Pjotr Sapegin's Madama Butterfly (Stop Motion)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E387c5RAhK4&feature=youtu.be&iframe=true&width=90%&height=90%


Wow! Okay...

From the very start of this video I didn't know anything going in and did not know what to expect.
All I knew about the video was that it used classical opera music, so it had to be something beautiful and magestic.

I was actually taken aback immediately as the stop motion video began with a very explicit sex scene, full of emotional and sensory shots of the man and woman swaying back and forth in the throws of their passion and clutching each others bodies with unbridled enthusiasm.

The story follows a presumably asian woman and her love affair with a presumably american sailor.
All set to the music of Madae Butterfly. The use of this classical music really adds an artful and beautifully sad tone throughout the animation.

There is no dialog in the film, which leaves it up to the visuals to tell the entire story.
I was very surprised at how many of the small touches had such a large impact on how I viewed the story.

The woman's body was pale, and to me seemed hand made. She seemed earthly and natural.
The Sailor's body was tanned and plastic, with a structure reminiscent of a barbie doll with unrealistic, better than perfect proportions.

This was most apparent while they lied next to each other naked in the straw.

of course, he left her on shore and went back to his ship, and we stay with the woman to watch her wait as she looks out on the horizon. It's revealed that she is pregnant and the child is his.

she opens her dress and her pregnant stomach is a fish bowl, with an anxious fish tapping against the side of the bowl. the water spills out onto the sandy shore and the clay fish becomes a child.

Having never been pregnant myself, i can't confirm this; but my friends who have given birth tell me that being pregnant is very strange because you literally have another being inside of you.

The allegory of the fishbowl hits me on many different levels.
The fact that the child is a fish, and her father is a sailor, the idea that when a child is inside a person he\she is intangible, and you can only imagine what they will be like before you actually meet,
and that the fish comes out onto dry land flapping at first, but begins to cry like a human child, not changing into one until after the mother takes it into her arms.

The umbilical cord is also very striking, the mother and child are connected together by a visible string, which of course is eventually ripped carelessly by the sailor. The idea that not only the daughter, but the mother too flew though the air like a kite using this string made the connection not only physical but clearly emotional aswell.

My FAVORITE part of the entire film was at the very end.
The Sailor takes the Daughter away and casually waves goodbye like it was nothing at all.

Then, like magic, the woman runs as fast as she can off the set of the shore, breaking the reality of her universe. Her pain was so great that she escaped her world, and while crying profusely she ripped the features of her identity off of her mechanical, doll-like skeleton, and broke herself apart in a fit of self destruction. She disassembles herself and in her final act she unplugs the lights of the miniature set to shut out everything that had happened.

I could say that this beautifully recreates her internal struggle visually bla bla bla...

But to be honest, I honestly am so impressed with the idea that a character could be so distraught that she breaks the rules of her own reality because it's the only way she can escape her pain, that i am utterly speechless.

This is an amazingly creative use of medium.

I've been looking at examples of ASCII art  and seeing what kind of images and styles it uses. From an artistic standpoint, i can't say i'm terribly impressed with the esthetics of the style, but from the idea of the work that people put into each piece i appreciate the time and work put into the images. That being said, using a generator to change an image into text doesn't feel terribly impressive, and to be honest it feels like a fancy photoshop filter, like converting an image to halftone for screen printing.