Workshop: Discover
Words That Sing
“Imagination decides
everything.” Blaise
Pascal
Animator Tezuka Osamu’s images, themes and stories that he
worked with came from the heart. It showed through his choice of topics and the
manner in which he developed his films. Some techniques he had to let go of
because he couldn’t find enough people skilled in the process, but he kept as
close to the passion of creating film by hand because “I really wanted to keep the preciousness of the hand animation in the
work,” he said. At the time his industry was undergoing a metamorphosis of
its own and Osamu felt that the original work of Japanese animation was
becoming imitative instead of original.
The story was fueled by the techniques and the techniques
enriched his storytelling. For example in his short film, The Legend of the Forest with Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony Op.36,
he divided the story into four parts. And then each movement he animated in a
different style beginning with a basic form and adding more details and
complications with each transition. So alongside the legend he also visually
showed a development of animation without speaking about it at all. He embedded
the metaphors naturally.
“Perhaps the animation
can be supported by the passion of the creators.”
It’s that passion that creates timelessness as well as
creativeness. Viewers today may find some of the imagery he uses odd or
old-fashioned; especially since now computer graphics have emerged in leaps and
bounds since his day. Which he also recognized as a growing field of
development. Yet we still can identify and relate to his metaphoric images because
he has grounded them in familiar circumstances.
Often we ourselves don’t recognize the metaphors in our work
during the early drafts but by nurturing the quality and technical craft of our
novels we will begin to recognize them. Then our use of image and metaphor,
allusion, theme, symbols, echoes will all have the naturalness of originality
instead of imitation too.
Action Steps:
1. Make a list of the words you’d
like readers to say about your novels?
2. Write down the themes you’d
like your readers to identify with in your novels.
Share: Which one would make your heart sing?
Read deep, marcy
