Title Image: Writings on Irish Folklore, Legend and Myth
By William Yeats

After being told about the presentation brief I took some time to work out what I’m most interested in talking about. My first instinct was to look through my Vimeo page, I had a bit of a lone screening evening and decided CODA was something I would really like to use as a starting point. The film itself is pretty famous, won lots of awards, but I felt like there was a rich range of subjects covered in it to go into. As appears to be a theme for me, I was drawn to the more somber themes, and I decided to go ahead with “The motif of death in animation”.

Since then, I had a video meeting with Laura-Beth which was super helpful, and it was really nice to just have a one-on-one chat about the subject. She helped me to narrow it down a bit (death is arguably the most complicated and explored subject there is, because we as humans will never truly have the answers.) and settled on focusing specifically on the Irish studio that created CODA. I noticed when researching that their ‘main’ films seemed to have a consistent theme of the death of a character. This certainly isn’t unusual in animation (watch any Disney film; apparently to be a protagonist you need to have dead parents), but the way OMAP addresses death and grief is in a way unlike I have connected to before.

Going for an Irish studio also gives me the opportunity to look into Irish folklore, and apply that research to my analysis.

…and so, drum roll please as I present the working title!

The Recurring theme of Death and Grief in And Maps and Plans Short Films.

(It’s a bit long, so I’ll probably alter it a little later.)

Initially I was looking more into the depiction of the grim reaper in animation, it’s quite interesting really, because it seems there are two main ways of displaying the character: scary or comical. Here’s a list of characters and concepts in animation I made when I thought I was going down that route.

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• Death and the Mother, Ruth Lingford, 1997 (B&W etched wood animation) based on a story from Hans Christian Andersen
• Death in Animaniacs
• Death in family guy : making fun of the character, has asthma, a rebel teenager
• Soul (afterlife)
• The cursed idol from Happy Tree Friends (a death adjacent representation. Based off of the fertility idol in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the lost ark).
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole Inspired by death as written in “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe in 1842.
• Coco (land of the dead, Mexican folklore)
• Harry Potter Deathly Hallows Deathly Hallows “Death”
• Death – Adventure Time (The Netflix age of animation: Cartoon for the adult existentialist.
• Satan/ Mysterious strange in The Adventures of Mark Twain

Recurring aesthetics in the depiction of death: colours, skulls, expression, size etc

How has the character of Death changed over time according to cultural context and stylistic trends in animation?

Extra

Mexico: Upon dying, a person was believed to travel to Chicunamictlán, the Land of the Dead. Only after getting through nine challenging levels, a journey of several years, could the person’s soul finally reach Mictlán, the final resting place. https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/day-of-the-dead