Toys of tomorrow.

Abstract

Toys of Tomorrow is a 2 minutes animated short telling a story of an unpopular toy maker who is trying to follow the fashion trend. This paper aims to tell the concept behind the story and recollect the details on the way of making the animation.The inspiration comes from a study of Simryn Gill’s photograph series called A Small Town At The Turn of the Century 2000 at Lucy Davis’s class of Contemporary South East Asian Art. Each photo in the series is a portrait of a local inhabitant covered by a headdress fashioned from fruit, vegetable or flowers. Clues in skin colour and costume are given showing the identity of the photographed people, but without faces we are stopped from knowing them as individuals and personalities.1 The absurdity in the scenario shows that identity is constructed and shifted by popular theory (essentialism), large social context, and others’ opinion. This inspired me in creating an animation celebrating individual identity. The first idea came to mind was to created a story about a young man who was dissatisfied with the world he lived in, striving hard to make a change and eventually succeed. Italo Calvino’s novel La nuvola di smog (1965) helped me visually imagine the emotions and the story settings in a social-realistic mode. The novel satirizes the industrial society in creating a smoggy environment and mentally disordered humans.