(Warning: This article contains season 1 ending spoilers.)
Amazon’s animated
production of Invincible has concluded its 8-episode first season and has
already been renewed for two more seasons. All this, to the excitement of the
comic book’s existing franchise fans and its new viewers.
Episode 8 of Invincible is a landmark program in animation, for reasons that founding masters and producers of the animated medium have maintained are key to animation’s worth as an artform.
—The significance of this
show, and its episode 8 in particular has to do with its ability to shock
audiences in ways that previously only horror movies could manage. The
challenge of animation, in regards to scaring or shocking audiences has to do
with its innate artificiality. Animation, 2D animation (there are cel-shaded 3D
elements in this series) is inherently an other-reality, - a flattened,
stylized abstraction and as such, looks “fake” by design. For those creators
who have wanted to make an animation as scary as William Friedkin’s The Exorcist,
or as explicitly violent and gore-laden as the opening of Saving Private Ryan, animation’s
lack of verisimilitude has defeated prior efforts to scare or shock despite
some incredible work in Japanese anime in recent years. Live-action horror
films themselves will often fall short of the mark if the blood “looks fake” or
the stunts and effect work are unconvincing. What then, do traditional animators
(who will never approach the texture of reality and don’t intend to) do to
affect their audiences with the proper shock required of a story like
Invincible?
—In short, they must do
what Robert Kirkman did in episode 8: raise the emotional stakes so that the
violence that the animation illustrates evokes a shock that exceeds the actual
gore and trauma depicted on screen: Episode 8 horrifies and shocks because the
viewer is made to care.
Walt Disney is said to have
been unconvinced of animation’s legitimacy until he saw his own production of Snow
White with an audience and witnessed people crying and reacting uncontrollably
to a series of flickering drawings and sounds projected on a screen – the
audience reacting as they would to a movie with live actors — reacting as they
would to “real” events.
Season 1 Episode 8 of
Invincible and its many violent set pieces may indeed be looked upon as the
moment wherein 2D animation, both enabled and limited by its inherently abstract
nature, finally exercised the ability to horrify in as visceral a way as any
scary movie.
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