Month: October 2022

Sea child is an 8-minute hand-painted animation. It does have a narrative, nevertheless, I still consider this animation as a conceptual abstraction. 

The narrative of the story is simple: a young girl on the verge of becoming a woman follows a group of men in the streets to find her mother. Abstraction comes in the representation of her nightmares and the symbolism of the eel fish. 

This animation can be defined under the genre of drama. The combination of animation techniques and chosen theme creates a very dark mood and leaves a long-lasting impression. 

The animation shows a male-dominant world where all generations of women are serving and pleasuring them. From a young age, girls are besieged by men that are trying to make them do whatever men want. A symbolic eel fish represents the idea of womanhood. It is killed and served to men and fed to a young girl so she can become the same. 

The animation was hand painted with mostly black and red ink. Only in a scene of a city were added colours to make it look vivid. Kim, the director and animator, said about the technique, “I really liked the texture and the way it looked. It felt very analogue as the ink stayed on the wooden boards no matter how hard I tried to remove it. The trail of what had happened before keeps a sense of the time that was put into and it felt right for the story”. (Munday, R., (2016) Experimental about innocence in animation. Available at: https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/10/04/sea-child/ Accessed: 27.10.2022) The domination of black colour created a feeling of isolation and anxiety, while drops of red colour represented blood and womanhood. The domination of male characters is shown by their visual enlargement, while a young girl becomes smaller compared to them, or she fully disappears.

The audio in the animation mostly enhances the movement and sounds of the world. There are only three additional songs that are performed by three women there: a young girl, her mother and her grandmother. Each of them has its own motive and represents each generation.

The film Mommy describes a complicated relationship between the mother and her teenage son. This relationship balances between unconditional love and fear, extreme happiness and heartbreaking dramas. 

The story arch

To break down the story arch of the film I am going to use a way to describe a story arch as a circle created by Dan Harmon. The circle consists of 8 stages. I will go through each stage with examples from the film Mommy.

1. The character is in a zone of comfort. Diane (Die) is a widowed single mother, who works as a journalist and leads a small column in a newspaper.
2. They want something. Die wants to pick up her teenage son Steve from an institution. He was discharged because he started a fire which ended up injuring one of the boys there. 
3. They enter an unfamiliar situation. Right after Die is reconnected with her kid, she loses her job which leaves them both almost without any means of subsistence. This is also a stage that brings a new character – Kyla, a mother. She recently lost her son and moved to a new area with her family to get through it. 
4. Adapt to it. Kyla starts to tutor Steve and finds a way to deal with his behaviour (Steve has ADHD, attachment disorder and occasional violence). Die is looking for a new job. 
5. Get what they wanted. Three of them have bonded. Kyla seems to get through her loss and eliminate her stuttering problem. Steve receives better marks on his school works. And Die finds a job in a cleaning service and does translation work on the side. 
6. Pay a heavy price for it. A big fall happens when Die receives a letter from the parents of an injured boy, that says Steve and she have been sued for the injuries the fire caused. It ends up in Steve’s aggression and a suicide attempt. 
7. Return to their familiar situation. Die realises that Steve could never change and decides to put him in a hospital for troubled children. Die ends up being by herself again. Kyla decides to move again. Steve is abandoned again as he was a few years ago after his father died.
8. Having changed. Steve calls his mother from the hospital to apologise for everything he has done and runs towards a large bright window. 

The archetypes

Steve is the rebel. He goes against the rules and follows his interests. It was not a choice, but a consequence of all the pain he had to go through and his mental illnesses.

Die is the mother. She does everything she can to save her child. Unfortunately, the circumstances are above her abilities.

Kyla is a tutor. She teaches Steve to be more patient and to deal better not only with his behaviour but also with his studies. 

A timeline for the main character starting before the film start

From the film, we know that Diana left school early and did not receive a proper education. She cannot get rid of bad habits, struggles with absent-mindedness, often behaves eccentrically and becomes the initiator of conflicts. 

Before the death of Diana’s husband she was probably a housewife that enjoyed her life, loved dressing up and was not completely invested in her son’s life, which resulted in Steve seeking for mother’s love. After the death of the family’s breadwinner, she had to find her own ways to provide for the family. She found a job as a journalist but only because of her romantic relationship with the chief. Steve began to commit small crimes. The mother could not deal with his behaviour and she was forced to turn to the help of special institutions.

Title: How has feminism influenced animation

The film industry has been represented as male-dominant as soon as it became commercialised. It resulted in the inaccessibility of high-skilled and professional jobs for women only on the basis of their gender and therefore, the under-representation of the female experience in animation. The second and third waves of feminism brought the possibility to hire and promote more female workers. And the art of animation began to be filled with female protagonists of more than one male-gaze archetype. 

Keywords: feminism, animation, gender.

Bryson, V. (1992). Feminist Political Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Simensky, L. (1996). “Women in the Animation Industry: Some Thoughts,” Animation World Magazine, Volume 1, No.2.

Pilling, J., ed., (1992). Women and Animation. London: St Edmundsbury Press Ltd.