Introduction

My name is Daniel Sliwa, and I'm majoring in Cinema at SIUC. In this blog I will share my views on readings for animation, animated films, as well as detail the progress on my final animation project.

I'm taking this course because I believe that to be a successful filmmaker one must be educated in various genres, and animation is one genre that is very prevalent in entertainment. I haven't worked that much with animation, so I hope to gain some real hands-on experience by challenging myself. I'm also fascinated in the history of animation, and would love to learn about it.

Anime has always been interesting to me, from the childhood days of Pokemon, to the mesmerizing work of Hayato Miyazaki, Japanese animation has a vast amount of entertaining shows and films. Recently, I watched the film Paprika, and I was in awe of how beautiful the artwork was, as well as, how original the story was. I chose to watch it because my friends were talking about how it was both comparable and superior to Inception, so I decided to pop it in and was glad I did so.

I believe the worst animated film I saw was Beowulf. Beowulf is a terrific piece of literature, but the movie just seemed to be trying too hard. The animation was slick, but the cinematography and editing was too over the top for me. I didn't care about any of the characters, and the story was presented as dull. It was truly a bastardization of strong source material.