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summer_jackelOk, so I saw this little...gem...on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skorzy's journal, and it's just too hilarious and bizarre, so I'm sharing the pain. This is an upcoming anime film based upon a manga set in the Vietnam war which uses anthropomorphic characters: bunnies for Americans, kitties for various Asians. I can't vouch for the quality of the manga, having never read it, but all I can see looking at this trailer is "dog."
Hey, maybe it will be a brilliant film. I nonetheless cringe and snicker guiltily despite this very real possibility; you guys hand me some crow if it is. Still, as a furry fan and someone who likes to tell stories through the vehicle of anthropomorphic animals, I started poking a little at why I had such a strong reaction to something which in theory I might just like. I quickly came to the conclusion that the concept was fine, but I hated the character designs, which clash with the war theme in this amazing way.
Maybe that's intentional? Even if so, I had less of an 'unsettled so it makes me think' experience and more of an 'I'm being pulled completely out of the drama by the juxtaposition of ultra-cute fuzzy animals and serious, violent plot, to the point where creators have made me LOL unintentionally.' One can go for 'Happy Tree Friends' and one can try for 'Maus', but maybe not at the same time in the same story. Or maybe you can, but the above just failed to pull it off.
This got me to thinking about telling stories using furries/anthro critters in general. Doing so is, of course, an ancient pan-cultural practice which is alive and thriving everywhere today, but why? I re-read McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' recently, and am thinking about the bit where he suggests that the more cartoony a character is, the more universal it is, which makes it easier for the reader to empathize herself into the story. Anthropomorphic animals add one more layer of attractive symbol, making the process that much smoother for many. I'm not breaking any new ground here.
But in the above clip, this easy mechanism fails. So, can you only tell a serious story with serious looking furries, as Spiegelman did? I'd bet good money that more than one work exists out there which would disprove that theory. Actually, 'Pom Poco' (sp?), another anime, does a great job of telling a really sad partly-true story with cute, toony little animals.
I think that this disjunct between art and story is one of those things that has to be done carefully, is different for every work, and can either completely blow your story or make it brilliant. Talking animal stories can successfully exist along a huge spectrum, from 'the anthros are a carefully imagined and crafted alien race,' minimizing this disjunct as much as possible, to 'they just look like animals; There's no explanation; just go with it,' emphasizing the dichotomy to the point where it just goes away, and everything in between.
Heck, if you poke too closely at 'The Wind in the Willows', you come to the conclusion that this cute bucolic little story has to exist in an utterly surreal world where the anthro critters are the size of and interact with humans and there are no "real" animals. Or perhaps (and I think you could make a decent argument for this, especially given the Pan chapter) they walk through one or several 'reality shifts' at various points in the story and the setting is actually changed deliberately throughout---only so subtlely and with such authorial skill that the reader doesn't see it until her leg is in the trap. The whole thing is, arguably, about the animal characters slowly becoming more and more human (in the beginning, Mole could be an actual mole; by the time Toad is in jail things are distinctly otherwise) and less and less innocent.
So: you can make a story work anywhere along the spectrum, but you usually have to do it with some kind of internal consistency. The reader has to buy your world enough to suspend disbelief, unless you think you can get away with being really clever and use knocking the reader clean out of your story to your advantage. This is Spiegelman-level authorship, and even he does it carefully.
A lot of these problem disjuncts are really subtle. Take Loyalty and Liberty, this beautifully done, carefully researched costume drama that's trying to tell a Revolutionary War history using anthro cats. It's of the 'no explanation, they act like humans, they're just cats' type. I love it so far, but the character designs, which have proportions so accurately feline that they look like real kitties that have been dressed up in really fancy Halloween pet costumes, kicked me right out of the narrative. I found myself thinking, "ok, how does this work. We have sapient housecats which happen to have exactly replicated American history. The tack they ride is probably beautifully period-accurate, but there's no way those characters' hind ends will sit on or guide a horse using those saddles. A cat would design a different saddle. And while I'm worrying about it, am I supposed to be seeing a super-tiny horse or a puma-sized cat? Either way, there are problems here." I can't not see this now, and it definitely detracts from the work for me.
I think that is why I rolled my eyes at the first few seconds of the 'Cat Shit' trailer, in which we see a grim looking bunny driving a tank. To buy a serious 'realistic' story, I need some internal consistency between figure and ground---in this case, the bunny's paws could never reach the controls of that tank, which I responded to before I even became consciously aware of it. Perhaps to pull off a complex, serious story when your antho characters are drawn with something like real animal anatomy, you need to redesign the whole world. Of course, then you lose the impact of ultra-realism. How much of a compromise can you get away with?
I'm grappling with such an issue in 'Bone Shard', which is probably why I care right now. I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, trying to pull off a rather serious plot in a fairly accurately-designed period setting. It is an AU (which was a question I was asked recently, actually)---I'm not trying to depict Victorian England, only with foxes, because to do that well I think I'd end up telling a story that was at least partly about Victorian England, I don't know the history well enough to do it properly and I don't want to. ("informed by" yes, "about" no). Besides, healthy chunks of my plot revolve around these characters not being human and their world not ours. The thing is, I still have a disjunct which cannot be entirely gotten around, because if you think about it carefully, nobody with fur or tails would EVer have invented Victorian fashion or a whole slew of other things I want in the book. I'm pretty certain that I can work with this, but it's uneasy, and I am paying attention to the issue. We'll see if I fail, I guess.
Sheesh. I try and draw a few pages of porn with foxes in corsets (less! Danielle and Shard weren't even supposed to have their own comic when I first made 'em!) and I get this.
skorzy's journal, and it's just too hilarious and bizarre, so I'm sharing the pain. This is an upcoming anime film based upon a manga set in the Vietnam war which uses anthropomorphic characters: bunnies for Americans, kitties for various Asians. I can't vouch for the quality of the manga, having never read it, but all I can see looking at this trailer is "dog."Hey, maybe it will be a brilliant film. I nonetheless cringe and snicker guiltily despite this very real possibility; you guys hand me some crow if it is. Still, as a furry fan and someone who likes to tell stories through the vehicle of anthropomorphic animals, I started poking a little at why I had such a strong reaction to something which in theory I might just like. I quickly came to the conclusion that the concept was fine, but I hated the character designs, which clash with the war theme in this amazing way.
Maybe that's intentional? Even if so, I had less of an 'unsettled so it makes me think' experience and more of an 'I'm being pulled completely out of the drama by the juxtaposition of ultra-cute fuzzy animals and serious, violent plot, to the point where creators have made me LOL unintentionally.' One can go for 'Happy Tree Friends' and one can try for 'Maus', but maybe not at the same time in the same story. Or maybe you can, but the above just failed to pull it off.
This got me to thinking about telling stories using furries/anthro critters in general. Doing so is, of course, an ancient pan-cultural practice which is alive and thriving everywhere today, but why? I re-read McCloud's 'Understanding Comics' recently, and am thinking about the bit where he suggests that the more cartoony a character is, the more universal it is, which makes it easier for the reader to empathize herself into the story. Anthropomorphic animals add one more layer of attractive symbol, making the process that much smoother for many. I'm not breaking any new ground here.
But in the above clip, this easy mechanism fails. So, can you only tell a serious story with serious looking furries, as Spiegelman did? I'd bet good money that more than one work exists out there which would disprove that theory. Actually, 'Pom Poco' (sp?), another anime, does a great job of telling a really sad partly-true story with cute, toony little animals.
I think that this disjunct between art and story is one of those things that has to be done carefully, is different for every work, and can either completely blow your story or make it brilliant. Talking animal stories can successfully exist along a huge spectrum, from 'the anthros are a carefully imagined and crafted alien race,' minimizing this disjunct as much as possible, to 'they just look like animals; There's no explanation; just go with it,' emphasizing the dichotomy to the point where it just goes away, and everything in between.
Heck, if you poke too closely at 'The Wind in the Willows', you come to the conclusion that this cute bucolic little story has to exist in an utterly surreal world where the anthro critters are the size of and interact with humans and there are no "real" animals. Or perhaps (and I think you could make a decent argument for this, especially given the Pan chapter) they walk through one or several 'reality shifts' at various points in the story and the setting is actually changed deliberately throughout---only so subtlely and with such authorial skill that the reader doesn't see it until her leg is in the trap. The whole thing is, arguably, about the animal characters slowly becoming more and more human (in the beginning, Mole could be an actual mole; by the time Toad is in jail things are distinctly otherwise) and less and less innocent.
So: you can make a story work anywhere along the spectrum, but you usually have to do it with some kind of internal consistency. The reader has to buy your world enough to suspend disbelief, unless you think you can get away with being really clever and use knocking the reader clean out of your story to your advantage. This is Spiegelman-level authorship, and even he does it carefully.
A lot of these problem disjuncts are really subtle. Take Loyalty and Liberty, this beautifully done, carefully researched costume drama that's trying to tell a Revolutionary War history using anthro cats. It's of the 'no explanation, they act like humans, they're just cats' type. I love it so far, but the character designs, which have proportions so accurately feline that they look like real kitties that have been dressed up in really fancy Halloween pet costumes, kicked me right out of the narrative. I found myself thinking, "ok, how does this work. We have sapient housecats which happen to have exactly replicated American history. The tack they ride is probably beautifully period-accurate, but there's no way those characters' hind ends will sit on or guide a horse using those saddles. A cat would design a different saddle. And while I'm worrying about it, am I supposed to be seeing a super-tiny horse or a puma-sized cat? Either way, there are problems here." I can't not see this now, and it definitely detracts from the work for me.
I think that is why I rolled my eyes at the first few seconds of the 'Cat Shit' trailer, in which we see a grim looking bunny driving a tank. To buy a serious 'realistic' story, I need some internal consistency between figure and ground---in this case, the bunny's paws could never reach the controls of that tank, which I responded to before I even became consciously aware of it. Perhaps to pull off a complex, serious story when your antho characters are drawn with something like real animal anatomy, you need to redesign the whole world. Of course, then you lose the impact of ultra-realism. How much of a compromise can you get away with?
I'm grappling with such an issue in 'Bone Shard', which is probably why I care right now. I'm somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, trying to pull off a rather serious plot in a fairly accurately-designed period setting. It is an AU (which was a question I was asked recently, actually)---I'm not trying to depict Victorian England, only with foxes, because to do that well I think I'd end up telling a story that was at least partly about Victorian England, I don't know the history well enough to do it properly and I don't want to. ("informed by" yes, "about" no). Besides, healthy chunks of my plot revolve around these characters not being human and their world not ours. The thing is, I still have a disjunct which cannot be entirely gotten around, because if you think about it carefully, nobody with fur or tails would EVer have invented Victorian fashion or a whole slew of other things I want in the book. I'm pretty certain that I can work with this, but it's uneasy, and I am paying attention to the issue. We'll see if I fail, I guess.
Sheesh. I try and draw a few pages of porn with foxes in corsets (less! Danielle and Shard weren't even supposed to have their own comic when I first made 'em!) and I get this.
