COP1 Seminar - GENRE (its time to get dramatic ya'll)

Today we looked at Genre Presentation and Genre in animation, something which I've realised I could go on and on about, so please DONT stop me if you've heard this one before.

What is Genre?

Its what is seen as the categorisation of music and filming, but can often be contradictory. We typically imagine that "Horror" and "Romance" would be for adults and Cartoons to be for younger people. HOWEVER don't be so quick to judge poppet!

Grizzly Tales For Gruesome Kids

After watching this Episode I was taken back to my childhood and reminded how much this terrified me to my very core when I was younger. This is an example of the fact that even animations that are made for children can still be frightening by their standards! Even watching it now as an adult, its still a pretty disturbing concept.. 

The Happy Moose (Please excuse the language..)

This 1995 animation surprised me quite a lot. A lot of people might assume that due to the name of the style of the animation that it would most likely be for kids. Well, erm no it isn't. Im not going to lie, I laughed pretty hard at this one. One of the things that makes it so funny is how contradictory it is. It is a 2D animation which starts of nice and sweet and then..it becomes clear that it is NOT for baby humans at all. This is an example of some of the exceptions made when it comes to drama, not everything that we watch is easy to pin point straight away.

We also looked at Paul Well's Generic Plots which are Maturation / Redemption / Punitive / Testing / Education/ Disillusionment. There are however, exceptions to these. We also looked at his, 7 Genres of Animation Film which are Formal / Deconstructive / Political / Abstract / Re - Narration / Paradigmatic / Primal. I like the fact that looking at these aspects got us all talking and dishing out our opinions on how films are judged based on their Genre.

For example, "The Hunger Games" was originally going to be reeled as a SiFy movie but instead it was changed to, Fantasy. This was because it was more likely to be more appealing. There is a lot of stereotypical connotations when it comes to genre, so a lot of people might be put of a SyFy movie because of the "geeky" or "lame" types of people that are into that stuff. Another example of this is "Chick Flicks" Its pretty typical for a lad to refuse to watch one of these with his girlfriend, but why is that? These types of films have been associated with women and teenage girls. Its not a bad thing but they are definitely less popular with the gents (..or so they claim)

There was also a lot of talk about the fact that SyFy is typically associated with men more than women. However we all luckily agreed that was a sort of unnecessary point and that it is irrelevant, at least to us lot anyway!