Animation critique

Animation Critique – Astro Boy In 1951 Osamu Tezuka introduced people to Might Atom, a robot named Astro Boy. This anime was soon turned into television series and film as a result of its popularity. As shown by Tezuka, Astro Boy is a robot with inhuman power created by a scientist to replace his dead son. However, as Astro cannot be a human, is rejected by his father. Soon he embarks on a journey where he saves people and cities and in the end reconciles with his father. The major character in this film was Toby/Astro and Dr. Tenma, his father figure and these characters and story has significant in historical context too. For instance, the end of world war II had bring devastation to Japan and crimes and evils had increased at that time too, so Astro is shown saving people and stopping US Force from attacking poor Vietnamese. (Tezuka Osamu and Astro Boy, 2008).
Moving towards the animation techniques used in the film; the first is computer aided techniques, which is 2D and 3D. For instance, in the movie Astro lashes needed to be long and curl, hence 3D techniques were used to achieve this feat. It was also used to fabricate vertices, edges and faces (Taylor, 2002). Furthermore, facial expression were also used such as parameterization to obtain a smiling, laughing or angry Astro Boy face or to remove wrinkles and to make these facial expression of Astro more realistic 2D and 3D morphing were also executed (Noh, 1998). Apart from these different other techniques were also implemented such as three fram shooting to emply a full animation, stop images to display a still photo of a crowd or still reaction from Astro Boy, Pull-Cells to make the scene with Astro flying or mving to save people and repetaition technique to illustrate Astro by walking around (Steinberg, 2006).
Before rating the movie, we will use eight judging criteria. The storytelling was good as the Astro acts of saving people provided with a moral message, the clarity of the scenes are also present and timing is perfectly used. Secondly, the 12 principles of animation were also utilized to portray facial expressions, fight scenes and the normal stance in the movie. The tchnical criteria was also met with the help of major and crucial animation techniques, the movie was properly paced with perfect display, camera angles and lip synchorization. Aesthetics was also given attention as the coloring was matched and expressing, art in form of bulding and characters were also present perfectly and use of sound was also present when Astro was in figh with the villans, good sound of punching and crashing. On audience interaction the animation was bit low because as individuals we do not have experinces like Astros’ in daily life, neither it wvikes any cultural or historical value, but it was good and sometimes made us laugh. In economic viability the budget was god, but the revenue was not as expected. However, the movie was entertaining and good to watch as it had fun and elemts of what children wants. Nonetheless, the movie had uniqueness and origionality because it was made on and Japanease anime and new to Americans.
Based on the judgement I think the movie was good, because of the characters and the dislay of simple themes such as grief and joy. Plus it was a light movie to watch with good entertainmet and the animation made the movie more realistic. Likewise, the availability of resources such as computers and other technological devices made the movie fall in good category.
Works Cited
Noh, Jun-yong. ” A Survey of Facial Modeling and Animation Techniques.” USC Technical Report (1998): 26.
Steinberg, Marc. ” Immobile Sections and Trans-Series Movement: Astroboy and the Emergence of Anime.” Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1. 2 (2006): 190-206.
Taylor, Richard. Encyclopedia of animation techniques. . New Burlington Books, 2002.
” Tezuka Osamu and Astro Boy .” 2008. 8 August 2014 .