Analyzing an animated short

Theme: How we express ourselves

Central idea: People use creative arts to influence other people's perspectives.

Most kids who watch cartoons will not appreciate them for anything more than just entertainment.

Not so for Grade 4 kids.

Our precious Grade 4 kids have been practicing the art of analyzing various art forms; especially animated cartoons.

Of course, they laugh, they cheer, they laugh some more, but after watching, say, a PIXAR short, we dig a little deeper and try to understand the THEME as well as the artists’ intentions. They are learning that there is special feeling of

satisfaction that comes with ‘cracking the code’ and identifying the theme of a movie, or a book, or even a comic strip. Then, we can make comparisons and ask them to think of other stories (or TV programs) they have enjoyed that

have a similar theme. The bottom line of course, is to understand the author’s/artist’s intentions, “How are these

creative people trying to influence us?” It is to be expected that each student will have their own personal interpretation of these elements, as you can see from these 4 examples. This formative assessment task was given after we had watched the animated short “Smash & Grab”.

主題：我們如何表達自我？

中心思想：人類如何使用具創意性的藝術形式，來影響他人的觀點。

大部分的孩子在看卡通時，主要是在享受其所提供的娛樂性。但奎山四年級學生所關注的，不只於此。

奎山可愛的四年級學生練習分析了許多不同藝術形式，並註以賞析，尤其針對動畫卡通這一領域。當然，看卡通時，他們歡笑、歡呼，但在觀看完畢後，學生們在老師的帶領下，也一同挖掘出創作者想傳達的主題。學生在抽絲剝繭出創作者的意圖後感到心滿意足，他們分析的藝術形式有：電影、書與連載漫畫。接著，他們將這個主題與其他曾在電視節目上看過的相似主題相比較，目標就是在要透徹悟出『這些創作者，這些富有創意的人，是如何影響我們的觀點？』

我們期待，每位學生在能夠發展出各自的詮釋，下圖所示即為四位學生在觀賞完動畫短片“Smash & Grab”後的作品。