The animated film "Box Monster" should be the most representative classic in stop-motion animation.
The film was co-directed by Anthony Stach and Graham Anabel, co-produced by Focus Pictures and Lycra Animation Studios, and a stop-motion animation film produced by Universal Pictures. In "Box Monster", the director tells the bizarre story of what happened in the Victorian cheese bridge city in a gothic funny and absurd artistic language...
The film is about a conspiracy, the little boy "Egg Born" of the Du Box family was forced to be raised by a group of box monsters, at the same time, the timid and kind box monsters are constantly persecuted by human society, under the leadership of the human boy "Egg Born", trying to save the world of the box monster, the film exposes the conspiracy of the bad guys, and the different characters in the story also re-establish the meaning of their own existence in a chaotic farce, which seems to be a farce, but the realistic meaning behind the film is thought-provoking.
<h1 class= "pgc-h-arrow-right" > the ugliness of human nature that you wouldn't imagine</h1>
As an animation, the film seems not only to put children into the audience, the director and the animation producer take "obscurity" and "repression" as the main language environment and emotional tone of the film, giving people "horror" sensory stimulation.
One of the strange creatures known as the "box monsters" is set as an indispensable and important character in the film.
These "box monsters" do not exist in real real social life, but their bodies are condensed with human characteristics, personality and behavior, and so on. In the movie "Box Monster", the division of ranks and classes is very obvious, from low to high, such as bugs, box monsters, ordinary people, red hats (also known as "box terminators" in the film) and white hats.
Behind this is a specific socio-cultural context, interpretive mechanism and system.
"Box Monster" contains a wealth of metaphors, such as the name of the villain "Snächer", whose pronunciation is very similar to the English "predator, kidnapper", suggesting the greed and violence of the character's personality.
The relationship between the underground world where the box lives and the above-ground world where humans live symbolizes the relative relationship between humans and the box monster, and there are many examples of metaphors above and below, such as the upper world and the lower world in the movie "Reverse World", or heaven and hell... It can be seen that the screenwriters and directors of the film want to reveal and reflect the hierarchical division of class society and class high-pressure rule in reality.
Again, the place where the story takes place is called the Cheese Bridge, and there is also its metaphor.
Here, cheese is a symbol of a certain interest and privilege, and only the upper class with white hats can taste and enjoy the best cheese, and white hats, red hats and box monsters are the symbols of different groups and metaphors for the class system in the real world.
In order to obtain the white hat, the villain tastes the cheese with the white hat, and does not hesitate to kidnap, plant loot and even destroy, shaping the kind box monsters into "man-eating monsters" and destroying all the box monsters in exchange for their own purposes. This 10-year-old, deep-rooted "box monster cannibalism story" is a conspiracy of Snächer from beginning to end.
Although the rumors about the "box monster eating children" seem to be nonsense in the end, the director has vividly expressed the content of class rule in human society in the process of "overturning rumors". Snächer, who was despised by the upper class, disguised himself and mixed into high society, and even after exposing his conspiracy and revealing his ugly appearance in the "egg-born", the gentlemen of high society did not care, but only cared about the cheese that fell into the river in the chaos...
The most ironic thing is that Snacher longed all his life to enter high society and crave cheese, but he himself was allergic to cheese, and finally although he tasted the world's most delicious cheese as he wished, he paid the price he deserved.
This form of artistic creation abandons the boring and tedious narrative methods in traditional films, making the film more figurative, more able to make people immersive, and resonate with the audience in terms of emotion and other aspects. As an animation produced by a Gothic-exclusive animation film and television production company, the work always reflects the naked dissection of social relations and the treacherous and pedantic irony of social rights and human nature.
Ernst Cahill, in his Treatise on Man, defines man as a symbolic animal, arguing that the entire development of human culture depends on symbolic thinking and symbolic behavior, which is the most representative feature of human life.
Just like the hat, cheese, box in the movie, it is an expression of symbols, but at the end of the film these symbols are redefined, in a chaos, the giant cheese symbolizing power is smashed, the rules of the old society are broken, the lord gives up the white hat for his daughter, and the villain Snächer is also swallowed up by his own ambitions... Cheese town has gained an unprecedented harmony, white hats are discarded, the original cold and numb people also began to have a new life, and finally the residents of Cheese Bridge and the box monsters live happily and harmoniously together, it can be said that the story ends in a joyful way, bringing people to think very heavily, this metaphor is not obscure, "where there is oppression, where there is resistance", if in the movie, the box monster is the typical representative of the oppressed masses at the bottom, then the boy raised by the box monster "egg birth" He was the pioneer of the resistance of the masses at the bottom.
"Cheese, hats, boxes, these don't represent you, because you are you."
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > stop motion animation is a technique and an art</h1>
About Laika Animation Studios, there is some news about them on the Internet, and their staff takes 1 week to do 1-2 minute stop-motion animation, which means that the 97-minute animation will take them nearly two years, not including the preparation of props and the construction of scenes. Laika's third animated film, Box Monster, is still gothic, and it is worth mentioning that the studio's first two works, Ghost Mother and Psychic Norman, have laid the foundation for it.
At present, the classic stop-motion animation abroad includes "Magical Pirates", "Box Monster", "Vincent", "Shaun the Sheep", "Caroline", "Psychic Boy Norman", "Frankenstein Dog", "Peter and the Wolf", etc., and the domestic classic stop-motion animation such as "Divine Pen Ma Liang", "Avanti", "The Great Thief", "Cao Chong Elephant" and so on.
Academics generally believe that stop-motion animation originated in 1907, that is, the film "Haunted Hotel" shot by American director Yate Brackton using the "frame-by-frame shooting method".
Stop-motion animation and hand-drawn animation have a long history, the innovative genes it carries also have incomparable innate advantages, there are few companies producing stop-motion animation at home and abroad, only because stop-motion animation production is too troublesome, stop-motion animation mostly uses real models frame by frame to shoot, most of the handmade ingredients, so it also has a unique sense of real beauty of handmade art, and its incomparable handmade components and artistic value are also unique to stop-motion animation.
While other companies are emphasizing realistic CG effects, LAIKA insists on stopping animation and does not follow the trend of today's animation production and selling cuteness, which is called courage. Whether it is in the artistic expression of animated films, or in the expression and interpretation of film theme ideas, "Box Monster" has made outstanding contributions to the future development of the film industry, and provided good inspiration and reference materials.
< h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > concluding remarks</h1>
With a strong combination of irony, steampunk, beautiful music, exquisite graphics, stop-motion animation, and so many elements, "Box Monster" is destined to be a good-looking animated movie. It is worth noting that the end of the easter egg, is simply with life in the spit, here is not a spoiler, I have to say that the last life of the stop-motion animation must be an angel with folded wings!
Original text, figure network