ABSTRACT
Simplicity in the image leads to an improved readability and understanding of the content. Too much information is cluttering the image with useless material and thus the audience has difficulties to understand who the character is, what is going on, and where the story is heading. Too much information in the character design is diluting the main point the artist is trying to make, which is the character’s personality in relation to his actions. Anything that takes the audience onto another path, a path that steers away from the main direction, needs to be either simplified, adjusted, or eliminated altogether to create a streamlined character design and/or story path that is clear and congruent. For instance, the robots in the Transformers series (2007–): Their design is very well done and they look stunning as toys or as concepts. However, as acting characters that have facial expressions and are supposed to cause empathy in a film, the design causes issues. There are so many moving details in the characters, especially their faces, and the design is so intricate and complicated that one has problems knowing where to look when the robots move. This could be acceptable if you only had one robot. But if you have good robots fighting bad ones in fierce battles and fast-paced action scenes, after a while the viewer loses track of who fights with whom and which robot is the good and which the bad. That is the point when the audience starts to detach from the story and loses interest. Fortunately in the Transformer series there isn’t much story to lose interest in, so it’s all still good. Simplicity in the design would have taken away the robot’s intricate alien details that make the design quite fascinating, but it would have added readability, which in a feature film is the more important aspect. Pixar’s movie UP (2009) has explorer Charles F. Muntz’s dogs talking due to a device that translates their thoughts and barks into language. This is a funny idea, however does not logically fit into the movie, despite being rather entertaining. Not only does the question arise who actually invented this device in the middle of a cave in South America, but it neither goes along with the world that UP is set in nor has it something to do with the actual storyline, even though it’s an interesting idea. The overall style of the film could be called contemporary-retro with a lot of 1950/1960s influences and no references to modern inventions at all. Everything in the world of UP is semirealistic, exaggerated, and stylized, but actually possible (even flying a house is technically feasible), though a talking dog just does not fit into the world created and thus it is distracting. A cute idea is not always helping the story or solving story problems. Everything needs to follow one goal!
