Rendezvous With CANDYCRACKER

From the first moment I laid eyes on this video, it was apparent that it was not going to be like anyting else I had every seen. And, indeed it was not.

However, the story line was simple when broekn down. A character, the main character or protagonist, murdered a priest and stole its heart. Afterwards the murderer is running from the police or antagonist, in order to escape capture. While attempting to escape a second Antagonis, the candycracker, severs the tendons of the murderer's fingers. This causes the murderer to fall, seemingly causing death.

One thing in this video is that the death is mainly assumed because the animator shows the visual perspective of the murderer as he is falling, one never sees the impact and proof of death. I do not know if this is any type of method used by the animator or if it simply seemed like a creative way to end what I call a very bizzar video.

The characters themselves did not resemble humans, they were strangly created, some with huge hands on which they sat others (the police) which were basically cylender shape with guns. With the apparent "strange" style of the characters, I am lead to believe that the animater did not have the ablity to draw natural human figures. Which I was told is a method for getting around this difficulty.

There were only a few sound effects, ranging from the sound of the tendons snapping to the sound of the horse running. There was no dilague at all, but there was music which played consistently throughout the video. The music I noticed did not fade or break, or even stop at any point for the duration of the flash video. However, the choice of music did seem to follow along with the animation almost as though it were created just for it (this I do not know). I can speculate that the animator spent a great amount of time detailing everything from the music to the background just right.

What else is so different about this video, well there is a lot more. Some of which I am sure would take me hours and hours to tap into. For now, I add that with the characters there were two colors, white and red. The red was bright, and very bold. I feel this was used as a method to have the characters really stand out from the surrounding background. And, the backgrounds were very basic, almost see through. They looked like simple pencle sketches and this could also have been a method to really make the characters stand out.

All in all, I did not really like the video. I chose it because it was different but it did not appeal to me in any other way, if anything I found it to be annoying from the consistent chewing of Candycracker to the extremely strage style of the characters. It isn't me or my style...

The crock files

This time around I decided to choose the animation by Todd Gallina called the crock files.

Right off the bat even before I open the webpage to watch the flash animation I can notice a very different animation style from "Teddy and Anna." The most noticible to me is the dark outlines one sees in all of Todd Gallina's animation videos, compared to Teddy and Anna, which have no dark outlines on the animation. Continuing on the style of the animation, the crock files characters are more abstact, the lines which create them aren't very smooth, often very rough in nature.

The movement is jumpy, it simply jumps back and fourth in the frames to give the illusion of movement. In Teddy and Anna, the characters acctually showed what I call natural movement, they seemed more human and the characters design was also much more human like and natural. Going deep into detail to further my point, I want to bring up the eyes from both animations. The characters from crock files primarily have simple circles as their eyes, yet in Teddy and Anna, the characters have (I use this word a lot) more natural or human like eyes consisting of eye sockets, puples, basically the whole eye sructure itself.

The dialogue in crock files is more of a modern style to voicing over, instead of the old style separate scene which has written dialogue that those who are watching must see and read instead of listen to. In the crock files, all one has to do is have their volume up enough to be able to listen to what the character is saying and to hear the various "things" going on.

One thing I did not bring up in Teddy and Anna is that one does not hear the movement or activity, music is playing over the entire animation, the dialogue isn't even heard, only read. But in the crock files, you can hear simple activity and also hear what the character is saying.

The crock files has a comedic plot to its animation, which allows for laughter. I see this as a reason for its more choppy and less natural animation as well as the much brighter colors throughout the episode. Teddy and Anna was more of a dark series, and had darker colors and darker music to show the seriousness of the animation.

All in all, the two very distict styles of Teddy and Anna and the crock files basically have to do with the story being portrayed and also with the preference and style of the animator.

As to which one I might prefer, I am the type of person who would enjoy brighter colors and more of a comedic animaton as opposed to dark colors such as browns and serious/dark animations which I really dislike.