Ottawa and Objects

Something I really look away from my experience at the Ottawa Film Festival was really how much emption animation is able to give intimate things. I obviously already knew that animation had the power to give life and stories to objects and things that don't usually have a voice. But in so many shorts I saw it was really wild to me how far animation was able to take personifying intimate objects. The artists and process of animation was able to take things viewers don't usually care about or connect to and give them such feeling that the audience would react to what happened to them. For example, one short I saw was about a little ball traveling through space. We watched him for a bit and started to form a connection with this character, all of a sudden another all traveling through came from the opposite direction and started bullying the first ball. Eventually in their fight, the first ball (our hero) popped. The whole audience reacted and gasped! I thought this was crazy how the creator of this animation got a whole room full of people to love and care about this little ball (with literally no facial expressions or dialogue) so much that we all were sad when he died. That is so powerful that without any of the tricks live action uses to get audience members to care about characters, animation is able to get people to care just as much.