Month: November 2020

Last Sunday, I felt terribly uninspired. I woke up bright and early, the sky was grey, the rain was banging against my window and I really felt like it was a lay-in day. I decided to fight that off by planing myself a date before lockdown would come and lock us all in. Looking at the list of museums available for students, I came across the Cartoon Museum which I hadn’t visited before. Before this visit, I didn’t consider myself a fan of British cartoons. With all due respect, I’ve always thought they were a bit dull, adopting the same sort of visual language and themes. This visit came to change my perception behind the history of British cartoon, specially in regards to Sequential Image.

“(…) THIS IS NOT BECAUSE THE JOKE HAS GONE STALE AND DISAPPEARED WITH AGE, SINCE IT WAS NEVER INTENDED TO AMUSE. THE CARTOON IS INTENDED TO DISTURB. THUS THE WORD ENTERED OUR LANGUAGE”
STEVE BELL

Located in Central London, the Cartoon Museum has re-opened its doors in July 2019. This registered charity dedicates it space to comic and cartoon art, conserving Britain’s comic art heritage.

As mentioned before, my exceptions from this visit weren’t too high: I imagined I would see some political art that you’d find in old newspapers from the 20th century which I’m personally not interested by. I was shocked to find our art from eighteen hundreds with such character! Predominant silhouettes, dynamic shapes, bold imagery, sharp brush strokes, geometric shapes-based character design, perception of depth, accentuation of body features to show different emotions and personalities.

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What I found particularly interesting in this illustration was the usage of geometrical shapes in the designing of the characters. Nowadays, studios such as Cartoon Network are very particular in the use of simplistic geometrical shapes in their characters for a slick, easy to read look and it’s interesting to see this method goes way back. An example of this is the show ‘The amazing World of Gumball’:

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The quality of line in this ink cartoon is just so graceful!

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During this exhibition, I stumbled upon various controversial political/ religious posters. The way the artists use satire as a form of communication is extremely powerful.

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This visit was an enriching experience. However, I do want to return since I couldn’t be inside the museum for too long due to Covid-19 restrictions. For my next visit, I’d love to sit down and have a read about each individual artist and their work.

My goal for these two years in London is to explore as many museums as possible and grow my knowledge on other cultures and art fields. Even though I’m taking up an Animation MA, I believe it’s important to be aware of what’s going on in other areas of study that can reconcile with Animation!

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On week 1, we were briefed with an Animation Theory presentation proposal. This presentation aimed the analysis of the work of an animator from our home country and its historical/ socio-political contextualisation, or the exploration of an area of animation theory or history.

I chose to speak about the work of Abi Feijó, a traditional experimental Portuguese animator. You can find the final presentation PDF on the link below.

I will start off this post by deconstructing one of the questions I wasn’t able to answer during the course of my presentation, this past Wednesday: what is Portugalidade?

Portugalidade

I mentioned Portugalidade as a theme portrayed by Abi Feijó in his work. However, as a Portuguese person, I am so familiarised with this concept that I’ve never really thought about the meaning behind it and I failed to explain it to my colleagues. The animation above, directed and animated by Abi Feijó, focuses on this word ‘Portugalidade’.

To compliment my answer, I’ve been looking at a few authors explaining this concept and I found these interesting perspectives on it:

‘Portugality exists, first and foremost, as a family of men and women. It has no firm meaning; its substance and definition vary from place to place, context to context, time to time. However, there are deep and structuring characters that give it a safe form; these characters, which constitute the essence of what Portugality is, often include the language, but do not have to be limited to it.‘- Rafael Pinto Borges for Nova Portugalidade, 2019.

Portugalidade, não Lusofonia

‘(…) a human heritage that encompasses almost three hundred million people‘ – Rafael Pinto Borges and Hugo Monteiro Dantas for Observador, 2017.

‘(…) from Amazonia to Timor, there is a community of men “whose political tradition, virtues, collective defects, experience and worldview are children of the encounter with Portugal” and thinks that the new national plan must pass by “breaking down barriers between men and embracing the ‘world that the Portuguese created’ to which Gilberto Freyre referred to.‘ – Rafael Pinto Borges for Observador, 2017.

O que é afinal a portugalidade? (A nova e a outra)

From what I’ve gathered, besides the feeling of being Portuguese, Portugalidade has a meaning of its own from Portuguese to Portuguese. It’s generally a set of hereditary characteristics such as our historical ancestry, our politics, our latin language, our conquests, our loss battles and how that reverberates to these days. I believe each and every country has their own word to describe the feeling of belonging to it and if they don’t, they should.

‘Portugalidade’ means to me the idea of family, strength, battle, culture but mainly community.

Abi Feijó

I chose to speak about animator Abi Feijó due to my admiration for his contribution to the Portuguese Animation industry.

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I was actually quite excited about this presentation. The reason why I moved to the U.K. was because I was never introduced to Portuguese Animation. I attended an Artistic High School (Escola Artística de Soares dos Reis, in Porto, Portugal) for three years and besides it being a top tier school, only Northern/ Western European/ North-American animation was taught to us. I’ve always been curious about animation in my own country but I confess I never got out of my way to research about it. Only when I had to decide which University I wanted to attend was when I realised Portugal had no undergraduate Animation programmes. It was either graphic novel based or generally graphic design and motion based. Sadly, I had to leave my beloved country to pursue a career in Animation but just like Abi Feijó, one of my life long goals is to return to Portugal with a fat CV and contribute to the Portuguese animation industry as much as I can!

Based on my personal issue, after spending days on end looking at Portuguese animation festivals, old Portuguese cinema and books about the history of Portuguese animation, I finally found an animator with enough background in Portuguese animation for me to speak about. Right off the bat, I was impressed with Abi’s career so far and wanted to look deeper into it. Here’s what I found:

I began by watching the documentary ‘The Art of Animating in Portugal’. It shows the history of Portuguese Animation. It’s in Portuguese but the imagery is phenomenal. It opened my eyes to a world I’d never known before.

Contamos a história da animação em Portugal

As I was watching this documentary, there was a section in the film talking about Cinanima Festival (which is on right now, go buy your tickets). That’s when I found animator Abi Feijó.

Abi was born in Braga, Portugal, 1956. He attended Porto Fine Art’s University in 1956 where he graduated in Design. He only became interested in Animation when the Cinanima festival debuted in the city of Espinho in 1976.

After attending workshops at Cinanima and also abroad (many in France), Abi had the opportunity to intern for 5 months at the Canada National Film Board in 1956. There, he made his first film ‘Oh que Calma’, which. translates to ‘How calm it is’, the film I analysed during. my presentation.

Upon his return to Portugal, Abi founded Estúdio Filmógrafo where he went on to produce many films with other talented animators.
All of his work produced during those times are shown in the documentary below. ‘The Animated World of Abi Feijó’ is a documentary that majorly helped me throughout this Research Project. Produced and directed by Sociologist Maria Helena Pinto in 2011, it touches the highs and lows of the animator’s career on a personal level. Unfortunately I couldn’t find it in English.

Besides that, Abi also founded the Casa da Animação. It is the most amazing place for animation lovers. I recommend all that visit my beautiful hometown of Porto to have a go at this institution.

casadaanimacao.pt

(I will be adding further research on here)

When presenting, I was extremely nervous. I was confident about the research I had put together, but because I hadn’t presented for about 4 years, even though I practiced the days before, I lost control of my anxiety. But I finished it and I’m proud of it, regardless. It was the first of many, I learnt with it and I genuinely can’t wait to do it again and improve my public speaking skills. I acquired so much new knowledge, both from my research and my colleague’s and I’m very much looking forward upcoming presentations.