wk 2

• What changes when a graphic novel is animated?

I think the greatest loss in animating graphic novels is the loss of the readers’ interpretational freedom or closure. Comic panels offer a ‘staccato rhythm of unconnected moments’. Via closure we connect, with imagination, these moments and mentally construct a continuous reality. Animations remove this possibility of closure because they already provide a continuous timeframe and therefore remove or limit our ability to imagine.

• What audience does the animated version of The Blue Lotus target?

In my opinion, it appeals to everyone old to young, but because it is quite classic and bit a bit dated, it may target more to middle aged people. Also, perhaps Japanese and Chinese as well as it highlights the Japanese invasion and there is a young Chinese boy who become friends with Tintin.

• What does Baetens (2001) mean by ‘monstration, ‘graphiation’ and the graphiateur’?

These terms are derived from Traces en cases by Philippe Marion (1993).

Marion proposes to call ‘graphication’ the graphic and narrative enunciation of the comics, and ‘graphiateur’ the agent responsible for it. The analysis of lines, contours, and colours, both of the drawings and of the letters and words, can give an idea of what the graphiateur and his or her graphiation is like provided. Graphiation is at its strongest in a drawing that is in the stage of a rough copy or sketch. Monstration is to analyze the specific narrative situation of movies as the hierarchical combination of several types of narration, in other words, the narrative instance of a film the ‘image-narrator’ or ‘great image-maker’. It is also called as ‘narration’, that narrative enunciation is split between what on the one hand, according to Gaudreault.

References

Baetens, J. (2001). Revealing Traces: a new theory of graphic enunciation. In Varnum, R. & Gibbons, C. (Ed.). The Languages of Comics: word and image, (pp. 145-155). Jackson: U P of Mississippi.