The Stain

As a live action major, I have been having trouble staying interested in some of the videos that we have been watching in class for the past couple of weeks. Not to say that these videos weren't interesting per say, but sometimes I felt that the conversation leaned toward animation technique too much to really make me want to have joined in on the discussion. However, I found the "Women in Animation" week fascinating and wanted to share my thoughts on my favorite short during that segment (and perhaps of the entire semester) "The Stain."

Foremost, I highly enjoyed the mixed media that the animators used. My favorite use of this was probably the juxtaposition between the innocent looking two dimensional drawings and the eerie, uncanny clay sequences. This always kept the film unpredictable and made me a little uneasy watching these characters passively transform into different figures.

Second, I thought the method of telling the story primarily through the older daughter's perspective was fascinating. The story is founded on the actions of the two older brothers, but there was a huge emotional dissonance created by not allowing the story to be told from their point of view. As a result, they were almost demonized and portrayed as nearly sociopathic in nature. However, their thoughts are never truly revealed so we are left to decide their "true" character for ourselves.

The story is especially heartbreaking for the youngest daughter who was paralyzed by her older sister from envy and fathered by one of her two older brothers. I think the story is really about her tragic life and how her mere existence is inadvertently the cause for all of the conflicts even though she never really does anything to catalyze these events herself.

I think this may possibly be a metaphor by the creators of the film, claiming that women are often blamed for a lot of problems caused by the male-dominated society when the women are in fact the true victims of the male's actions. I thought this was a beautiful film and possibly beats any live action short that I've ever seen.