Visual analysis task

Visual writing task analysing Kristen Leapore's 'Bottle' and Siri Malchior's 'The Dog who was a Cat Inside'

Instantly one can see a definite similarity between the two animations in terms of hidden message, the concern of identity, and a growing issue with young people in the world today with the growing use of social media. But they are portrayed in very different ways, and the message being represented differs slightly with each animation. Here is an analysis of these social concerns and how these two animations portray them.
Inspecting ‘Bottle’ first, created by Kristen Leapore, it takes on a different approach to the current concern of identity crisis. But Kristen provides a softer approach until we get to the end. It starts with two characters each inhabiting two different environments: beach and snow covered beach. Separated by a vast ocean communicating with one another by means of glass bottle, they start sending different items found in their different environments. These items are used to attach to their plain figures to slowly create certain human like features such as eyes, hair and mouths. Then the one sends some drawings implying they should meet by converging at the bottom of the vast ocean that separates them, it’s when they get closer they start to lose the items that they attached to themselves and slowly start to dissolve. This brings to fruition the ideology of social media miss-representing people, how people represent themselves in such a different way on social media than how they are in reality.
Compared to Bottle the next animation, The Dog who was a Cat Inside deals with a similar issue but in a different approach. The basic premise is that a cat is trapped inside of a dog; it is created to suggest that the cat isn’t a separate being or character but rather the identity of the dog trying to override the identity of the character. This leads us to sway towards the identity in which the social community and groups of individuals create and enforce on their peers which in turn create it very hard for someone of a different orientation to accept this or present themselves ion this way and try and hide it, such examples consist of: sexuality, religion, gender and such aspects of human orientation.
So as described they are both oriented around the same concern, one which effects a lot of people in the ever growing dominance of social media. But the animations differ in a way that represents two different approaches to this concern. Bottle seems to represent the way in which people display themselves how they want to be perceived in social media which is not true; when The Dog who was a Cat Inside seems to display the inner desire not to be how one is perceived.
But it isn't the meaning that is different, it is also completely different aesthetically, Bottle is created using stop motion and The Dog was created using 2D hand drawn elements within 3D computer generated space, they both merit different benefits to the concerns that these animations represent for example, in Bottle the objects used are everyday objects along with naturally occurring ones, depicting an empathetic response to the characters making the concern seem more pronounced. This cannot be said for The Dog due to its abstract charm, but this benefits the understanding of the issue making it easier to represent