Scribble Kibble is a show about animation.
Last month I went through Netflix’s animation category and added every movie I thought looked
interesting that I hadn’t seen.
Then I took the whole list and looked for what I thought was the weakest movie and I
watched it.
Sahara is so bland that about 15 minutes in I was considering calling it quits, and me,
I’ll suffer through just about any movie or book I start.
Sahara is bad, but not bad like animation quality bad, bad as in the movie has no idea
who it’s for or what it’s about.
And it’s not even terrible enough to be entertaining.
It’s a soulless desert of mediocrity.
Supposedly Sahara is for kids, but the movie begins with one of the main characters getting
beaten with a rock until he blacks out, the other main character spends most of her time
as a slave trying to keep her distance from a lecherous male snake, and her brother is
a drug addict with a voice that makes you want to strangle him.
Despite these teen topics, the movie has no adult humor or sensibility to it at all, making
it incredibly boring for parents.
On top of that, the film has no main theme or lessons.
It’s about blue snakes versus green snakes, er, poverty versus prosperity, no, wait, it’s
about police brutality, oh just kidding it’s a love-at-first-sight Romeo Juliet story.
Ohh, it’s an adventure story.
No wait, it’s about slavery.
Friendship?
Alright.
I have no idea what this movie is about.
After it ends you come away with nothing.
So here’s this cliché-ridden, rambling plotline, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a
fantastic scene slams into your face.
What this is even doing here, I have no idea, but it’s absolutely amazing and I love it.
This particular sequence is by a couple of artists separate from the main animation crew
and wow, is it stuffed with psychedelic trippy symbolism, from the Garden of Eden to loss
of personal identity.
At first glance, the animation looks to be 2D.
It starts with painted 2D illustrations.
The swirling snakeskin pattern in the background is 2D art doused with blur and color effects.
You can actually see the pattern when it shows up again here in blue.
The waveforms that come next are hand animated, probably with a wave warp special effect added
on to them.
But it’s here, at the frame-by-frame paint splashes where things get interesting because
those animations are mapped onto a 3D environment, which turns out to be this snake.
The top of the snake has an animated texture masked on to it.
What mask means is the animators take this flat shape and tell the artwork or video clip
to only show in that area.
I can’t figure out if the green snake is hand drawn or if it is the same 3D model from
the movie with different lighting settings to make it look 2D.
The accuracy of the head shape and body pattern suggests it’s 3D.
Technically you can accomplish the same thing by animating a still painting (here’s an
animated painting), by rotoscoping / drawing on top of a raw 3D animation, or by being
a perfectionist at staying on model when drawing the character.
The fully detailed snakes are probably 3D though.
But wow, what a great section full of color and texture and art.
It’s the oasis in this desert of a movie.
I daresay there’s another thing I enjoyed about Sahara, and that’s the snake dancing.
I could’ve watched an entire movie about snakes dancing.
As an animator, the nice thing about snakes is the character bones are relatively straightfoward:
you don’t have to worry about hands and arms and legs, all you need to do is animate
curves.
It’s entertaining to watch these simple shapes do intricate break dance moves.
I wish there’d been more of it.
Heheh.
A musical dance movie with snakes.
That’s totally ridiculous, never mind.
What I’m trying to do is reimagine this movie.
This is an exercise you can do to get better at writing stories.
Take a movie or book you didn’t like, figure out what about it is good and should be kept,
and what was bad that you would change to make it work.
Sahara has strong character designs and character animation.
It has many potentially interesting themes, but it never spends more than ten minutes
on any one of them.
For a kids movie, I’d center the story around dancing, get rid of the romance, and pick
a lesson.
How about: if you work hard and practice, sometimes you’ll still lose.
For a teen movie, I really like this idea of being forced to adjust to a new reality.
Spend the first part of the movie with these two characters already together and in love.
Then, sudden disaster and we never see blue snake again.
Green snake learns to survive in a harsh world where failure ends in death.
Male green snake is supportive instead of arrogant so we like him as an audience.
These two bond and fall in love.
But then, surprise!
Blue snake rescues everybody and now she has to choose between the two!
Oh, what a painful choice!
Do I stay with the person who helped me survive, who faced all of these difficult choices with
me, or do I go with the person I once loved but I’m not sure I know anymore?
Hey, if you want to make a brutal, Hunger Games-level story, make all of the characters
humans, and the turning point is when the young woman is kidnapped and plunged into
the world of human trafficking.
She struggles to survive and bonds with a young man who is a victim too.
After a few years her fiancé rescues her with the help of the authorities.
But by then… is she the same person anymore?
There’s a good story.
C’mon, there’s a good story in this movie: give it to me!
So I’d like to know, what bad movie did you watch recently, and what would you do
to fix it?
Comment below!
During the Here’s The Plan episode, I asked what your plans were.
Here are some of your responses.