I Screen Studies

This is material excised from an article I am writing with Brian Yecies about Sejong Park’s digital animation Birthday Boy (Australian Film, Television and Radio School 2004). I analyse the film’s narrative structure, and discuss the ways in which the cinematography, editing, sound design, and score both aid comprehension and underscore the film’s contribution to international screen culture.

Birthday Boy has won over 40 awards at film festivals around the world including Best Animated Short at the prestigious SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival in 2004 which qualified the film for the 2005 Academy Awards even before Park and fellow students had graduated from the AFTRS. It was subsequently nominated for the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film, losing to another extraordinary short, Chris Landreth’s tribute to pioneering Canadian animator Ryan Larkin Ryan. Other awards include the Prix Jean-Luc Xiberras at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in 2005 (which had a special focus on Korea) and Best Short Animation at the 2005 BAFTA awards. It has screened at over 100 film festivals around the world, and is the most awarded film in the almost forty year history of the AFTRS.

An on-screen title sets the action in Korea, 1951. The film tells the story of a young boy, Manuk, who roams a seemingly deserted town to glean and recycle the debris of war. We first meet him in the wreck of an aeroplane, looking for a particular piece of war refuse – a bolt – to turn into a toy soldier for his collection. He sings a song about a bear. Upon hearing the unmistakeable low whistle of a train in the distance he runs to the track and places the bolt on the rail. The train thunders past on its urgent mission to carry tanks to the front. Manuk stands mesmerised, and grins widely. Once the train has passed he retrieves the bolt which has become magnetised. He makes his way through the town, pretending to be a soldier engaged in house-to-house fighting, until his attention is captured by the drone of aeroplane engines. Silently he watches them slowly cross the sky. His war game begins again as he crouches behind rocks on a ridge overlooking an area with houses jumbled together. A postman cycles down the road below Manuk’s hiding place. Manuk imagines he is with his dad, pinned down by enemy fire. “Dad, there are too many of them,” he cries as the sound of machine guns and artillery fire fill his head. “But we are braver than them,” his father replies in the game. Manuk picks up a rock as if it is a hand grenade, expertly pulls the pin with his teeth and hurls it at the enemy crying “Dad, get down!” He waits, crouched, fingers in ears for the explosion which never comes. Instead we hear the postman cry in surprise and pain, before crashing his bicycle and shouting at his unseen tormentor. Manuk slinks away, and climbs the hill towards his home. He takes a key from a special hiding spot, and approaches the verandah in front of his house. He notices a parcel, and hurries to open it. He pulls out an old leather wallet containing a faded black and white photograph of a man crouching with a child dressed as Manuk is now, but much younger. Manuk gently caresses the photograph with his thumb. He then pulls out a set of dog tags, and an old boot. He marches up and down in front of his house, wearing the boots, as if he is a soldier on guard. Later, inside the house, he plays with the toy soldiers and tanks he has made from bits and pieces of metal he has found, and falls asleep on the floor. His mother appears at the door, saying “Manuk, Mum is home”.

The film is set in Korea, during the war that pitched the north of the country and its allies China and the Soviet Union, against the south and a United Nations coalition led by the United States of America which included more than 17,000 Australian army and air force personnel. But the film is not ‘about’ the war as such (as Sejong makes clear in media interviews), and is certainly not about the Australian experience of this conflict. Neither is it an explicit comment on the conflict in Iraq which began the year before the film was finished. Rather it is about the impact of war on those left behind, and so has a much more universal and timeless appeal.

Part of what is exciting about the film from an Australian perspective is that it does not allude to the usual iconography or correspond with the kinds of social and cultural experiences that typically mark films from this country. It does not allude to local histories of storytelling, or overtly suggest that it can tell us something about what it means to be Australian, and yet it tells us so much about these things by telling a story from, about and set in a different place and culture. As Sung-Ae Lee has argued in a reading of the coverage of the film and its success in Korean language newspapers in Sydney, the film provided the opportunity for the celebration of diasporic achievement and success, for cultural maintenance through its remembering of the Korean War, and for empowerment of the diasporic community (Lee 2004, p.233). At the same time, the allusions to other films, the subtlety of the film’s style as expressed through camerawork, editing, sound and music as well as mastery of digital animation techniques and a structure familiar from mainstream Hollywood cinema mark the film as a knowing and learned contribution to international screen culture.

The film is divided into four parts of roughly equal length and an epilogue, a structure familiar from mainstream Hollywood cinema but not so usual in Australian short filmmaking (Thompson 1999, pp.28-44). In the first part, the setup, the protagonist, Manuk, and his world are established. Manuk’s series of overlapping goals are not all made obvious in this part, which runs up to the point that we (and Manuk) first hear the train. He is clearly very young, too young to tell us what is happening; we must piece together the story ourselves. One of the pleasures of Birthday Boy is realising how much of the story is seeded early on but only gradually revealed, and only able to be fully assembled in the climax, to devastating final effect.

Manuk’s primary goal is to be reunited with his father, to be with and like him, a soldier at war. The games he plays throughout the film revolve around this goal, most obviously in the scene with the postman, in which Manuk’s inadvertent assault on the hapless cyclist is the result of a game in which he imagines he is with his father attacking an unseen enemy. His search for the piece of metal in this opening part of the film is also directed towards the goal of reuniting with his father, if only symbolically through his imaginative play with the soldiers and tanks he builds with scavenged metal, his trophies of war. His broadest, loosest goal is to play and to occupy the time he must spend alone – perhaps after school – until his mother returns home. He must make his own entertainment, and he is resourceful. He is driven by the desire to play, and this is what is enchanting about him. He is imaginative and mechanically savvy, but still too young to understand what the return of his father’s possessions means.

The setup ends with wide shot which frames the tiny boy against the wreckage of the aeroplane which has fatally scarred several buildings. We hear the low whistle of a train in the distance. This is the first turning point, marking the transition from the setup to the second part of the film, ‘the complicating action’ (Thompson 1999 p. 29). This is the longest part of the film, and also the most action-packed. In the opening shot of this part, the camera floats down the side of the locomotive as it thunders down the track. The intense and unexpected sound of the train cues a new mood of urgency and excitement leading up to the flattening of the bolt on the rail. This is the ‘central turning point’ (Thompson 1999 p.32), the major event which ends this part which tends to occur at the mid-point of a film and functions to set the story on a new path. In this case, the turning point is the flattening and magnetising of the bolt which allows Manuk to continue his journey home to make and play with the toy soldier.

Up to this point it has appeared that Manuk’s quest first to find and then to work the metal is his primary goal. In the third part of the film, ‘the development’, which spans Manuk’s war game through the town culminating in postman’s crash, it very subtly becomes clear that Manuk’s primary goal is to be with and like his soldier father. This part of the film is played for comedy, specifically the comedy of French director and film clown Jacques Tati, two of whose films feature a cycling postman (the short L’École des Facteurs, 1947, and the feature film Jour de Fête, 1948). There is a double tribute to Tati here, as the gag of the postman crashing after Manuk throws the rock is reminiscent of a similar set piece in Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle in which Tati’s character Hulot sits with a group of small boys on a rise overlooking a road. They take bets on whether they will be able to distract passers-by below by dog-whistling them and making them walk into a lamp-post. This scene is not only a further example of the intercultural concerns that underpin the film, it is also a dialogue with the international history of film. Serge Daney, translated and quoted in Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review of the reissue on DVD of Tati’s Jour de Fête, declared that “Every Tati film marks simultaneously a moment in the work of Jacques Tati; a moment in the history of French society and French cinema; a moment in film history”. It follows then that the allusions to Tati’s films in Birthday Boy are also moments in film history.

The climax of the film begins as Manuk slinks away from the postman. This part of a film typically resolves question about whether the protagonist’s goals can be achieved; the tragedy of Birthday Boy is in the realisation that although Manuk has achieved all his goals – he found the bolt, made it to the train, reified his father in his war game, and made it home, to play – with the discovery of the parcel and its deathly contents, his life has irrevocably changed in ways that he is too young to understand. The five final shots which constitute an epilogue after the climactic scene with the parcel are all separated by dissolves to underscore the poignant bleakness of Manuk and his mother’s new situation. The first two shots – panning slowly across his toys on the floor lit by late afternoon sun, new meaning and emotions attaching to them like the dust dancing in the air, the lasting legacy of war; and a shot of a desk on which sit more of Manuk’s tin toys, with three photographs on the wall above of an old man, an elderly couple, and between them a soldier in uniform – could be chronologically in sequence but could be moments frozen in time, defined simply by their being post mortem. The three shots of Manuk asleep on the floor are all shot from overhead, each almost imperceptibly rising away from the boy. The film ends at the moment the mother arrives home, thus delaying indefinitely her discovery of the contents of the parcel. The film ends then on the cusp of her and Manuk’s new life, before she realises what has happened, but at the point at which we realise we know more than all of the characters about the story.

The editing and framing of these shots amplify the pitiful scene (particularly in the shots of Manuk asleep on the floor just before his mother arrives). They function as breathing spaces, moments to contemplate the enormity of what has happened to Manuk. The use of dissolves to transition between these shots is, apart from an almost imperceptible dissolve between the first and second shots of the film, the only overt intervention of editing style in the film. The rest of the film has been edited in continuity style for clarity and comprehension, although there are several sophisticated sequences of cuts which while probably unnoticed by most audiences are fundamental to the telling of the story, as well as to cueing the mood, and giving balance to the film. One vital example is the moment when Manuk first sees the parcel. From an angle which later transpires to be the position of the box, we watch Manuk arrive home. Suddenly his head whips around so that he is looking directly at the camera, there is an axial cut to a close up of his face as he looks back at us. But instead of directly cutting to the reverse angle and showing what Manuk is looking at, as is the convention with this looking/looked at transition, another shot is inserted from a new angle: wide and behind Manuk, so we see him kick off his boots and clamber up on to the verandah from behind, before he scurries over to the object of his attention. It is only at this point that we see what he is looking at, from his point of view: the box with incomprehensible (to him and a non-Korean speaking audience) writing on it. The insertion of the extra shot delays the satisfaction of our desire to see what has captured his attention so totally, and also performs the important work of separating us from Manuk and preparing us to deduce as onlookers and not as Manuk (to whom we have established quite an attachment) what the meaning of the parcel really is.

Later, the scene with the train – the heart of the ‘complicating action’ – is another good example here. After seeing the locomotive thunder down the tracks at the start of this sequence, we cut back to Manuk who is running from front left of screen away from the camera which tracks in slightly following him down a narrow alley before he performs a comic turn around a corner. In one of many symmetrical framings in the film, Manuk appears in the centre of the next wide shot emerging from a gap between two buildings on either side of the screen, facing the camera in the mid-ground and looking offscreen to the left. He runs across the track towards the camera, almost colliding with it. In the next shot the camera has swivelled 90 degrees to the left, and Manuk’s face is now close to camera in the bottom right of screen, looking to the left back past the camera. The railway track cutting from bottom left diagonally up to the right of frame is paralleled both by the buildings’ roof-line, and by telegraph or telephone lines snaking across the screen. Manuk leans eagerly into frame, craning his neck for a glimpse of the train. Cut to a reverse angle from his point of view of the track running away from the camera from bottom right of screen diagonally up to the left. Again, the roof-line and telegraph lines border and reinforce the line of the track across the screen, with the direction echoed in the outlines of three identically shaped mountains in the background. In the distance in the centre of the screen is a rust-coloured iron arch railway bridge separating small groups of buildings clinging to the side of the closest mountain. A slight zoom in accentuates the sense of taking on Manuk’s point of view. Cut back to the previous shot and framing, before cutting in to a close up of Manuk’s face as he bends to place his ear to the rail. He smiles and sits up; with a cut on action the camera moves a further 45 degrees to the left with the track now cutting diagonally down left to right in the foreground at a similar angle as in the wide shot with the bridge in the background. Manuk sits next to the track, shuffles forward, and reaches into his pocket. Cut to a shot from his point of view with the nearest rail in close up running from side to side across the middle of the screen. Manuk places the bolt on the rail, it starts to roll off and he repositions it with a small flourish. Cut to a shot from the front of the locomotive, looking down on to the tracks rising from bottom to top of frame, the noise of the train insistently raising excitement. Then in a wide shot taken as if level with the rail, the bolt recognisable but out of focus and enormous at the front of frame as Manuk retreats to a stone staircase a few metres from the track in the background. A rack focus pulls the bolt into sharp focus just as the train wheel rolls over it. Manuk looks up, mesmerised, and in a reverse, low angle shot from his point of view, we see the train’s monstrous cargo – tanks being rushed to the front – flash past. The train noise diminishes, leaving only the hollow sound of the wind whipped up by the train. The sound effects take us into Manuk’s imagination at this moment; the train is overpowering, awe inspiring. Cut to an overhead shot looking down on Manuk in the bottom left corner of the screen as the train scythes the frame diagonally in two from top left to bottom right. Slowly as if in a trance he approaches the train, and we cut back to a frontal shot of Manuk who approaches the camera to stare up at the train in close up, his face gradually creasing to a wide grin.

Cut to a low angle shot down to Manuk’s right and slightly behind him, as he whips his head around to try to fix his gaze on each of the tanks before they are tugged along by the urgency of their mission past him and out of his sight. In another wide shot the train clatters away to the back of the frame as Manuk runs after it down the track. He begins in the bottom left corner of the screen, the position he has occupied in two of the previous three shots, running almost to the middle of frame before he stops to watch the train disappear in the distance. The noise of the train diminishes again, with the whistling wind filling the void.

As evident in this sequence, dynamic and subtle camera moves are a feature of the film. These are of course not real camera moves at all, but rather computer generated approximations and recreations of camera moves in the endlessly malleable digitally animated space. The movement of the camera within a shot acts to identify the work as digital rather than hand-drawn 2D animation, but the principal purposes of the camera moves are to reinforce the storytelling and enhance mood cues in the film. The first two shots of the film majestically swoop from a close-up of a butterfly on the crown of a roof down over the roof and tracking in to the fuselage of a crashed aeroplane to end facing Manuk who is sorting through the ruins of war. The transition between shots is masked by the film’s title, first written onscreen in Hanja (Korean adaptations of Chinese characters), dissolving to ‘Birthday Boy’ in capital letters, in English, in a slightly stylised typeface. The next shot is a brief overhead which, rising slowly, frames Manuk through a hole in the fuselage as he walks out into the sunlight. (This shot will be repeated in the next sequence as the train passes, and again, heartwrenchingly in the epilogue where along with the dissolves between shots the gradual upward lift of the overhead shot completes our separation from Manuk that had begun when he saw the parcel.) In a long, locked off wide shot we then watch Manuk exit the wreck of the plane and walk towards the camera, the shot ending with a close-up of his face, reinforcing his importance in the story and allowing contemplation of the accomplishment of the animation.

The film uses a naturalistic earthy colour palette, full of greens, browns and rusty reds; like the camerawork the colours are not garish or showy as in many animated films. Their purpose is to set the scene and support the storytelling rather than to stand out and demand attention. Even the sky is yellowish rather than blue or grey. Apart from the wide shot of the train track running off into the mountains, the only natural flora or fauna seen in the film (insect noises are heard throughout) is the butterfly in the opening shot, an unidentified white and orange pieridae, which is disturbed by a metallic clang. Its flight launches the camera backwards over the wooden roof of a traditional Korean building. In Korean culture the butterfly can symbolise happiness, perhaps an allusion to Manuk’s impending happiness at finding the bolt and making the toy, although this may be one of many moments in the film which invite a cross-cultural reading. The Greek word for ‘butterfly’ is ‘psyche’, which also means the soul or the form that a person takes in the after life. The flight of the butterfly here in Birthday Boy might then be the flight of the soul, perhaps the soul of Manuk’s soldier father who, we will learn, has recently been killed. Manuk is oblivious.

We are first introduced to Manuk through sound as the butterfly is disturbed by Manuk’s clatter through the debris in the aeroplane in search of a particular piece of metal, before we hear him singing. This is fitting as the sound design and sound editing, along with the score, are critical to the telling and comprehension of the story. In the absence of English dialogue (Manuk’s song, his game, the postman’s cries and his mother’s greeting are all sung or spoken in Korean, with English subtitles), the work that must be done through sound effects, atmospheres and foley is amplified. And it is through sound that we identify and are aligned with Manuk at two critical moments: first, as the train passes Manuk its noise diminishes, leaving only the wind and his heartbeat between the boy and the train; and second, in his war game leading up to the assault on the postman when he talks with his father and we hear the sounds of explosions and gunfire in his head. When he throws the rock/handgrenade, we hear it spiralling to earth, but then it abruptly stops and instead of the anticipated explosion we hear a dull thud followed by the anguished cries of the postman crashing his bicycle. The use of atmospheres is also notable here, particularly the sound of insects, birds and frogs which runs through the film, dropping out only when overpowered by other sounds and in the epilogue when the soundscape is evacuated to leave only the sound of Manuk sleeping, and the wind whistling through the house. The use of the sound of the wind in this final scene gestures back both to the incident with the train, and to the opening scene where the wind whistles through the aeroplane. In the epilogue the wind is made more eerie, ominous and other worldly by the removal of other environmental noises.

Music is used sparingly but effectively in the film. After metallic clangs and rhythm set by the sounds of insects and frogs, the first music in the film is Manuk’s song which is heard twice in the setup. The song appears before Manuk, so initially it functions to provide information about character and setting and to alert us that the film’s first language is not English. The first instrumental note is not heard until the transition from the setup to the complicating action when a combination of gongs, chimes, bells that are bowed or struck, and plucked string instruments are used to play an apparently arhythmic motif. This motif appears again in variations at the start of the development and again at the beginning of the climax. The eerie strangeness of the music is discomfiting, and raises concern for Manuk’s well-being at each spot it appears. Music is used most consistently in the climax. As Manuk discovers the parcel the pattern of short bursts of a single or few notes is broken. A low, drawn out, deep resonating note ominously signals the power of the box’s contents, and the music ceases completely in the transition to the epilogue as Manuk marches up and down wearing his father’s presents, the boots and dog tags. They are reunited at last, but forever destined to be apart.

References

Sung-Ae Lee, (2004) “Performing Community: A Comparison of Korean-Language Newspapers in Beijing and Sydney”, Diaspora 13.2/3, pp. 227-52

Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Color of Paradise’ Chicago Reader http://www.chicagoreader.com/movies/archives/1998/0198/01168b.html

Kristin Thompson, (1999) Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique Cambridge: Harvard.