Week 12, In-Class

My Voice

           For as long as I can remember, my voice as an artist has been cartoony. I've been drawing cartoon characters since I first started drawing at the age of three. My sketchbook from my childhood contains many drawings of animated characters. The sketchbook begins at age 6, with a drawings of characters from the Dreamworks animated film, Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron. From there, there are numerous other drawings of horses and other animated characters like Snoopy, Angelina the Ballerina, Donkey from Shrek, Mickey Mouse, and many others. And I guess you could say that still applies to me this day, as I study computer animation. I have always loved lively characters, and the stories of the characters. I love fairy tales, and dreamy/cheesy romantic love stories, or stories with strong leading female characters or anything really girly and pink. I believe that my overall voice is "happy." What can I say, I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

Week 12

This week I’ve chosen French director, Jacques Tati. I began watching Trafic (1971) and Playtime (1967), by the director. Though Tati only directed six films in his career as a director, his films are famous for being comedic and for Tati to be in his own film. In many of his films, including Trafic and Playtime, Tati plays the lead character, Monsieur Hulot, a socially inept man with a raincoat, umbrella and pipe.

The character M. Hulot brings a similar voice to each of his films. Since Tati has created a character that people can see in his multiple films, he has created an archetype from this character. The character is an new archetype of its own. He is a man who struggles and makes impractical decisions, but it is funny to the viewers.  
His films, Playtime and Trafic, both share the common element of automobiles. It is a theme in his movies, of technology, society, and materialism. Playtime contains the same beloved character of M.Hulot, but the film’s appearance is more cold. The film takes place in a “futuristic and modern” (for its time, 1967) suburb of Paris. I feel as though Playtime, is a bit different from his usual films, but that he tried something different.

Trafic is Tati’s last film with his character, M.Hulot. In this film, Hulot is a bumbling automobile inventor who is trying to get to Amsterdam in a vehicle that has a few issues along the way. The film gets its title because there is a lot of traffic on the road. The voice of the film is quiet and subtle. All of the gags in the film are visual gags of people acting silly. One of my favorite scenes of the traffic is this one minute sequence of the people in traffic subtly picking their nose. Each shot is a different French person sitting in their car, and their finger slowly goes up to their nose, and they look around to make sure no one is watching. Trafic is full of this very subtle, old-fashioned French humor, which leads me to believe that Tati's voice in many of his films are subtly humorous.