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.

"Ruka" and "Surogat"

Surogat

Ruka

These two short films are animated European political satires, each with their own method of animation, story-telling, humour, but very similar themes. They both differ in many ways, and I'm going to compare and contrast each of these films.

Ruka, by Jiri Trnka, appears to have a rather high budget, as opposed to Surogat. There are numerous sets, props, and special effects used in this short, it's also longer (18 mins). Surogat, by Dusan Vukotic and Zagreb Film, is noticeably cheap looking, with very simplistic designs, art, and animation; he backgrounds are quite bland and sometimes non-existent, of course this is mainly because this works with the style the directors were going for. The colours in Ruka are rather bland (mostly tinted with brown) with some low key lighting, and this is to give the short a very bleak tone and dark atmosphere. There are more bright colours towards the end, with a harsh blue background, and bright red as well. Both the colours and the lighting in Surogat are bright, in comparison to Ruka, with a lot of vibrancy which is suitable for the brighter and more comical tone of this short. 

They both share the same political context, of course Ruka is more about Trnka's own personal experiences, being hassled by the Czech Republic to make propaganda for them, much like how the character in the film is told to make a statue of the hand instead of a pot for his plant. In Surogat, the protagonist seems to be a satirical representation of the leaders at the time, who built the country and feels like they deserve to get what they want, and this doesn't really become clear until the final scene when he creates the roads. It could also represent how men have shaped the standard of beauty for women, for example, he makes one woman then creates a different woman because he finds that one more attractive.

Both shorts manage to work well with each of their soundtracks. The pacing in Ruka is very close to the soundtrack, generally there is no music, but during the dramatic scenes the soundtrack is nothing but an anonymous drum beat, to add a grim and tense atmosphere. In Surogat, the music is quite bouncy and upbeat, much like the tone. It also mostly consists of the main character humming a tune. Both Ruka and Surogat intended on portraying the government honestly using surrealism so that they wouldn't catch on. This is due to the fact that it was illegal to negatively portray the government in media at the time. Surogat intended on doing that whilst also bringing some comic relief to its audiences. They both share the same target audience, although considering the tone and content in Surogat, you could say that that could be seen as more of a family film.