Visual Analysis: Bottle (2010) & The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside (2002)

Bottle, and The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside are both low-budget, indie animations, that effectively work around their lack of production values by using cheap methods that compliment their visual style. Bottle uses litter found on the beach, sand, snow, and objects found in the forest, which are obviously free unless you have to pay mother nature for that stuff. Whereas The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside, uses a very simple art style and method for animation. Since the characters in it comprise of mainly shapes, they get away with animating it without putting much thought on the in-betweens, dodging many basic principles of animation, as well as animating at an exceptionally low frame-rate.

Bottle has some impressively consistent lighting, considering it's shot mainly outside, taking time of day and weather into account. The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside is also quite impressive in terms of this, as it manages to establish day and night effectively, as well as having rather smooth transitions between them.

It's unclear if the content for Bottle was meant to be telling us something. How the two characters meet is clearly meant to be synonymous with online dating, only it's through the classic note in a bottle trope. Of course they have to communicate that way, since they can't exactly swim to each other, but they end up connecting so much that they decide that they have to meet each other in person. They obviously only thrive in their own environment but want to meet each other anyway. This could also symbolise the online daters' own comfort zones being so opposite that they couldn't handle each other? In The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside, the content is quite clearly supposed to resemble a man that feels like a woman inside, and trying to come to terms with that. It could, however, also be about the difference between being masculine and feminine, and trying to find that harmonic balance between the two. Or it could just be about a dog trying to suppress it's inner catlike instincts. This one is a lot more open to interpretation than Bottle.

Bottle is pretty relevant for the time it was made, if my interpretation for the themes are correct, as online dating was very popular in 2010, to the point where dating sites were (and still are) even being advertised on TV. When The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside was released, in 2002, transgender was quite the touchy subject. No one really called it "transgender" that often, actually, because people thought it was a sexuality, and mainly referred to it as "transvestism", and people were referred to as "transvestites" regardless of whether or not they wore the opposite gender's clothing because they identified as them or just felt comfortable in them. Of course, this is still assuming The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside intended on actually having that correlation with this theme. Context would be a factor into this if it was the case.

There wasn't much emphasis on music in these shorts, in fact there was no music at all in Bottle, but they each work around this in their own ways. In Bottle, as I said, there is no music but rather environmental noises, depending on the setting the sounds were mainly ocean noises in the beach scenes, and windy noises in the snowy scenes. There is some very decent sound-design in this, actually, although the sound of the sand scraping the glass bottle goes right through me, I guess that's a good sign on their part though. The music in The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside was pretty generic Paris background music, nothing exactly to write home about, but it does establish the setting and tone effectively. The sound effects are also subtle but well done. It is rather obvious that the dog and cat noises were done by people, but I actually think it works here as it sounds rather silly, adding to the more comedic tone of this short.

Bottle was basically made to tell a cute love story with kind of a twist in the way it turns out, so it works in that sense. Like most indie shorts, it wasn't really meant for a specific target audience. The correlation in it should be more familiar with adults, but it doesn't exactly target them as an audience. It's tone of voice is appropriate for adults and young people, not being too dark or too light. It might actually be that the point of Bottle was to introduce kid's to these adult themes in a fairly light tone of voice. The Dog Who Was a Cat Inside is kind of similar in the sense that it kind of exists just to tell a cute story with real-world themes that a select group of people might be familiar with, but does it in a tone of voice that would appeal to both adults and children, though I think this might appeal to children slightly, because it's not as slow as Bottle and has that rather nice looking 2D/3D art style.

Subculture: My Thoughts.

Subcultures mainly consist of groups of people that like to distance themselves from the norm of society, typically due to the oppressive nature of whichever culture they belong to that demands that their social standards be met quite strictly. A few examples of this include goths, street punks, and hippies. This is typically done by dressing and styling themselves in a certain manner beyond social standards, as well as acting unconventionally. Sub-cultures are usually considered rather edgy and controversial, due to society's anxiety towards irregular folks within their community.

Subcultures are often looked down upon but some find their attitude and fashion-sense rather appealing. For this reason, you often find people not part of a subculture but still dressing like them. This has led many clothing stores to market their fashion products towards subcultures and people that look up to them. This kind of breaks the idea of subcultures, since the point of them is to go beyond the norm, and yet their style has become marketable.

Recently, "geek culture" has become rather popular, possibly due to TV series like Big Bang Theory and IT Crowd, and, in my opinion, it has actually led to a more positive perspective on geek culture within society, since before then it was considered more shameful to follow that lifestyle. Both the term geek culture, and people actually identifying as "geeks" is evident that this has essentially become another subculture. Granted, I am someone that by definition fits into this category of subculture but doesn't really identify as it. I feel like the difference between subcultures and everybody else is that they take pride in the fact that they are distancing themselves from society.

I personally think the very existence of subcultures is rather contradictory if the idea is go beyond the norm. They basically end up creating their own norm within their subculture, which is no different to what they were trying to avoid. I mean, are they trying not to conform by... conforming to their own culture? I don't have a problem with people being different, though. I wholeheartedly support individuality, but I don't think developing a group of people to celebrate this is necessarily the right thing to do. I always see subcultures as types of tribes, because people are basically forming a group based on their own differences and live in that particular manner. They create their own comfort zone because of this, and when they see other people/groups outside of that comfort zone, their instincts tend to vary between fascination, confusion, and irritation, most often the latter of the three. I believe this violent aspect of human nature as a species hasn't yet evolved since the Dawn of Man.