Scribble Kibble is your weekly cup of animation.
I’m going to split this topic into two mugs. For two episodes I’m going to ignore the
methodology of the animation and instead talk about writing because, as Chris wrote on the
Zootopia episode, “Good writing can save bad art. Good art can’t save bad writing.”
Welcome to Good Writing Bad Writing. The featured animation is Tiger.
[sigh] Yes, we’re starting with bad writing. But I promise I’ll make up for it next episode.
First of all, I should mention that the animator, Pernille Kjaer, is devoted to the type of
art you expect to see in a modern art museum. Aka: the weird stuff. In that respect, the
animation does very well. It’s a confusing mess of symbolism with no definitive meaning.
Perfect.
Yeah. Yeah, I get it now. It’s abstract art, but animation. Like one of those films
where you sit in a dark room and listen to 30 minutes of pops and clicks synced to images
of colored smoke.
But even that type of exhibit, there’s always a little plaque where the artist talks about
what they intended to make you feel or think, and once you read that you can watch the movie
and say, “Oh. I get it.” If you don’t read the plaque, you still feel something.
In terms of writing, Tiger fails to make us feel anything other than confusion, and it
defies interpretation. It’s the perfect example of someone wanting to make people
think in order to figure out what is going on, but the final story is so contorted there
is no way for us to find meaning in it.
How to fix this? There are two paths to go down. Path one: become more abstract. If the
intention is to be abstract, then as a writer, you need to decide what emotions you want
viewers to feel throughout your film. Then try to capture that emotion without using
a narrative or conventional symbols. Symbols have meaning. You don’t want that. You don’t
want people’s biases getting in the way of their experience of the raw emotion. That’s
why a lot of abstract art boils down to shapes and colors that look nothing like anything
in real life.
Path two: fix your story. The first way to do this is let some people read your script
and then tell you what they got out of the story. If they get something out of it - even
if it might not be what you expected - good. If multiple people are confused or bored,
then that is poor writing on your part. You need to rewrite.
I’m not going to pretend writing is easier than animation. Writing is more accessible
than animation. Animation requires tools and knowledge, writing only requires knowledge.
Many people can write. Only a few people can write well. And only a few people can write
well for animations.
Going down the less abstract better writing path, all that Tiger really needs is to be
more clear. Even getting rid of the copy paste beginning and ending would let us make up
a meaning for the story. Because it’s there, though, it implies that the whole cycle repeats
itself.
Let’s say Tiger is about a girl becoming an independent person and unwittingly pushing
her fat round friend Olav out of her life. In that story, it doesn’t make sense that
we would start over from the beginning. If it repeats, it means none of the characters
have learned anything.
Gee, if you got rid of the Tiger part altogether the story would be more clear and still have
the open-to-interpretation feeling.
What even is the tiger? The animation is called Tiger so it’s probably important. If the
Tiger is the girl’s creativity or independence or imagination, then it makes sense that she
can’t kill it permanently.
Or perhaps she could. The ending would be her alone in the kitchen with a dead plant.
Her friend Olav is gone, and she killed the wild part of herself that made him leave.
The end.
And that’s how you can mess up an entire story with a poorly written ending. If we
mapped out the story, it’d look like this: rising action as the girl discovers the cube
plant and it starts taking over the world. Growing tension between these three characters.
Climax, where Olav attacks the plant and it eats him, forcing the girl to act. Slowed
pacing leads to discovering Olav’s dead body, slight bump in action when the Tiger
non-aggressively plays with the girl and she decides to kill it, utter confusion.
Ugh. I can’t try to make sense out of Tiger anymore. It’s making me frustrated.
Good art can’t save bad writing. And this is bad writing.
Scribble Kibble, the show where I’ve given up on watching confusing cartoons and instead
eat dog food.
Wolves don’t bark. They bork. Bork! Bork! Bork!
My blah reaction to today’s animation. And… my happiness at what I have in store next
week. Eeee!