Animator vs. Animation

Characters, according to Chatman are anything that does 'stuff.' Therefore, the Cursor and the Stick figure in Animator vs. Animation are characters because of their very entertaining war. Both characters I would argue are complex and have their own personalities and characteristic traits. However, I find it hard to label the Stick figure as the protagonist of the story. According to the story, the Stick figure was labeled as the "victim" from the start, but considering the actions of the Cursor versus those of the Stick figure I find it hard to accept the Cursor as the antagonist. For instance, if the Cursor were truly the "evil" character he could have simply wiped off the Stick figure's head with the eraser, or simply not created him at all. Yet, as the story plays out, it seems more and more believable that the Stick figure turned on his creator rather than was created to be destroyed. This idea unfortunately conflicts with story space and discourse space. In story space the reader is expected to accept the labels of each character, but in discourse space, the reader is allowed to interpret the events of the story.  read more »

so, weve all seen the animator vs. animation (AvA for short in this) in class, but, whilst searching on the internet,i stumbled upon another of the AvA series: animator vs. Animation 2 (apparantly there is a 3, but they were all removed from youtube...its a mystery why). the "victim" in this is named instead, "The Chosen One" (cue evil music). this story, however, is much more in depth than its counter part. the chosen one in this animation in fact does battle with the mozilla fire fox, AIM guy, and all sorts of other desktop paraphernalia. the animator, however, tries to get help using AIM from his buddy, but before the transmission is sent, the AIM screen is used as a weapon. anyway, i wont spoil the ending (which is 200,000 times better than the first in my opinion).  read more »

I have to admit that I was pretty entertained by animator vs. animation. I don’t think that I really need to explain to anyone what was going on, it was pretty simple: animator creates stick-figure, and then tries to kill it. What made A vs. A different and entertaining was that it broadened the dimensions of the story. Instead of the discourse and story space being restricted to the simple plane white canvas of the processing screen, the story was expanded to include the tool bar and the boarders. Every icon and button was in play. For some reason, A vs. A reminded me of the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I know, sounds dumb, but there are scenes in that movie in which the characters simple draw objects and they appear, much like A vs. A when the stick-figure (or perhaps the protagonist) draws lines and shields, only to have them suddenly part of the story, in the form of protection and weapons. The same idea can also be said for Krazy Kat. There are frames in the strip in which a character would draw something (or erase something) and it would affect the story. For example, Officer Pup drawing Ignatz in jail, or Ignatz erasing a brick in mid-flight.  read more »