On the image in the cinema

November, 05; 2024. By Arscodex

Shin Chan still

On this occasion we are going to talk a little about the image in cinema, which is the main layer, as we all know, on which the "audiovisual" medium is based, that is, the union between audio and video, which has, as we all know either, a series of properties and special narrative force.

Well, since the image in cinema is the main layer, we cannot think that it is not something important for it. But of course, we must not get too carried away, because cinema, as an art and as a narrative language, needs resources to tell stories, and of course one of them is the image, but without thinking that this is decisive or sufficient to make a good film.

So, to give some examples, we are going to start with Tim Burton's stop-motion. It is a very characteristic type of audiovisual image that, to an eye accustomed to current American 3D animation, could sound old or weak, but it is not at all. Tim has been able to develop his narrative discourse brilliantly in this medium, and for the viewer to enjoy his work, we must at least make a small "immersion" in his cinematic language based on stop-motion animation.

We can mention some other recent stop-motion films such as Guillermo del Toro's version of Pinocchio, and other older ones from Eastern Europe such as those by Jiří Trnka.

On this side of cinema, also in television series format, we can mention several American animated series that use and abuse a kind of "unpleasant style" image, such as South Park or Beavis and Butthead. From Japan we also received, with great success, Shin Chan, the animated series; whose image appears as if it had been drawn "lazily".

Also in animation we mention Shrek, his first appearance in cinema back in 2001, which, after approximately 20 years of its production, the 3D animation used is certainly showing fatigue today since there have been many advances.

On the other hand, we have all those films, especially science fiction films, that abuse visual effects in the cinema and that are like "gimmicks" for children and adults.

In any case, as we have seen through the examples, the image alone is not enough for a film to succeed; there we see many cases with a "special" image that have worked very well and other cases of films loaded with visual effects that have been box office failures. Every filmmaker must know that the image is nothing more than the main vehicle of cinema to tell a story, therefore, a strong, detailed and careful image is neither necessary nor sufficient to correctly perform its task (although it is very welcome).

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Tim Burton