Producto editorial - Animatic

HOW AN ANIMATED TREAT WAS MADE

Pixar’s character design tips

Cuphead review 12 animation principles

FIRST STEPS

THE FOLLOWING 12 BASIC PRINCIPLES OF ANIMATION WERE DEVELOPED BY THE ‘OLD MEN’ OF WALT DISNEY STUDIOS, AMONGST THEM FRANK THOMAS AND OLLIE JOHNSTON, DURING THE 1930S. THESE PRINCIPLES CAME AS A RESULT OF REFLECTION ABOUT THEIR PRACTICE AND THROUGH DISNEY’S DESIRE TO DEVISE A WAY OF ANIMATING THAT SEEMED MORE ‘REAL’ IN TERMS OF HOW THINGS MOVED, AND HOW THAT MOVEMENT MIGHT BE USED TO EXPRESS CHARACTER AND PERSONALITY.

Squash and stretch This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it’s broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking.

This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

Anticipation This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed.

The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher’s wind-up or a golfers’ back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

Staging A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once.

Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion.

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The first drawing is more interesting than the second one. The 3/4 view and the position of the arms make a more dynamical pose; as a result, a better staging.

FIRST STEPS

Straight ahead and pose to pose Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn’t have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

Follow through and overlapping action When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. “DRAG,” in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly.

Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

The first sequence shows a straight-ahead process, while the second shows only the key frames of an action.

In this sequence, notice that the hat follows the movement of the character.

Slow-out and slow-in As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.

The ball slows in in the arcs and slows out when falling and bouncing.

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FIRST STEPS

Arcs All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

Arcs are present in every action the human body does: to walk, to jump, moving an arm or a leg... Every body part has a pivot point, excepting the tongue.

Secondary action

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This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk.

Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary.

Notice that the primary action is the walking cycle, while the secondary action includes the arm movement and the expression of thinking.

FIRST STEPS

Timing Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement.

Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters.

Exaggeration

Transform this...

Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. Its like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.

...into THIS!!

Solid drawing The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life.

You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

Appeal A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal.

Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience’s interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

The following has been paraphrased from the “Illusion Of Life” by Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston. For a more extensive explanation of these principles, refer to this seminal text.

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FIRST STEPS

CHARACTER DESIGN CHARACTER DESIGN IS A VITAL COMPONENT OF PIXAR'S WORK. CHARACTER IS WHAT DRIVES THE STORY AND BREATHS LIFE INTO A FILM.

complete hundreds of drawing of what they believed the character would be like. An art review will then be undertaken where the director selects a number of these drawings and designs which best fit their vision when they were writing the script and The design of characters for the film begins during the initial stag- developing the character for the film. The character designer es of the development of the film. Pixar's character designers work then takes those drawing and begins developing them again with the director as the script is still being written to bring the back at the drawing board. This process repeats itself until the characters to life. As the concept and script of the film goes through perfect character has been designed.

At Pixar, character design begins with pencil sketches. many changes, so does the design of the different characters.

The connection of the audience to the character is the prima- Sometimes the artists have a clear idea about the character, ry goal when designing a Pixar character. Imbuing the characters sometimes only a vague notion of the character’s personality.

The designers draw thousands of penwith humanity, and focusing on their cil and marker sketches to refine the humanity is vitally important to creTHINK ABOUT THE MEANING OF THE ating this connection. When designWORD 'CHARACTER'. YOU'RE SUPPOSED look of each character. Pixar has to decide how cartoony, how iconic, and ing a character, a Pixar artist needs to TO BREATH LIFE INTO THESE THINGS, know what to exaggerate and what to MAKE THEM APPEALING AND GIVE THEM how realistic they want each character to appear. play down, what to add to give a hint of THE MAGIC THAT WILL ALLOW PEOPLE TO Even though you might not notice, background and depth, and what to do IMAGINE WHAT THEY'RE LIKE TO MEET each character has a theme when it to develop personality.

AND HOW THEY MIGHT MOVE. appears on screen. We want the audiPixar’s artists use tradition media -Neil McFarland ence to read each character instantly. to draw the initial design of their charAfter the artists have drawn and acters. An artist typically does hundreds, sometimes thousands, of sketches before they are satisfied designed the look of each character, it is the animators who must then bring them to life on screen, giving them personality and with the design of their character.

A major character goes through a much longer design process movement. Animation is full of detail inspired from human life. and often includes a number of artists and the director working to Every movement of a character which is animated is executed to precision, and beautifully detailed. The animators carefulcreate the look, feel and personality of the character.

The process of designing a character starts with a character ly craft their creations, and ensure they are accurate to the findesigner receiving script pages from the director. These script est detail; demonstrating why Pixar’s characters are so memorapages describe what the character is like. The artist then has to ble and believable.

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The creation of Wall-E was highly complicated as they had to design him to be mechanical and have the mechanisms of a robot while still maintaining a level of humanity.

FIRST STEPS

PIXAR'S TIPS FOR DESIGNING A SUCCESSFUL CHARACTER WHEN A PIXAR ARTIST IS DESIGNING A CHARACTER THERE ARE A NUMBER OF AREAS THEY EXPLORE TO ENSURE A SUCCESSFUL CHARACTER DESIGN.

Research and evaluate

Exaggerated characteristics

It can be helpful to try and deconstruct why certain characters and their characteristics work and why some don't. Study other characters and think about what makes some successful and what in particular you like about them.

Exaggerating the defining features of your character will help it appear larger than life. Exaggerated features will also help viewers to identify the character's key qualities.

Making different sketches you can evaluate the characteristics that work for your character.

A way to exaggerate is changing the proportions of the body, such as height, the eyes, the cheeks, etc

Who is it aimed at?

Visual impact

Think about your audience. Characters aimed at young children, for example, are typically designed around basic shapes and bright colours.

Whether you're creating a monkey, robot or monster, you can guarantee there are going to be a hundred other similar creations out there. Your character needs to be strong and interesting in a visual sense to get people's attention.

Inside Out characters are formed with basic shapes, as circles, squares and lines.

It doesn’t need to be a very complex design to create an attractive character.

Mike Wazowski and Sullivan from Monsters Inc. have visual impact even as sketches. The colours, shapes and appeal make charismatic protagonists.

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DESIGN YOUR cter! own chara pages to create n on the previous tio en m e w at th tips imagination.

Apply the Pixar’s only limit is your e th r: be em m Re ter. an original charac

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WE LOOK AT HOW DIRECTOR TOMM MOORE CREATED THE OSCAR-NOMINATED ANIMATION SONG OF THE SEA, AND HOW THE IRISH LANDSCAPE INSPIRED IT...

Animation films have proved that some of the world’s most adventurously entertaining cinema is being created outside of the “live action” arena. This superb Irish animation from the director of 2009’s The Secret of Kells is a treat; an enchanting and very moving “family film”. Once again, the story is rooted in Irish folklore, with selkies, giants and faeries slipping in and out of a tale of a vanished mother, a grieving father, and two lost but resourceful children trying to make their way home.

Like The Secret of Kells, director Tomm Moore’s first feature, Song of the Sea blends Celtic legends, bravura design and animation, and intelligent storytelling that understands but never patronises young viewers, to create an exquisite and rewarding work.

In a vaguely 20th-century Ireland, pugnacious young Ben lives on a remote island with his lonely lighthouse-keeper father and six-year-old kid sister Saoirse, a mute who, like the children’s lost mother, is a half-human, half-seal selkie.

Saoirse’s magical nature reveals itself when the kids embark on a cross-country adventure after their well-meaning but wrong-headed grandmother forcibly relocates them to Dublin. Folky music and

Studio Ghibli-level flights of eerie fancy are obvious pleasures, but even more subtle and entrancing is the way Moore and his team use echoed shapes to suggest hidden patterns in nature and parallels between the real and the mythical.

Walking along Ventry beach in south west island, it’s easy to see how a filmmaker might be inspired by the spectacular landscape: the rolling hills and craggy rocks, the overwhelming air of tranquillity. But the inspiration for animator Tomm Moore’s new film, the Oscar-nominated Song of The Sea, was inspired by a less than tranquil experience.

About a decade ago, Moore was staying on holiday in the nearby town of Dingle, and visited Ventry beach with his 10-year-old son. To their horror, they found the beach littered with the bodies of dead grey seals. Reports at the time suggested that local fishermen, who blamed the seals for dwindling fish stocks, were responsible for the cull.

“I was talking to a local lady, and we were disturbed by the fact that we were see-

ing these seals being killed on the beach,” Moore recalls. “The old lady we were renting the cottage from was saying that it wasn’t something that wouldn’t have happened years ago.”

A local tour guide, who knew all about the folklore connected to the region, agreed.

“The guide was saying that there are stories connected to every aspect of the landscape,” Moore said. “She was saying the seals would have been respected - they would have been seen as the Selkies, containing the souls of the dead - the people who were lost at sea.”

Like a slowly-developing photograph, the idea for a new story began to form in Moore’s mind. He thought about local folktales, the myths and legends that were once passed down from parent to child - the stories that bonded people to their environment, and that were in danger of vanishing from Ireland’s culture.

“I WAS HOPING TO MAKE A FILM THAT REINVIGORATED THE FOLKLORE FOR KIDS OF MY SON’S GENERATION, AND I THOUGHT AN ANIMATED FILM WOULD BE AN AMBITIOUS VEHICLE TO DO THAT WITH.”

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Moore’s first feature film was similarly steeped in Irish history and legend. Released in 2009, The Secret of Kells was a colourful, disarmingly tender fantasy based around the Book of Kells, an illuminated medieval manuscript now kept at the Trinity College Library in Dublin. Nominated for an Oscar, The Secret of Kells brought Moore and his studio Cartoon Saloon to global attention.

Suddenly, this little animation house based in Kilkenny was being mentioned in the same breath as Pixar and Disney - a considerable achievement, given that The Secret of Kells’ distinctive 2D animation was created on a budget of around $7m.

To put that in perspective, Pete Docter’s Up, which actually won the Best Animated Feature Oscar in 2010, was made for $175m.

Cartoon Saloon’s success provided a boost to Ireland’s small yet vibrant animation scene, which stretches back to the 1970s. Jimmy Murakami, the veteran animator who directed The Snowman and When The Wind Blows, set up two studios in Ireland: Quateru Films in 1971 and Murakami-Wolf Films in 1989 - the latter produced the first Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series. Former Disney animator Don Bluth set up a studio in Dublin in 1979, where such films as The Secret of NIMH and An American Tail were created.

That an entire animation industry had sprung up in Ireland was an inspiration to Moore, who’d grown up in Ireland with a passion for drawing, film and animation.

But after studying animation at Ballyfermot College in Dublin, Moore found that the studios around him were gradually disappearing; Bluth’s studio had gone bankrupt in 1995 following a series of commer-

cial failures, while Murakami Wolf Films had vanished by the end of the decade.

“There was the idea, I suppose, amongst everyone, that you could work at Don Bluth, or you could go over to Paris and work for Disney,” Moore tells us. “During the four years I was at college, those studios were actually petering out, finishing up. Basically, by the time I called up Disney Studios in Paris, it was just about finished - it wasn’t hiring anymore. They were finishing on Tarzan. Don Bluth’s studio had gone back to America to Phoenix.”

Faced with the choice of relocating to the US to find work or setting up his own studio, Moore opted for the latter, founding Cartoon Saloon with fellow animator Paul Young in 1999. The studio quickly built up an impressive body of commercial work and short films. From Darkness, a 2002 short film directed by Nora Twomey, is an early example of Cartoon Saloon’s distinctive fusion of traditional and digital animation techniques.

That hybrid approach defined the look of The Secret of Kells and is pushed further still in Song of The Sea. Beginning with line drawings on paper and watercolour backgrounds, Song of The Sea’s animation is embellished further with computer graphics - an approach which, if anything, makes the movie look even more like a moving painting. Whereas in the past animators were largely restricted to painting each frame on transparent cels and layering them over a hand-painted background, Moore’s team of animators had no limit over the number of layers they could put in each frame or the kinds of detail they could put into them.

“TRADITIONAL ANIMATION - I LOVE THE LOOK OF IT, AND I TRY TO KEEP THAT BECAUSE I THINK IT HAS A TIMELESSNESS, BUT IT WAS LIMITED TO THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE DAY.”

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The result is a movie that positively shimmers with colour and detail; its geometric, often dreamlike quality chiming with the story itself - a gentle, funny and sometimes moving fantasy about a family dealing with the loss of a loved one. Like its animation, Song of The Sea is a seamless union of the traditional and the modern, interweaving Irish myths about faeries, giants and sea creatures with a gentle drama set in the present day. (“The first draft tried to use the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross stages of grieving as a structure, but it was way too feckin’ heavy,” Moore reveals.)

Song of The Sea’s setting is drawn from the Dingle Peninsula landscape which first inspired Moore over a decade ago - the rolling hills, the dramatic, craggy rocks jutting out of the sea. It’s a location that has attracted several filmmakers in the past; director David Lean filmed Ryan’s Daughter in the area, and even build an entire village (actor Robert Mitchum famously said of the production, “Working with Lean is like constructing the Taj Mahal out of toothpicks”). Ron Howard shot parts of his 1992 romance Far and Away in and around the Dingle Peninsula.

Early in Song of The Sea’s production, Moore took his team of artists on research expedition around the area to give them a flavour of the area’s unique scenery, which then fed back into the artwork they produced: a fantastical, child’s-eye perspective of south-west Ireland, where rocks come to life, faeries live beneath roundabouts and the roiling seas teem with enchanted creatures.

Song of The Sea’s sense of wonderment recalls the work of Hayao Miyazaki, and Moore openly professes his affection for such movies as Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro.

“I always come back to Hayao Miyazaki’s films. You didn’t need to know about Japanese mythology to access them, it just gave it a flavour. You could feel that there was a whole belief system behind it that they were tapping into. The more you knew about it, the more the film opened up to you.

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“There’s a layer of depth to it, because he was drawing from his own culture. And being quite creative with it; the Totoros were completely invented, but they felt like something from that animist way of looking at the world... I don’t know if it’s something to do with small countries, but every part becomes sacred, there’s a name for every field, there’s a story for every corner of the field. That kind of stuff.

Ancient island cultures seem to build up this sort of natural animist way of looking at things, because we’re living so closely in relationship to the environment.”

There’s a lyrical simplicity to Song of

The Sea’s execution that runs counter to approach taken by most mainstream animators. But the process of bringing the movie to life was anything but straightforward; in fact, it required the coordination of studios in five different countries: a chunk of the animation was created in Denmark. Animation, backgrounds and layouts were produced in Luxembourg.

Those elements were composited in Belgium, while post-production, sound and music was completed in France.

Overseeing the film’s making meant a considerable amount of travelling for Moore, but once again, technology meant

that he could also oversee the production via the web.

“With the appliance of modern technology and the internet - we used Skype, we had a system for tracking the production and the assets - Tomm could look at them from wherever he was,” Young tells us. “Nothing could move on without his approval. It was a piece of software we used on The Secret of Kells as well, which keeps everybody linked to the same animatic, or the same reel, as it were. It sounds very unwieldy, but we were kind of used to it.”

This pan-European approach to production has allowed Cartoon Saloon to make films on a scale that it couldn’t have hoped to afford on its own. Indeed, Moore believes that Song of The Sea couldn’t have been made on such a tight budget without computer technology.

“AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, WE WANTED TO KEEP THAT HAND-DRAWN, ORGANIC FEEL,” MOORE SAYS, “BUT THERE’S NO WAY WE COULD HAVE MADE THE FILM IN THE TIME AND THE BUDGET WE HAD IF WE DIDN’T HAVE THIS HYBRID APPROACH WITH COMPUTERS.”

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Since it made its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2014, Song of The Sea has garnered a wealth of accolades - including a second nomination for Best Animated Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. This immediately placed it in the company of such films as Disney’s Big Hero 6, DreamWorks’ How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Studio Ghibli’s The Tale of The Princess Kaguya. While the $165m Big Hero 6 ultimately won, the Oscar nomination once again gives recognition to a small studio thousands of miles away from Hollywood itself.

“With the nomination, I met a lot of people like Pete Docter and Henry Selick, and it really felt like the industry saying, ‘Oh no, this is great. It’s great to see something independent. Keep going. Let’s see more,’” Moore says. “That’s what it felt like.

It felt like the industry itself, or our peers in animation, endorsing what we were doing.

And that was massive.”

9 July 2015 | 11:05 am Via Telegraph

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11 Dic 2015 | 11:11 am Via Common Sense Media

3 Jun 2015 | 09:00 am Via Empire Online

“Every scene feels like a warm hug at bedtime.”

“Beautiful Irish tale explores myths, sibling relationship.”

“brother and sister set off on a wondrous journey.”

The film is every bit as rooted in Celtic lore as its predecessor, but it branches and blooms into something less straightforwardly linked to a particular time and culture. The colours, forms and emotions are individually familiar, but they’re combined in ways that aren’t quite like anything you’ve seen before. If it hadn’t been bagsied by Disney in 1940, the perfect word for it would be fantasia.

Song of the Sea is a film that can barely stop itself from giving, and every scene shines with imaginative flourishes that could only possible in two-dimensional, hand-drawn animation. Moore’s film is alive to the world in a way that challenges, and sometimes even defies, adult understanding. The only way to describe it is childlike. See it and feel four years old again.

Parents need to know that Song of the Sea is a beautifully hand-drawn animated adventure about Irish myths and legends, predominantly selkies — creatures that live as humans on land and seals in the water. While Song of the Sea is less intense than the director’s previous film, The Secret of Kells, it can still be intense and heartbreaking at times. Some events can be creepy and scary, but in the end this is a powerful movie about the importance of sibling relationships, about accepting everything you feel (no matter how sad or scary), about literally andfiguratively finding your voice, and about doing everything possible to protect the people you love.

Much like the Celtic myth that pervades this beautifully realised film, hand-drawn animation is slowly receding into the past.

His saucer-eyed characters are a delight to behold, while the symmetry that runs through so many of his elegantly wrought frames is a constant source of pleasure. There’s a satisfying symmetry within the narrative, too, where events in the real world are mirrored by those in a mythic realm, the two overlapping courtesy of a selkie child born to a faerie-world mother and a human father.

Visually, this is an exquisitely composed film, and it teems with curiosities and compassion. If on occasion the story seems to wander, it arrives at an enchanting destination.

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DESPITE ITS REPUTATION AS A DIFFICULT GAME, CUPHEAD GENEROUSLY TEACHES PLAYERS TO BECOME EXPERTS Written by Chris Plante @plante | Sep 29, 2017

Cuphead has a reputation for being difficult, so let’s clarify this up top: Cuphead isn’t impossible; it isn’t the Dark Souls of 2D shooters, nor is it the world’s cutest bullet-hell game; it isn’t even particularly punishing. For a game that has established an identity around an “old-school” (read: hard) design, Cuphead is unexpectedly accessible.

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Cuphead cultivated a fandom around its art style, an homage to 1930s cartoons from Disney and Fleischer Studios. Brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, along with animator Jake Clark, meshed the hand-drawn art with the run-and-gun genre popularized by pixelated games.

The result is an ode to the good old days of games and animation alike.

Shrewdly, the creators lanced many of the warts that have festered on the “good old days” of both forms. Gone are both the technical limitations of classic games and, more importantly, the grotesque racist caricature of classic cartoons. Cuphead’s creators have emulated how we remember our nostalgic darlings, rather than how they actually exist today.

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CUPHEAD IS A THROWBACK ON A THROWBACK And that’s why I say Cuphead shouldn’t be missed because of preconceptions about difficulty (barring, perhaps, the finale, which I’ll get to shortly). It borrows ideas from games like Ikaruga and Gunstar Heroes, but it’s fine if you aren’t familiar with either of those. While it’s a game about battling overpowered enemies, Cuphead

shares more with puzzle games, although it requires healthy reflexes, patience and, above all, a willingness to learn.

Cuphead is the story of an adorable cup that makes a deal with the devil, then has to repay a debt by collecting the contracts of the devil’s other debtors. Satan’s debtors amount to a few dozen stand-

alone boss fights, which must be completed so dear Cuphead can save his soul. You (and optionally, a friend in local co-op) travel from one boss to the next, unleashing infinite ammunition into their eyeballs, tummies, appendages or other vulnerable spots until they submit. All the while, you dodge increasingly complex patterns of attacks.

CUPHEAD PUNISHES PRIDE AND SPEED The average boss fight in Cuphead, from beginning to end, is roughly two minutes long; short enough to be tested over and over and over again. Fights are themselves divided into a few phases, and each phase introduces its own new set of challenges (such as a tall wave of bullets) that inspire tiny epiphanies (rather than jump over the bullets, duck). Strung together to complete a stage, these self-taught lessons produce a real sense of accomplishment. It’s chemical. I do not fist-pump while playing games. I do not whoop. Cuphead had me doing both, while yelping “I did it!” to my very confused and indifferent dog.

Cuphead, at its best, educates the player on how to overcome each obstacle. Every boss fight has an ideal strategy discovered through trial and error. To avoid stress, it’s helpful to think of failure as a greater tool than any weapon. When a Medusa-like boss froze me in midair, I eventually found the spot to hide from her icy stare.

After a ghastly horseman uppercutted me into oblivion, I knew to keep an eye on the bottom of the screen so I could spot him preparing a strike. With each round against a boss, I found myself progressing further, not because I was becoming some prodigious video game guru, but because I

merely spotted and memorized each stone on the walkway to victory.

All of this is possible because of one crucial component: consistency.

The game isn’t designed for true gamersto race through with nothing but raw skill and unearned confidence. If anything, the boss fights punish pride, filling stages with minions, projectiles and traps.

Where Cuphead scolds speed, it rewards a careful and thoughtful method.

Anytime the challenge feels too great, a solution can typically be found by inhaling, exhaling and carefully considering

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LEVEL UP all possible solutions before diving back into the fight.

Cuphead unlocks new weapons and abilities rapidly, allowing for further experimentation in pursuit of the optimal way to beat any given boss. In a fight, Cuphead can carry two weapons, a bonus power and a special attack at all times. A thoughtful loadout can impact the difficulty of a stage. For example, a stage with swarms of enemies benefits from a powerful short-range attack, a buff that automatically accumulates special attacks and a screen-clearing super move. Meanwhile, a humongous boss who fires large projectiles calls for homing bullets, a buff that prevents damage while dodging and also a special move that grants brief invincibility.

Loadout weapons and buffs can be purchased with coins hidden throughout a handful of platforming stages. To be clear, Cuphead isn’t a platformer. A few side-scrolling moments have been added for flavor, but where boss fights teach players the unique method with which to clear each fight, these traditional stages are largely completed through brute force, killing everything on screen, pressing forward until the finish line. Classic video game boss fights have fallen out of favor

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in the past couple of decades, and one wonders if these bits of platforming were added to ground intimidated players in something more familiar.

CUPHEAD’S FINAL BOSS FIGHTS: THE GAME’S BEST TRAITS Sadly, there’s no better reminder of why video games have largely scrapped the classic boss fight than the final two battles in Cuphead. The first is a gauntlet of bosses, between three and nine, along with a bonus boss. And the final ... well, I won’t go into details, but it felt like a battle with the game itself.

Cuphead has an astonishing cohesion: a stunning orchestral soundtrack and visual confidence that reminds me of my favorite Ub Iwerks cartoons. But on occasion, those elements get in the way — particularly the art, which can obscure the foreground, concealing enemies and projectiles. Sometimes the part of an enemy that can be touched without taking damage is unclear. The final fights combine both of these problems, and what should feel like a culmination of a learned expertise winds up requiring a mastery of the game’s idiosyncrasies — with help from luck.

The conclusion of Cuphead isv, I fear, what the game has broadly been perceived as: a comically difficult, if not cruel, experience. And that’s really a shame.

Why? Because the lion’s share of Cuphead is a special formula that takes a notoriously challenging genre of the past and carefully and lovingly introduces it to the wider audience it deserves.

SO, WHAT DO YOU THINK?

OUR TOOLS

What is a

ZOETROPE? A ZOETROPE IS ONE OF SEVERAL PRE-FILM ANIMATION DEVICES THAT PRODUCE THE ILLUSION OF MOTION BY DISPLAYING A SEQUENCE OF DRAWINGS OR PHOTOGRAPHS SHOWING PROGRESSIVE PHASES OF THAT MOTION.

T

he zoetrope consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. On the inner surface of the cylinder is a band with images from a set of sequenced pictures. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures across. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, and the user sees a rapid succession of images, producing the illusion of motion. This illusion of motion depends on two things; persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon.

Persistence of vision, first noted in 1820

by Peter Mark Roget, refers to the length of time the retina (the “screen” at the back of our eyes which is sensitive to light) retains an image. If we see a light flash every tenth

of a second or less, we perceive it as continuous. The impression of each flash of light remains, or persists, in the retina for at least one-tenth of a second. Because of this persistence, we can’t tell where one flash ends and the next begins. Instead, we perceive a continuous light.

If, when you spin the zoetrope, you look over the top of the drum at the drawings instead of looking through the slots all you will see is a blur. The illusion of motion is gone.

The slots of the zoetrope simulate flashes of light, creating a strobe. Persistence of vision is a stroboscopic effect. The images you see must be interrupted by moments of darkness in order for the illusion to work.

The Phi phenomenon is a result of human instinct. Our brains strive to make

meaning from what we perceive. When we see different images close together our brains quickly create a relationship between them. The metamorphosis of an umbrella into a mushroom makes a certain kind of sense, even though this is not something you would ever see in the real world.

Movies are composed of shots of different characters and events taken from a variety of angles and distances edited together. A skilled editor can take advantage of the phi phenomenon to maximize the illusion of continuity so that you may not consciously notice the cuts. But you, as the viewer, are most responsible for continuity.

You see the shots together, and your mind creates a world from them which seems to have its own space and time.

Running cycle of a horse displayed on a basic zoetrope.

Did you notice the same frames in the corners of this book? Try it by flipping the pages.

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See you later!

Non profit academic project. All the information and graphics were taken from the internet. Credits to their authors. Some texts and images have been modified to adapt them to the product. For any question or comment, please contact the autor of this project.