Research Presentation
Critical Report
How to better use” humor language” in animation
“Humor” is both an artistic language and a technique of entertainment. As a product of movies, animation mainly focuses on entertainment since its birth (Furniss, 2009). In animation, “humor” can be integrated through various elements, including script, character design, action design, and sound effects. However, humor varies from different cultures and ages (Marx, 2010). Therefore, in the current era of multicultural integration, it is very important to grasp the humorous language of animation. This article uses script selection and character shaping as dominant clues, including character design, action design and character language. Afterwards, how the humorous language of successful animation caters to the trend of the global animation film market by breaking the barriers of culture and age is discussed as well.
Humor often can change a person’s direct reaction to certain things. People’s negative emotions can be dissipated and alleviated through humor. Humor is an attitude and way of life. As Chekhov said: People who don’t know how to joke are people who have no hope (Chekhov, 2016). On the contrary, Critchley pointed out that certain types of humor requires additional knowledge of specific groups, ethnicities, or cultures. If you want to understand one joke, it is not enough to just understand the language it uses (Critchley, 2011). It is true that humor has to compromise with language and cultural factors, because it crosses geographical boundaries. These are often only typical characteristics of source cultures, thus losing the ability to entertain in the new culture (Chiaro, 2010). Therefore, it is important to classify humor as a whole by analyzing cultural background (Hertzler, 1970 ). Similar to this point of view, Kotthoff believes that humor creates distance due to gender and age (Kotthoff, 2007). For animation, watching animation helps shape audiences’ views on social hot issues, which in turn can influence audiences making positive decisions or causing bad consequences (Nwosu & Agoha, 2018). Overall, although the humorous language of animation is very common, the successful application of humorous language still needs to break through the double barriers, namely culture and age.
As we all know, “anime industry” is the third largest industry in Japan. Japanese anime not only has a global audience of children but also more adult audiences. Such an achievement that breaks age limitation is inseparable from the unique humorous elements interspersed in the plot and character shaping.
Japan’s special geographical environment created Japanese inherently pessimistic character and their tenacious and innovative national spirit. Japan is a nation that values spiritual feelings and prefers to appreciate tragedies. The long-term repressed mental state prompted Japanese national culture to germinate, develop, and grow from the mud. Therefore, Japanese anime is good at turning age and cognition differences into its unique humor. The protagonist of the Japanese cartoon “Crayon Shin-chan” is a kindergarten kid with mediocre aptitude and shameless appearance. Normally speaking, such people could gain everyone’s approval through their own efforts, or live with low self-esteem. It is also possible to grow up unconsciously. The author portrayed him as an extremely intelligent, timid, lazy and greedy character. He doesn’t work pragmatically, but wants to be a speculator in troubled waters. If Shin-chan is an adult, in real life this is definitely an image of a disdainful “nasty ghost”. However, the author put these unpleasant qualities in a kindergarten child who is only 3 years old. Many short stories happened to this kid for his personality characteristics. Although the picture is rough, the animation has achieved success in plot and language. This ingenious design caused many unexpected psychological collisions among the audience, and produced many jokes. There are other animations that use this humorous way, including “Chibi Maruko”, “Doraemon”, “Fu Xing Boy”, “Dragon Ball” and so on. Undoubtedly, the method of breaking age difference and using it as a humorous topic selection material are great guarantees for its success.
Different cultures and regions have different aesthetics for the characteristics of human proportions. Therefore, in addition to the humor created in the selection of the script, Japanese animation is also proficient in discovering humor in character design. More specifically, different from European and American anime, most of the characters in the Japanese anime “Naruto” have nine heads. Such character design caters to the basic aesthetics of contemporary adult audiences. By contrast, attracting and maintaining more audiences without losing the favor of children is crucial to the development of animation (Akers, 2013). Therefore, in this kind of animation, when the mood of the character changes, such as suddenly surprised, surprised, tricky or frustrated, the standard height ratio of the character instantly becomes the height ratio of a child, with 3 heads or 2 heads, and the face instantly changes from an handsome face to a childish face, which creates a psychological collision for audiences. The standard height and handsome face give people the enjoyment of ideal beauty, while the latter kind of character appearance gives people a funny and cute feeling. Such animation works are loved by children and adults. Although the standardized modeling attracts adult audiences, it also attracts children audiences in a unique way.
On the contrary, it is precisely because of its cultural and historical influence and part of the humor is violent and pornographic. Such works are not suitable for younger children to watch, and some works are even banned by other countries. Indeed, Japanese animators also use animation to explore broader themes: love and death, war and peace, and historical past and distant future. Once these animators taken the first step and out of the limitations of the Western era and subject matter, they could continue to explore and challenge the limitations. Some of the pornographic jokes in Japan are partly influenced by its culture, while some of the pornographic jokes are to train consumers as soon as possible, which breaks the boundaries between children and adults (Durham, 2009). However, this kind of adult humor does not always fail. In “One Piece”, Sanji’s role is set to be a humorous machismo and lecherous youth. Erotic humor is the main feature of the character, while the author balances the scale. This approach not only makes the image full of character, but also deeply loved by Chinese people, which indicates that, behind the successful animation, there is a perfect balance of humorous language in different age groups and cultures.
Compared with Japan, American animation has a long history of using humorous elements. American animations mostly are light and humorous comedies. The characters’ exaggerated and funny facial expressions and humorous and funny body performances created endless laughter for the animation works. For example, the minions in “Despicable Me” are very distinctive in design. In the design, without being constrained by animal shapes, the designer puts all his attention on the creation of “cute” shapes, thus allowing the creators to thoroughly refine the styling elements and create refreshing characters for the audience. This comic character is the biggest contributor to the success of the film. Apart from the exaggerated humor in the character design, its unique minion language created a humorous form that crosses cultural barriers. Although no one can understand their language, audiences can easily understand its meaning through body language and the environment. Meanwhile, it unconsciously brought into its unique humorous environment.
However, in recent years, with the increasing self-confidence of Chinese nation, some localized slang words have gradually appeared in Chinese market, such as “Nezha” and “Boonie Bears”. Some of the interest generated by the unique slang becomes part of the character setting in the animation. Such works indeed attract Chinese audiences, and they also received a lot of support in China. However, due to regional and cultural differences, audiences from other countries have difficulty in understanding the humorous language behind their culture. For the layman, some introduction is necessary, this phenomenon can explain cultural landmarks and in-joke (Drazen, 2014). Therefore, although such works can quickly occupy Chinese market, it is difficult to surpass animation works such as “Despicable Me” that conforms to the trend of global market.
In addition, animations that are aimed at children need to provide some sense of humor, because children need humorous stimulation (Klein, 1992). Compared with the former two, as a representative of Chinese children’s animated films, “Mini Hole” tried the humor of local slang and also added many contemporary buzzwords to win children’s laughter and ratings. However, these buzzwords have deeper connotations, including many uncivilized languages. As an animation work for teenagers whose values are gradually established between 7 and 11 years old, it is a typical failure. Such humor can be considered as the type of “The Unfunny Comedy”. They are jokes, or at least suggestive, but they are not funny. This kind of laughter lacks penetration. People went to see it and some even laughed, but it was a hollow laugh from people who lacked humor (Schreiber, 2017). Humor plays a role in reducing stress and supporting children’s emotions in animation, and is significant in social and cognitive development (Klein, 1992). On the contrary, works such as “Mini Hole” are not responsible for the development of children, because they are just humorous for the sake of humor.
All in all, a good animation must have something to attract audiences. Some animations are thought-provoking, and some scripts are memorable. However, the works that audiences love the most and never get tired of often have a lot of emotions and high humor. Faced with the two major difficulties of cultural differences and age differences, Japanese animation took advantages of the two differences, so as to produce humor with local characteristics that could cross age limitation in terms of the selection of scripts and character design. American animation uses exaggerated character design and body language to discover humor, thus breaking the regional barriers of humor. However, Chinese animation is at the stage of learning and development. The development of unique humorous methods in the age of multicultural hybridization should also take cultural differences and age barriers into account. In a word, successful animation needs humorous language, and successful humorous language needs to break through cultural and age barriers.
Word count: 1686
References:
Akers, C.L., 2013. The Rise of Humor: Hollywood Increases Adult Centered Humor in Animated Children’s Films.
Chekhov, A., 2016. The cherry orchard: a comedy in four acts. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Chiaro, D., 2010. Translation and humour, humour and translation. Chiaro, Delia (ed.), pp.1-29.
Critchley, S., 2011. On humour. Routledge.
Drazen, P., 2014. Anime Explosion!: The What? Why? and Wow! of Japanese Animation. Stone Bridge Press.
Durham, M.G., 2009. The Lolita effect: The media sexualization of young girls and what we can do about it. Abrams.
Furniss, M. ed., 2009. Animation: Art and industry. Indiana University Press.
Hertzler, J.O., 1970. Laughter: A socio-scientific analysis. Exposition Press.
Klein, A., 1992. Storybook Humor and Early Devlopment. Childhood education, 68(4), pp.213-217.
Kotthoff, H., 2007. The humorous stylization of” new” women and men and conservative others (Vol. 18, pp. 445-475). de Gruyter.
Marx, C., 2010. Write your way into animation and games: create a writing career in animation and games. Taylor & Francis.
Nwosu, E. and Agoha, K.U., 2018. Beyond children’s entertainment: Animation as social commentary. Creative Artist: A Journal of Theatre and Media Studies, 12(2), pp.1-20.
Schreiber, B., 2017. What Are You Laughing At?: How to Write Humor for Screenplays, Stories, and More. Simon and Schuster.