"Love of Blue Umbrella": Looking Back and Seeing Her Again

Maxie 2022-04-14 08:01:01

It has been more than 70 years since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences established the Animated Short Film Award at the fifth Oscar. Animated short films of different countries, different themes and different expression techniques appeared on this stage, which left a deep impression on the audience.

Driven by commercial interests, long-form animated films need to take into account factors such as the market and audience, so they tend to be conservative in terms of subject matter or presentation. But animated short films have no scruples in this regard, and often produce some excellent works full of experimentation, pioneering and exploratory, and this is also the biggest advantage of animated short films in the game with animated long films. Diversified themes and roles, flexible and rich production materials and expression techniques, coupled with highly creative and imaginative themes, make the animated short films always maintain a strong vitality.

Although animated short films have almost no economic benefits, the biggest reason why many animation companies, including big Hollywood studios, are still happy to make short films is that animated short films are a huge hotbed for cultivating animation talents, inspiring original spirit, and accumulating production experience. Take Japan, a major animation country, as an example. Since 2010, the government will allocate 200 million yen to support 4 animation short films every year to train new animators and create opportunities for small animation production companies. Many world-renowned animation directors have been trained step by step from the production of animated short films. At the same time, animated short films also provide a lot of themes and materials for long films to learn from, and some animation images have successfully jumped from short films to long films. or in the series.

Since the beginning of the new millennium, with the development of Internet technology, we have also been able to understand and watch many high-level animated short films, such as "The Old Man and the Sea", "Memories of Building Blocks House", "Violent Clouds and Sending Cranes", "Wingless" Bird", "Mr. Hublow" and so on. The "Blue Umbrella Love" discussed in this article is also a short film with a very high evaluation. Although it was not nominated for an Oscar in the end (the best animated short at the Oscar was won by "Mr. Hablo"), it is relaxed and warm. The theme and high-quality pictures still won the unanimous recognition of the audience.

"Blue Umbrella Love" is directed by German photography and composition artist Saschka Unseld. According to him, the inspiration for the short film came from a broken umbrella lying in a gutter when walking alone on the streets of San Francisco on a rainy day. "It's a very sad picture. I stood there thinking about what happened to it." So Unseld opened his mind and had this six-minute romance. love.

In fact, the director originally wanted to shoot live in the downtown area, but he had to give up because of the difficulty of implementation, but he kept the realistic style. In conjunction with it, in order to achieve photo-level visual effects, Pixar uses technologies that have never been used before, such as global illumination, depth image synthesis, etc., so that each picture is full of rich light and shadow and depth of field, which can almost be faked. . It is precisely because of this that the anthropomorphic scenes in the short film can be perfectly presented. When the first raindrops fall from the sky, objects such as sewers, sinks, mailboxes, traffic lights, and awnings come alive. If it is made into ordinary procedural animation, it is absolutely impossible to have such an effect.

Of course, technology is only an auxiliary means after all, the film is long or short, and the story always comes first. Although "Love in the Blue Umbrella" does not have an unexpected ending like some short films, it shows the ignorance, beauty and unpredictability of love in its infancy in just a few minutes. Combined with Sarah Jaffe's fresh humming, it seems It is relaxed and comfortable and brings infinite reverie to the audience.

Perhaps there was also a drizzly evening when we accidentally saw a charming woman on a crowded street corner. When the eyes of the two met suddenly, a wonderful love sprouted. However, will we also be like the blue umbrella, regardless of the wind and rain, to follow and search hard? Or let fate let this short encounter become another regret in life? When we smile at the efforts of the sinks and mailboxes, or sigh at the demise of their origin, are we touched by the perseverance of Blue Umbrella? Although the film is short, it contains a simple truth - the achievement of love requires fate and impulse, one is objective and the other is subjective, and the two are indispensable.

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