Animation or Abomination?

In it's early stages animation was used to appease audiences with joyful and appealing images that told fairy tales of great and mystical things that would've been too difficult to show through real-life film. However the genre has clearly evolved through a more artistic approach. Animation can be used to represent things like metaphors and other figurative images. It provides a medium that allow people to use their imagination and create a video that doesn't have an enormous budget and can do things we can't do in reality. Only naive people would consider animation to be the same fluffy way to tell stories to children in a delightful way. Cartoons have become more cynical and sophisticated ways to bring satire: The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park have all successfully portrayed real-life things and events through a more flexible form. You can remove body parts, create disfigured creatures, go through a high speed action chase fully equipped with explosions, with the biggest cost being your imagination.

Blood Tea And Red String is certainly an odd and disturbing animation that sways all cliche's of what animation is. Some might not consider it an animation because most people think of animation as moving drawings or computerized three-dimensional figures. The film was made through the use of stop-animation, which out of personal experience I can say is an extremely time-engaging experience. The use of dolls and other household figures creates a very eerie atmosphere, it's haunting feel really helps set the mood for the animation. It would be hard to replicate the same amount of disturbance with human figures. It's a very dark and confusing short that seemed very amateur compared to other works I've seen but perhaps this is what the director was aiming for.

Generally my conception of animation is that it can be used as a way to bend reality and that it should not be restricted towards any certain genre. Animation is art. There are no boundaries to imagination. Whatever way seems most applicable towards expression is the one that will be used. So whether animation is used to show murder, comedy, romance or fairy tales it will always carry itself as a property, a piece of art.