‘Who ate the apple?’ A Visual Narrative on Freudian Psychoanalyti Framework Using Pixelation Animation

Deepak John Mathew for profoundly guiding and guiding my work. Delwyn for his consistent feedback and support throughout my filmmaking and animation journey, Prof. Lastly, my dearest B.Tech friends Alok, Irfan, Dhiraj, Uwais, Ajay, Negi, Pramudit, Mayank, Supreet and Sudhanshu, you have made bachhu's life much more enjoyable amidst the chaos and tension of this job.

This film incorporates two styles of animation – Pixelation and Traditional hand-drawn animation to visually express the narrative. The film's narrative metaphorically represents the interconnection between the mental areas defined by Freud. The film is intended for viewers of any age group, mainly for those interested in knowing the essence of Freud's aforementioned work.

The story is about the protagonist being in a dilemma whether to eat an apple left in front of him by the owner, who is a stranger to the protagonist. The film is a fusion of in-house studio photography and traditional animation to create a blend suited to the creative expression of this narrative.

Introduction

Literature Review

Literature related to Freudian Framework of Id, Ego & Superego

According to Storr, the Id is embedded in the unconscious mind and has a primitive, disorganized and emotional nature. The id's motive is to seek pleasure and avoid pain, and in doing so it does not care about the consequences or whether it cheats or lies to get what it wants. Storr says that the Ego is the part of the mind that represents consciousness.

The ego is primarily sensitive to stimuli from the outside world, and therefore, once it exists, it acts as an intermediary between the Id and the outside world. The Ego is therefore uneasy between three agencies: the external world, the Id, and the Superego, each of which may be pushing in a different direction. He interprets the Ego as the I that is aware of itself as an I, the Id to be the dynamic unconscious, and the Superego to be the part of the Ego that contains the idealizations of the Ego.

In the editorial entitled Thinking (with) the unconscious in media and communication studies: Introduction to the special issue, they link the Id, Ego, and Superego to desire, reality, and duty. The importance of psychoanalysis in the field of media and communication further strengthened the decision to make it a core concept for the narrative.

Visual survey of existing representations of Id, Ego & Superego

Comic Book
Graphic Novel
Illustrations

Together, Simon and Maier have produced an accessible and imaginatively paced graphic novel-like biography of the founding father of psychoanalysis. It strikes the right balance between educational storytelling, witty dialogues and fascinating representation of complex theories like psychoanalysis.

Literature related to Experimental Animation

Norman McLaren
Contemporary Animation Films
Freudian analysis on live action films

The movement in the film is advanced so that the actions of the characters are animated rather than realistic. According to Albert Ohayon, McLaren got the idea to make the film as a parable about war after the trip to China with UNESCO. He was influenced by French cinema in the first half of the twentieth century that used a similar technique.

The synthetic soundtrack was created by McLaren by painting the sound directly onto the film. The review of his work provided an inspiration for mixing techniques of animation rather than sticking to purely a single style, to create a mixture suitable for the narrative. Some of the recent animated films that deal with human mind, behavior and the concept of self-representation were viewed for understanding narrative styles for stories dealing with human behavior.

Three live-action films were discussed to understand how the Freudian framework can be applied to extract meanings from the narrative of live-action cinema. This psychological control is the ego's way of allowing only the desires of the unconscious id to live alongside others in society. The film's narrative towards the end implies that by understanding mental processes, one can program individuals into a desired state of mind.

Black Swan (2010), directed by Darren Aronofsky, is a dreamy and dark film that explores human behavior in a competitive scenario. A Pervert's Guide To Cinema (2006), directed by Sophie Fiennes, examines various films from a psychoanalytic theoretical perspective. Both media – live action and stop-motion animation – were studied as part of the literature review.

It was clear that most of the films that dealt with the spiritual life had a negative. Above all, there was a bias towards showing the dark side of the human mind, how it can be deceived, controlled or monitored. The narratives are dramatically exaggerated to generate a cinematic experience, but very little effort is made to show the actuality of the mental processes, which it can be argued are still undiscovered.

Figure 8 : Norman McLaren timing the frames

Content for the film

Story 1 : Online

Arnav is a 13 year old boy, from a middle class family living in a small town in Maharashtra. One day in school, during the lunch break he finds his classmates talking about online chat rooms. Eventually he realizes the power of false identity and releases most of his deepest desires and fetishes under the mask.

But since she is unaware of this stranger's sexuality, she decides to use the internet to find out. She remembers an older e-mail id she once made when she was in school, for a fake male identity in order to talk to other girls. She uses the same identity and creates a social media profile and starts communicating with this stranger.

This is a cafe where Geetanjali sits alone with a cup of coffee and thinks about Arnav while waiting for Nazia who is a child psychologist. Online was designed as a result of reviewing many films and stories during a literature review. In addition, the live medium was originally chosen to execute this story, which was estimated at a budget that was not feasible for the scope of this academic project.

Story 2 : Meenakshi

Story 3 : Who ate the apple?