Response to the Quay Brothers exhibition at MOMA

 It was a very impressive visit to MOMA to watch the Quay Brothers’ exhibition. The exhibition surprised me with not only the large quantity of works that the Quay Brothers created, but also the great quality of work that they made. The realistic puppets and scenes are important factors that lead them to success, as while as their fluent animation and unique style of story telling.

I can hardly imagine that how people make great animations without computer software decades ago until I came to this exhibition. There are lots of great stop motion animations playing in the room while their puppets and scenes displayed at the side. The quality of every puppet, decor and scene is terrific because they are realistic and detailed. By making them in details, Quay Brothers also gave the decors and scenes characteristics. Every single object in the animation is a character, so there are lots of things to watch beside the animation itself. In Street of Crocodiles, the mysterious and creepy atmosphere was created successfully. There are several factors that contributed to its success: first of all, the animation has a very dark tone overall, and the music sounds really creepy, too. Secondly, the use of camera some times created very shaky or blurry images, which added a hint of mystery. The camera cuts jumped a lot in the animation, so it made audiences hard to follow the story. Last but not least, the detailed puppet, decors and scenes illustrated the horror atmosphere to the next level. All the above factors made this film achieve Quay Brothers’ expectation in terms of emotion. Therefore, I learned that not only good-looking characters make a good animation, but also characterized objects make a good animation, too.

As a result, I think I can definitely use this idea in my own animation. For my further projects, I will spend some times on objects in the scene. I want their characteristics to help me advance the emotion aspect of my own film.