Blog #3.5 John Canemaker Screening

During the screening of John Canemaker, we watched two of his works, entitled "Confessions of a Stardreamer" and "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation." They were animated short films which I found to be very unique and fresh. The films work because the artist captures the emotions of the narrator and the protagonists through use of color, lines, and different media. In "Confessions," he creates the personality of the woman who he is capturing, through changing her body shape. This mimics her ability to transform and morph into different personalities as she is an actress. Canemaker uses perspective to capture the feelings of when he was a child in "The Moon and the Son." An example of this is seen when the police enter to arrest his father for insurance fraud. The policemen are drawn coming out of a doorway and looking very intimidating and large, as would be seen through the eyes of a small child. He uses bold lines and thin lines to depict strength and fragility, as seen with the fist of the hot-tempered father in the second work we watched. In the same work, he depicts the mother using soft, curving lines, while the father is represented as being very sharp and angular, like an unstable bolt of electricity. In "Confessions," he personifies the faces of the people in the audience during an audition as being like those of scary creatures in the dark. This tells us that she is shaken by auditions and that they will figuratively tear her acting apart. In the second work, he uses newspaper clippings, photographs, and home video. He does this to illustrate the reality of the situation and how brutal it was. It strengthens the family's depiction and portrayal when they are animated and made into symbols. These films opened my eyes to animation, and it is something that I want to explore and learn more about because I think it is pure magic.