Big fat cartoon tears

photo by Urbancitylife- http://www.flickr.com/photos/breakingsights/


Did you see Toy Story 3 this summer? Well I did and if you didn't then you missed out my friend. Boyfriend and I went in proudly with our 3D glasses and slushy (regrettable choice) braced to be surrounded by a massive crowd of 10 and unders, but we were relieved/surprised to find that there were plenty of other twenty-somethings already there. Boyfriend wasn't as surprised I don't think, but he is an unabashed cartoon lover so it hardly made a difference to him either way. Anyways, we loved the movie, and I got all choked up more times than I want to publicly admit to. Boyfriend did too, but he is also an unabashed sap so he won't care that I'm calling him out (right?).

This week we watched Le ballon rouge (The Red Balloon). It's an older French short film that I had been meaning to watch for a while and finally got around to. Basically, it's a very simple film with almost no dialogue and the main characters are a boy and his balloon. It was so heart-breakingly pure, that's the best way I could describe it. Of course it involves some imagination to get swept up in the story of a balloon loving a boy. But still, the idea that such a simple object could illicit so much emotional response was really intriguing to me.

Okay, so if you haven't seen Toy Story 3, I hope you have seen at least some Pixar movie in your lifetime a. because they are great and b. because I'm going to keep referencing them for the duration of this post.

I started thinking about the other movies they have made that surround typically inanimate objects, mainly Wall-E since that is another one we have watched again recently. How an animated robot can elicit such a strong emotional response from people, kids and adults and of course it does this because it has been given human traits for us to connect with. It's not like we are connecting with a plain aluminum box that just sits there... like a box. Anthropomorphism and the reaction it draws from a subject is really interesting to me because I don't really understand the evolutionary background behind it. I assume that it's not something that was developed as an intentional asset of its own accord, but rather is simply the brain generalizing the perception of traits we have been conditioned to pick up on in humans. We know we are looking at a robot, but what we see are emotions that have been crafted into a mechanical face, we stop seeing the machine and just register these facial cues.

Okay, so then what about the red balloon? Even without human expressions an object can display emotion through action, even when restricted to the vague actions allotted to a balloon... like floating/rising/falling/speeding up/hanging still/and SPOILER ALERT: popping (come on.. like you didn't know that would happen?). Sure, in this scenario we have the attachment of the boy to the balloon to respond to as well, and reading the attachment he displays helps convey what the balloon cannot.

Okay then, back to Pixar, the very beginning clip of the lamp jumping on the I. We connect to A LAMP people... and I tip my hat to you Pixar, for making us all a little bit crazy for having an emotional response to a desk lamp. Obviously Ikea thought this was pretty funny to:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdIJOE9jNcM

I just find it interesting how easy it is for us to connect to the most subtle human cues of emotion when they are displayed on inanimate objects and yet, we seem to have such a hard time picking up on these things with other people. It's like we get distracted by all of the other aspects of connecting with another person that we are too busy processing simultaneously, that we miss the crucial points.

So after my rant on how video games and media are ruining the world, let me clarify, PIXAR is exempt from those statements.

I remember when I was little I was pretty much bored by any show that involved real people. There was too much dialogue and I just tuned out. I loved cartoons and animation and I think this speaks pretty generally for most kids these days. It's interesting to me that something simpler would be MORE captivating to children. When I did watch kids shows with real people, they would always really exaggerate their facial expressions, watch a clip of Sesame Street and you'll see what I mean. Old school cartoons, whether they involved inanimate objects, animals, or people, all involved really overly emotive characters and it makes sense that kids would latch on to that in order to learn these cues. Now however, animation is very different. Rather than being simple exaggerated subjects, they are extremely complex and over the top and I think we really lost something there (minus you Pixar).

Okay, my point is, if we have this amazing ability to generalize and perceive emotive facial cues imposed onto objects even if this is just a messy side effect from the evolution of this ability, you'd think that we would be stellar at picking up on these with other humans, right? I think the fact is that we ARE really good with this with other humans but we let other things get in the way.

I'm not the only one who thinks this. Malcolm Gladwell, think so too and he wrote a book called Blink, which you might be interested in reading. That is, unless this whole post to you was a waste of eye muscle movement aside from the funny Ikea commercial. In which case, I suggest you go watch Le ballon rouge and I DARE you not to have an emotional response.