Animated Narratives - Week 4

In response to this week's premise exercise, 'Place a character into a relationship with a need,' I began developing a short narrative about a man who wants to dance with his own skeleton.

The overarching conversation about character needs and motivations was very insightful, and had me thinking about characters and their purpose in a new way. In the past I would generally think of characters as symbols for ideologies, traits, emotions or archetypes, and while this is often the case I can see how important it is to ground a character in their own wants and needs.

In my mind I visualise my premise as a short animated film, following a man who dreams of seperating his body and his skeleton, creating a dance partner for himself. I'm not sure how I would conclude this story, but the initial concept has potential to resolve in a variety of interesting ways.

Though slightly different, this concept was partly inspired by the video game Felix The Reaper (Kong Orange, 2019). The game follows the titular Felix, a hopelessly romantic Grim Reaper set on winning the heart of Betty The Maiden from The Ministry of Life.