonates a Pan Am pilot and forges the airline’s payroll checks. Soon,he was making millions of dollars.
3. USAA finds people using cheques to steal money,Agent Carl Hanratty begins tracking Criminals.Carl finds Frank at a hotel, but Frank tricks Carl into believing he is a agent. He escapes before Carl realizes that he was fooled.
4. Frank begins to impersonate a doctor.he falls in love with Brenda, a naive young hospital worker. He asks her attorney father for her hand in marriage and also for help with arranging to take the Louisiana State Bar exam, which Frank passes.
5. He returns home and meets his father in a tavern, where he gives him a large sum of money in the hope that he will remarry his mother and attend his wedding. However, his father refuses the request and Frank leaves the tavern in anger.
6. At the same time,Carl tracks Frank to his and Brenda’s engagement party,but Frank escapes through a bedroom window, telling Brenda to meet him at Miami International Airport two days later.
7. At the airport, Frank spots Brenda, but also plainclothes agents. He realizes she has given him up, then drives away.Using his identity as a pilot, he held a fake recruitment drive for stewardesses at a local university. Surrounded by eight female flight attendants, he escaped without incident on a plane to Madrid, Spain.
8. 2 years later,Carl tracks down Frank in his mother’s hometown of Montrichard, France. He is incarcerated in a French prison in Marseille, where he becomes very ill due to its poor conditions.Carl takes Frank on a flight back to the United States. As they approach, the FBI agent informs him that his father has died. Grief-stricken, Frank escapes from the plane and reaches the house of his mother, who is now married to Barnes and has a daughter. Frank surrenders to Carl and is sentenced to 12 years in a maximum-security prison.
9. Carl occasionally visits Frank. During one visit, he shows him a fraud check from a case he is working on. Frank immediately figures out that the bank teller was involved in the fraud. Impressed, Carl convinces the FBI to allow him to serve the remainder of his sentence working for the FBI Financial Crimes Unit. Frank agrees.
10. Frank soon grows restless of the tedious office work.One weekend, Frank prepares to impersonate a pilot again and is intercepted by Carl, who allows him to carry on his act.But, Frank will die of old age in prison if he is caught again, leaving him to make his own choices. Carl is nervous when Frank doesn’t show up on time for work day the following week. However, Frank eventually shows up at his desk and the two begin to work together to solve the crime of fraud.

Character Analysis

Frank:I think Frank is an intelligent, outgoing man with a passion for life who could have been an outstanding contributor to society if not for his youthful admiration for his father and his broken family. (Even in the film,Frank becomes a cheque fraud expert with the help of Carl, who invents the most advanced cheque security sign available)

Carl:Carl is an FBI agent who works as a logistician researching economic crime theories. He had a happy family and a daughter with his wife, but unfortunately the couple divorced and the daughter went to live with her mother, making it difficult for Carl to see them. In the process of tracking down Frank, he discovers that he is the same kind of person as Frank – someone who wanders alone at Christmas without his family. I think if Carl hadn’t met Frank, he would have gone to work every day, writing his dissertation on economic crime, and in a few years, got a promotion and a pay rise. It’s a boring journey through life. It was when he met Frank that Carl felt that this talented young man was very much like himself, so he had the compassion to spend time with Frank during his ten years in prison.

Create a timeline

1. Frank is a genius and he is a great learner. In his youth, he witnessed many of his father’s deceptive tricks.

2. Although Frank’s family suffered a great change, his parents did not divorce and together they supported the family that was about to break up. Frank needed money and he found that becoming a pilot would be a quick way to earn it. He tricked his mother into dropping out of high school straight away and through his skills of language and deception, Frank quickly gained a lot of money to make up for the family’s financial shortfall.

3. However, Frank’s dropping out of school eventually becomes known to his mother, who leaves home alone one night, and Frank confronts his father about why he let her go. Frank confronted his father about why he had let her go. He explained that they had divorced long ago, but for the sake of Frank’s life, he begged his mother to stay until Frank could afford to live on his own. The father pleads with his mother to stay until Frank is able to live on his own. Angry, Frank also leaves home and uses his identity as a pilot to travel alone to New York.

4. Frank changes his identity, dresses up as a student and, by virtue of his forgery, gets into the economics department of New York University, where he meets Carl, who comes to teach, and the two have a good conversation. As Frank’s deception grows bolder, the FBI takes notice of the economic criminal and they invite Carl, hoping to provide professional support.

5. As Carl analyses the case, he realises that the criminal is his favourite student, Frank. Before that, because they were both alone, both due to family reasons, they had become best friends and knew enough about each other’s habits to allow Carl to detect this behaviour belonging to Frank.

On Christmas Day, Frank is ready to reveal his feelings to his closest friend, Carl. However, when he returns home, he finds the FBI police in Carl’s house and puts away the Christmas presents he had bought for Carl and leaves the house.

7. With mixed feelings, Carl sits on the sofa, wishing that Frank would not come home, but also hoping that Frank is not the financial criminal, even though the evidence is so obvious, Carl still does not want to believe this fact. Just as the clock strikes 12, Carl receives a phone call from Frank with the simple words “You’re a liar”.

8. Since Frank had disappeared into New York, the economic criminals who had been defrauding USAA had disappeared. Although Carl didn’t catch Frank, he still made a name for himself at the FBI and was hired to head the Economic Crimes Division, and Carl lived up to everyone’s expectations by solving several major economic frauds during his tenure. On Christmas Eve, a retired Carl was sitting in a park, enjoying himself, when a middle-aged man sat next to Carl, holding a worn gift box with the words ‘To Carl’ written on it. “”Merry Christmas to you too, Frank.”

In class, work with your teacher on what constitutes a research paper. Learn about learning how to create a dissertation with critical thinking.

The following paragraph is a thematic direction that I would like to research in my own postgraduate studies, but of course this is not necessarily what I will end up with.

Topic：

Communication and research on the history and culture of countries around the world based on the form of animation

Introduction:

I would like to explore and study the history and culture of each country, using animation (e.g. 2D animation, 3D animation, films, games) as a form of expression to promote their outstanding cultural history.

Most people are always bored and in a negative state when reading books, but when faced with images with sound, the attention level is greatly enhanced.

I will be investigating how boring histories and cultures can be animated to make these stories interesting.

Key words:

-Culture

-History

-Storytelling

-Animation

-Characters

The following sources will be used as references:

Whyke, T. W., Mugica, J. L., & Brown, M. S. (2021). Contemporizing the National Style in Chinese Animation: The Case of Nezha (2019). Animation, 16(3), 157–174. https://doi.org/10.1177/17468477211049354

Ghani D B A, Bin D. Upin & Ipin: Promoting Malaysian culture values through animation[J]. Historia y Comunicación Social, 2015, 20(1): 241-258.

Macdonald S. Animation in China: History, aesthetics, media[M]. Routledge, 2015.

Fan K K, Feng T T. Sustainable development strategy of Chinese animation industry[J]. Sustainability, 2021, 13(13): 7235.

Karuzaki E, Partarakis N, Patsiouras N, et al. Realistic virtual humans for cultural heritage applications[J]. Heritage, 2021, 4(4): 4148-4171.