Hey guys this is just a hobby project, I made this short film as an amateur animator to learn from the work of greats like "Isao Takahata". So basically this is just a study. I made this short film on my "Mobile Phone", I rotoscoped nearly 4000 frames with the help of my thumbs. I had rotoscoped/traced some of Takahata's work in order to get an in depth knowledge about animation. This project is not going to be monetised. Here are the videos, I referenced from :-
Rotoscoping had been used, to make the animation better. The references for rotoscoping had been taken from "Princess Kaguya". Even though different colours are used for the final product. The whole concept and genre are different from the rotoscoped material.
Synopsis
1) The animated short is based on the idea that dreams! create a parallel world, which is manifested by our subconscious. It also explores the synonymity between our dreams and reality. It explores some curious questions like:-
Is life just a dream? (Or a nightmare)
Do the beings in our created worlds evolve like us?
What death in dreams signifies?
2) This story is set in the psychological realm of a baby.
Opening scene starts with an image of a dead tree which is coming out of a white concrete structure. It's a metaphor for the harsh struggle in a world filled with colours. The tall white structure symbolises the psychological state and conscience of baby, which is higher than that of tree. But that's pretty low as well, since trees cannot think of what's right or wrong (at a complex level). In short, the baby girl is vulnerable .
3) Lying on her conscience, she starts dreaming about a ball (which she is obsessed with). she dreams to move out and play with her ball and..... imaginary friend. She is a lucid dreamer, that means she can control her dreams and can even have multiple dreams at the same time.
4) Now her dream elements look like and move like she had imagined them to be. She is taking references from her memory to create that ball and especially her imaginary friend, who looks like her father, but he is blobby and distorted since her small brain cannot record those minute details of her father's face and body.
5) She is free to do anything in her dreams. She rolls, jumps and even crawls. But that's obviously boring, so she tries to do something different......she tries to kill herself. She tries various methods to die, like having a falling rock on her body, being guilitoned and falling from a height. But obviously she is safe, since this is just a dream.
6) She dies in all of her dreams at the same time. She learnt an important lesson, not about dying, but about greed in life as she got killed everytime, while she was chasing her ball. This signifies that she is entering a phase of life, where her primitive urges (I don't mean following a ball is a primitive urge, it's a metaphor for hunger) cannot be the only reasons of living her life. According to many professional dream analysts, death in dreams symbolises inner changes, transformation, self-discovery and positive
development that is happening within you or your life.
7) After dying in her "dreams" (which were all set up in the same world), she comes back to reality of her psychological realm. But she left behind a world with no colours. Fortunately she had given a voice (which is pretty similar to her own) to her imaginary friend. Now, since there are no colours in his world, it's a big problem for him (since he have the similar conscience, as his creator had, he's created by a baby . And actually the last colour of his world was the smile of his creator, her joyfulness. So the only colour left is the colour of blood. He decides to paint his world with....blood (since red is the only color which reflects the light in that world, and it's also the real colour of the ball) That's kind of gory, but what will we do if we won't have any colours in our world, may we won't do something this drastic or will we? Now you never know, how this imaginary friend is going to survive without anything. Sometimes life just finds a way.
8) She wakes up in her psychology realm. Her ball arrives there, bouncing in the similar way like it did in her dream (moving without any external force). This leaves the story open to the interpretation of viewer. Maybe she is still dreaming, maybe life itself is a dream, maybe it doesn't matter anyway since she learnt the lesson.
9) In the final shot of the film, you can notice 3 more platforms are added to the white structure. This signifies her 3 deaths in dreams and the positive psychological change she had gone through.
10) Life maybe a dream or not, but it's a series of mistakes. Mistakes done by her, mistakes done byher imaginary friend, mistakes done by all of us. But these mistakes, teach us and empower us for our future..... mistakes. So....
"Life is a series of falls that are going up."