The Symbolism of LITTLE ISLAND+Metaphors with animation and computer graphics

I decided to unwind a bit.

And during that time, I've decided to watch some animated stuff for a change.

One of those is an old 1958 animated short made by the Late Richard Williams.

This is his first animated short, long before he did Roger Rabbit, and certainly way before he ever did THE THIEF AND THE COBBLER..... so the animation being far more limited is an indication that he was just getting started in the medium.... before receiving his education on the medium....

And by education, I meant independent education by being mentored by industry veterans like Milt Kahl.

other examples include Ken Harris and Art Babbit.

Funny how the man who prefers full animation over limited managed without the proper art school education required..... well actually, Richard did go to art school but it wasn't for animation but instead, it was for fine arts. 

Using this REMBRANDT example due to Williams being inspired by the artist.

For me, I had to get two animation school educations to get to where I am. The first I took for exactly one semester before a dropped out. Then four years later, I reapplied and this time, took all my classes and then graduated with a diploma in ANIMATION AND ART DESIGN.

But enough talking about my art school education and let's get back into topic.

The film has no dialogue but that doesn't mean it's completely silent. 

Today, we live in an era where sound is a must but even a silent film should at least have sound and music. How else are you going to explain all those PIXAR shorts where they have no dialogue?

The way the three men in this short communicate at first is with crazy noises.

"NICE GOOD OLD RCA PHOTOPHONE CRAZY NOISES!!!"

"HEY, YOU'RE SUSPOSED TO BE SILENT!"

"SHIT! WE'RE SUSPOSED TO BE SILENT!"

Uh Oh.... somebody's breaking character in my blog..... anyway.....

Other times, it's with their imagination. 

*No lightbulbs here. Just lotus flowers.*

Very surreal but in this case, PSYCHEDELIC SURREAL.... this was 1958, almost 6 years before the rise of the HIPPIE movement. But still qualifies.

Despite how limited the animation is compared to Richard's later works, I often find that if you spend too much time on doing Full Animation, you risk not even telling something funny or poignant. 

So in essence, the short Little Island is an early example of Substance over Style, a direction which Richard would reverse gears.

The Bald guy, who goes by the name of BEAUTY, will visually demonstrate my allegory.

This same argument of style over substance also applies with VIDEO GAMES too. If all that matters to a video game is amazing graphics, then that's all that there is to it but even then, the gameplay won't be that good.

Despite example shown, I still love Crysis for it's merits and benchmarking potentials.

This GRAPHICS PRIORITIZATION PROBLEM didn't start with 3D games on PCs or game consoles but rather started much earlier. I don't know where it started but let's just use the COMMODORE AMIGA as a starting example.

When the COMMODORE AMIGA 1000 was released on July 23 1985, it was absolutely a QUANTUM LEAP in the realm of gaming on a computer. It could do many things that many computers and game consoles couldn't even dream of doing until the 90s rolled in.

But this Quantum Leap was also it's downfall too.

As nice as the graphics are for many games on the AMIGA, it also presented a problem:

GRAPHICS PRIORITIZATION.

It's where a game company prioritizes on Game Graphics instead of perfecting the gameplay and story of the game....

Many old games often don't stand the test of time due to the limitations of the Graphics from whence they came and that's disheartening especially when my generation who's first exposure was 3D games often get exposed to these older games. Since a lot of Younger Generation Gamers want really good graphics, they might disparage the older games for their primitive nature of how they were made.

But the reality is that it's not Game Graphics that are to blame. It's actually the deadlines that companies enforce for game development so that leaves companies scrambling to get the game finished on time but the focus is SHOULD THEY PRIORITIZE GAMEPLAY? OR THE GRAPHICS?

Don't have good examples of game deadlines so instead, I'm using this screenshot of a Calendar from NEON GENESIS EVANGELION.

Other times, the deadlines aren't a problem but rather the hardware of the era when these games were made. RAM prices were very expensive in the 80s and 90s and increasing it on the motherboard from the factory would introduce pricing problems for the hardware.

So while the Amiga could do lots and lots of colors, it couldn't do it at high resolution at first due to the cost of RAM needed for the screen buffers and draw routines and that could make things prohibitively expensive.

But then you'd argue, well how did those CGI Short Films get away with such hardware?

Well the fact is, the AMIGA wasn't used for shorts like Luxo Jr.

 or Tony de Peltrie.

 

Those films were made on different hardware, often minicomputers the size of a refrigerator or a closet and made by the likes of DEC or SGI... and costing more than over $10,000.

Anyhow, This problem escalated with the rise of 3D Game Graphics as they got better and better and suddenly, we have games that look absolutely nice but the gameplay is not great.

Blame it on companies like EA who only care about the money and not about the schmucks who pay for their games......

To give you assessment for the argument, I talked with a coworker of mine at the airport and she said she plays Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3(2023 version). 

She understood the game is not great but she still plays it....... out of spite.....

Look up MWF's score on STEAM to get an idea what I'm talking about.

The same argument can go for animation too. I've seen projects where they have limited animation but they tell better stories than animation done all buttery smooth.

But then I see that the films from the likes of Disney start to hog all the awards, thus making projects such as IRON GIANT, EL DORADO, CATS DON'T DANCE, BALTO, practically all those made by  competitors who feel like their work is all for nothing when they lose to Disney both with critics and box office numbers.

But it's not helped that a lot of those projects are trying too hard to be like Disney.... with all the musical numbers and the full animation, it's no wonder these projects try too hard and slumped and the only reason they prevail today is because they have a cult following that reappraises said films.

By the way, the Push for Competitor's to be like Disney is often blamed on Executives who...... 

Oh you know what I'm talking about......

Films like BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD, SOUTH PARK, they don't need to compete with Disney since those films are their own thing. They don't need Musical numbers.... well...sort of. 

SOUTH PARK BIGGER, LONGER, UNCUT is a musical but more befitting of parodying LES MISERABLES than Disney.... as a matter of fact, Trey and Matt dislike Disney so they don't care if they compete or not....

But Trey hated losing to PHIL COLLINS in 1999 but what do we care....

"To quote my 1982 hit song: I DON'T CARE ANYMORE."

Where do I stand with whether I should do Full or limited?

Well, I'm sort of in the middle.

I do like Nicely drawn animation but at the same time, is it worth animating on ONES? 

.........

Anyway, Metaphors over...... what's the symbolism of LITTLE ISLAND?

Well it's all over the place.

My personal favorite is the buildup before the big fight.... 

where BEAUTY turns into a snooty HARP PLAYING Figure,

 annoying the others with his harp playing

And whipping his snooty hair

Kind of reminds me of these drawings of a similar snooty guy.....

If you're wondering who the snooty guy on these three images is, he's the gangly guy with the pointy nose, sweater vest, sharp shirt collar, and eyelashes.... also his hand gestures too.

Anyway, the guy painted in red blood, his name is GOOD, has had enough of BEAUTY'S Snooty attitude. So he decides to take action

Of course, BEAUTY isn't without rage and clearly, beating the shit out of him as well as jacking his precious feather is enough to piss him off......

And transform so he can have his revenge.

All while TRUTH, watches in horror as the two fight.

So the symbolism of Little Island most likely would be about the Cold War and the ideologies between the two superpowers. After all, this short was released around the time Tensions between the U.S and U.S.S.R were at an all time high before things simmered down during detente period.

This is most likely where I'll end this post.

I admit, I went into another rant..... or was it..... Yikes..... this Short was enough to inspire me to go off the kilter with metaphors instead of focusing on one thing which was the short.... 

I guess I have something in common with LITTLE ISLAND.... and that's breaking away from the general topic at hand....

But many of my comments about Amiga Graphics are true.... from a Youtuber's perspective. 
The comments were from David Murray, aka THE 8-BIT GUY, where he criticized developers for prioritizing Game Graphics over gameplay.

And I've seen the memes where GAME GRAPHICS were prioritized but I currently don't have the meme to show you so I'm doing this clearly by memory.

But this post is not me bashing the RTX cards or anything, otherwise I'd be bashing myself for buying a $1700 RTX 4080 in November 2023. For one, Yes, I like the ray-tracing in today's games but at the same time, games should also prioritize gameplay over making the graphics look hyper realistic.... Look at what has happened with CALL OF DUTY. No wonder Bobby Kotick resigned from ACTIVISION but I guess the failure of 2023's COD MWF3 wasn't the real reason for his resignation.

Yes I've read the criticism of Kotick.... but is he as bad as David Zaslav or worse? 

I'll let you be the judge of that. For me, I'm just going to leave my viewpoint at a grey area.

One final thing, I've finally got Blu-Rays playing on my PC. Took me over 6 months to get it working but it's finally doing the job.

Here's a screenshot from my HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME Blu-Ray.

If you click the screenshot, it will look much larger than my other screenshots I've taken with VLC player when playing DVDs. 

The Screenshots will still look big compared to my DVD Screenshots but you might want to check what monitor you're using as your daily driver. I'm using a 1440p monitor so my mileage may vary on my end but it's definitely better resolution than on DVD.

And that's only the playback of Blu-Rays. I haven't got the menus working yet due to missing JAVA files so I'll have to work on that in the future. But still, a major achievement.

I'm almost DEJA VIEW level of high quality Screenshots from Physical Media.......

By the way, check out ANDREAS DEJA's blog DEJA VIEW while you're at it.

As for THEIF and the COBBLER, I'm keeping my eye out for the MARK 5 print of the film. So far, we're still at Mark 4 for most downloads. And the YOUTUBE Page dedicated to Richard William's work hasn't uploaded MARK 5 yet...

As it turns out, there is a Mark 5 but according to Garrett Gilchrist, Mark 5 is unfinished due to lack of funds and lack of motivation. 

But someone was dedicated enough to let it loose on ARCHIVE.ORG. Here are the links to the film:

https://archive.org/details/the-thief-and-the-cobbler-recobbled-cut-mark-5-wip

https://archive.org/details/the-thief-and-the-cobbler-recobbled-cut-mark-5-wip-06-20-23

Man, all these metaphors and ramblings are making me hungry for more information. I got a sneak peak, sans pictures though:

THE SWEATBOX.

Believe it or not, I saw this Documentary in College and I want to point out a few things in the Documentary that's going to be very educational and will.... just wait for the surprise.