Animated Narratives Week 02: What if our thoughts, anxiety and fears manifested as other people in our lives?

Wiki Premise Week #2

What if our thoughts, anxiety and fears manifested as other people in our lives?

Example: Our partner is “fear” (embodies loneliness, boredom, ugly)

Boss: (embodies anxiety, stress, burnout)

Strangers: Paranoia, danger, 

This work examines the themes of mental health and how it affects our everyday lives. By physically emphasising the characterisation of the world in the narrative, the audience is shown the weight and impact of everyday life through the eyes of someone coping with severe anxiety / stress / depression and self esteem issues.

By using the medium of animation and it’s elements of exaggerated character design and history of caricature, we can use shapes, detail and colour to translate feelings and themes related to mental health. (in the visual examples, we see a group of strangers - visualised through the themes as shadowy, unsettling creepy and trustworthy figures. This helps to convey these themes to the audience, along with the difficulties the protagonist faces when dealing with these characters.)

This work is similar to the art of Masahiro Ito, particularly his work on the game Silent hill 2, In which characters emotions and mental struggles are conveyed as monsters / antagonists which torment him throughout the game and challenge him to grapple with the decisions he has made in his life.

A prime example of this are the infamous bobble head nurses, which symbolise the protagonist's feelings of sexual frustration, guilt and lust while his wife is in hospital with a terminal disease. 

YouTube. (2016). Why you should play Silent Hill 2. [Online Video]. 31 October 2016. Available from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckYvsSjV99A. [Accessed: 9 March 2021].

By further studying the work of Masahiro Ito and Team Silent (partically in Silent Hill 2) I am fascinated and inspried by the craftsmenship involved in taking a medium (in this case horror) and subverting expectations of where that narrative goes and the emotional journey that it takes it's audience on. To have people analyse, study and ultimaly label this game "beautiful" (when on the surface the work appears as nothing more then typhical horror fan fare) Is a real testament to the storytelling invloved and  fighting against preconceived  notions of genre in narrative.