WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:02.670 Scribble Kibble is a show about animation. 00:00:02.670 --> 00:00:07.759 Last month I went through Netflix’s animation category and added every movie I thought looked 00:00:07.759 --> 00:00:09.960 interesting that I hadn’t seen. 00:00:09.960 --> 00:00:14.690 Then I took the whole list and looked for what I thought was the weakest movie and I 00:00:14.690 --> 00:00:15.910 watched it. 00:00:15.910 --> 00:00:21.439 Sahara is so bland that about 15 minutes in I was considering calling it quits, and me, 00:00:21.439 --> 00:00:25.210 I’ll suffer through just about any movie or book I start. 00:00:25.210 --> 00:00:31.119 Sahara is bad, but not bad like animation quality bad, bad as in the movie has no idea 00:00:31.119 --> 00:00:32.870 who it’s for or what it’s about. 00:00:32.870 --> 00:00:35.760 And it’s not even terrible enough to be entertaining. 00:00:35.760 --> 00:00:39.960 It’s a soulless desert of mediocrity. 00:00:39.960 --> 00:00:44.430 Supposedly Sahara is for kids, but the movie begins with one of the main characters getting 00:00:44.430 --> 00:00:49.180 beaten with a rock until he blacks out, the other main character spends most of her time 00:00:49.180 --> 00:00:54.740 as a slave trying to keep her distance from a lecherous male snake, and her brother is 00:00:54.740 --> 00:01:02.199 a drug addict with a voice that makes you want to strangle him. 00:01:02.199 --> 00:01:08.720 Despite these teen topics, the movie has no adult humor or sensibility to it at all, making 00:01:08.720 --> 00:01:10.650 it incredibly boring for parents. 00:01:10.650 --> 00:01:14.030 On top of that, the film has no main theme or lessons. 00:01:14.030 --> 00:01:20.390 It’s about blue snakes versus green snakes, er, poverty versus prosperity, no, wait, it’s 00:01:20.390 --> 00:01:26.210 about police brutality, oh just kidding it’s a love-at-first-sight Romeo Juliet story. 00:01:26.210 --> 00:01:28.500 Ohh, it’s an adventure story. 00:01:28.500 --> 00:01:31.200 No wait, it’s about slavery. 00:01:31.200 --> 00:01:32.200 Friendship? 00:01:32.200 --> 00:01:33.210 Alright. 00:01:33.210 --> 00:01:36.110 I have no idea what this movie is about. 00:01:36.110 --> 00:01:39.170 After it ends you come away with nothing. 00:01:39.170 --> 00:01:44.940 So here’s this cliché-ridden, rambling plotline, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a 00:01:44.940 --> 00:02:06.070 fantastic scene slams into your face. 00:02:06.070 --> 00:02:11.560 What this is even doing here, I have no idea, but it’s absolutely amazing and I love it. 00:02:11.560 --> 00:02:16.310 This particular sequence is by a couple of artists separate from the main animation crew 00:02:16.310 --> 00:02:22.640 and wow, is it stuffed with psychedelic trippy symbolism, from the Garden of Eden to loss 00:02:22.640 --> 00:02:25.480 of personal identity. 00:02:25.480 --> 00:02:28.150 At first glance, the animation looks to be 2D. 00:02:28.150 --> 00:02:31.330 It starts with painted 2D illustrations. 00:02:31.330 --> 00:02:37.590 The swirling snakeskin pattern in the background is 2D art doused with blur and color effects. 00:02:37.590 --> 00:02:41.590 You can actually see the pattern when it shows up again here in blue. 00:02:41.590 --> 00:02:46.870 The waveforms that come next are hand animated, probably with a wave warp special effect added 00:02:46.870 --> 00:02:47.990 on to them. 00:02:47.990 --> 00:02:52.850 But it’s here, at the frame-by-frame paint splashes where things get interesting because 00:02:52.850 --> 00:02:57.930 those animations are mapped onto a 3D environment, which turns out to be this snake. 00:02:57.930 --> 00:03:02.540 The top of the snake has an animated texture masked on to it. 00:03:02.540 --> 00:03:07.430 What mask means is the animators take this flat shape and tell the artwork or video clip 00:03:07.430 --> 00:03:09.620 to only show in that area. 00:03:09.620 --> 00:03:14.960 I can’t figure out if the green snake is hand drawn or if it is the same 3D model from 00:03:14.960 --> 00:03:19.050 the movie with different lighting settings to make it look 2D. 00:03:19.050 --> 00:03:23.600 The accuracy of the head shape and body pattern suggests it’s 3D. 00:03:23.600 --> 00:03:28.130 Technically you can accomplish the same thing by animating a still painting (here’s an 00:03:28.130 --> 00:03:33.440 animated painting), by rotoscoping / drawing on top of a raw 3D animation, or by being 00:03:33.440 --> 00:03:36.880 a perfectionist at staying on model when drawing the character. 00:03:36.880 --> 00:03:39.569 The fully detailed snakes are probably 3D though. 00:03:39.569 --> 00:03:43.600 But wow, what a great section full of color and texture and art. 00:03:43.600 --> 00:03:47.430 It’s the oasis in this desert of a movie. 00:03:47.430 --> 00:03:51.650 I daresay there’s another thing I enjoyed about Sahara, and that’s the snake dancing. 00:03:51.650 --> 00:03:55.270 I could’ve watched an entire movie about snakes dancing. 00:03:55.270 --> 00:04:00.150 As an animator, the nice thing about snakes is the character bones are relatively straightfoward: 00:04:00.150 --> 00:04:04.430 you don’t have to worry about hands and arms and legs, all you need to do is animate 00:04:04.430 --> 00:04:05.430 curves. 00:04:05.430 --> 00:04:10.090 It’s entertaining to watch these simple shapes do intricate break dance moves. 00:04:10.090 --> 00:04:11.810 I wish there’d been more of it. 00:04:11.810 --> 00:04:12.810 Heheh. 00:04:12.810 --> 00:04:15.030 A musical dance movie with snakes. 00:04:15.030 --> 00:04:17.459 That’s totally ridiculous, never mind. 00:04:17.459 --> 00:04:19.900 What I’m trying to do is reimagine this movie. 00:04:19.900 --> 00:04:24.090 This is an exercise you can do to get better at writing stories. 00:04:24.090 --> 00:04:28.979 Take a movie or book you didn’t like, figure out what about it is good and should be kept, 00:04:28.979 --> 00:04:32.070 and what was bad that you would change to make it work. 00:04:32.070 --> 00:04:36.000 Sahara has strong character designs and character animation. 00:04:36.000 --> 00:04:40.669 It has many potentially interesting themes, but it never spends more than ten minutes 00:04:40.669 --> 00:04:42.250 on any one of them. 00:04:42.250 --> 00:04:47.169 For a kids movie, I’d center the story around dancing, get rid of the romance, and pick 00:04:47.169 --> 00:04:48.320 a lesson. 00:04:48.320 --> 00:04:53.880 How about: if you work hard and practice, sometimes you’ll still lose. 00:04:53.880 --> 00:04:59.700 For a teen movie, I really like this idea of being forced to adjust to a new reality. 00:04:59.700 --> 00:05:03.480 Spend the first part of the movie with these two characters already together and in love. 00:05:03.480 --> 00:05:07.110 Then, sudden disaster and we never see blue snake again. 00:05:07.110 --> 00:05:12.150 Green snake learns to survive in a harsh world where failure ends in death. 00:05:12.150 --> 00:05:17.090 Male green snake is supportive instead of arrogant so we like him as an audience. 00:05:17.090 --> 00:05:19.330 These two bond and fall in love. 00:05:19.330 --> 00:05:20.660 But then, surprise! 00:05:20.660 --> 00:05:24.710 Blue snake rescues everybody and now she has to choose between the two! 00:05:24.710 --> 00:05:26.230 Oh, what a painful choice! 00:05:26.230 --> 00:05:31.020 Do I stay with the person who helped me survive, who faced all of these difficult choices with 00:05:31.020 --> 00:05:35.550 me, or do I go with the person I once loved but I’m not sure I know anymore? 00:05:35.550 --> 00:05:40.449 Hey, if you want to make a brutal, Hunger Games-level story, make all of the characters 00:05:40.449 --> 00:05:44.820 humans, and the turning point is when the young woman is kidnapped and plunged into 00:05:44.820 --> 00:05:46.389 the world of human trafficking. 00:05:46.389 --> 00:05:50.490 She struggles to survive and bonds with a young man who is a victim too. 00:05:50.490 --> 00:05:54.540 After a few years her fiancé rescues her with the help of the authorities. 00:05:54.540 --> 00:05:58.190 But by then… is she the same person anymore? 00:05:58.190 --> 00:05:59.600 There’s a good story. 00:05:59.600 --> 00:06:03.790 C’mon, there’s a good story in this movie: give it to me! 00:06:03.790 --> 00:06:08.260 So I’d like to know, what bad movie did you watch recently, and what would you do 00:06:08.260 --> 00:06:09.420 to fix it? 00:06:09.420 --> 00:06:12.720 Comment below! 00:06:12.720 --> 00:06:19.610 During the Here’s The Plan episode, I asked what your plans were. 00:06:19.610 --> 00:07:04.260 Here are some of your responses.