The short film that I decided to write about is “She and Her Cat” by Makoto Shinkai. This film shows the relationship between a cat and its owner through the cat’s point of view. The story starts with the women at the cat’s first meeting and then going through their daily life. As the story continues the cat meets a female cat who he rejects due to his strong love for the woman. Later on, the woman gets a phone call, but due to the fact that this is from the perspective of a cat, or just simply that it wasn’t important to the plot, we don’t know what happened on the phone call. We know as much as the cat knows which is whatever was said during the phone call that night made the woman very sad. The cat does the best he can to make her feel better by comforting her and eventually she is happy again.

This story doesn’t revolve around a clear central conflict. Instead, the structure of the story feels more relatable and natural, like we are looking at someone’s daily life. However, while it isn’t very straightforward, with the lack of certain aspects like background knowledge, there is still conflict. The conflict occurs during the phone call, but we don’t exactly know much about it. It is later resolved when the woman becomes happy again. There is also another conflict between the cat and his girlfriend when they argue because he has stronger feelings toward the woman.

The story itself is told through first perspective during the narrative parts to provide context to the series of text messages. The incident that moves the plot along is when the man starts to distance himself from the girl Victoria until the next point of conflict comes up which is the pregnancy. The man keeps up a pattern and is usually the one that the conflict seems to start, from him ghosting Victoria countless times and trying to give attention to her when it fitted his benefit such as when he found out Victoria was pregnant. We never get to see the father or even the man’s name just to show how much of the man is even part of their life. He existed and was never really introduced back to Victoria and Jim’s life. The name dropping of both main character and Jim is a constant reminder of the consistent presence in this story and the man didn’t exist. 

The way the story is told is effective in getting myself to be immersed in this retelling of the character’s past. We can imagine what must be going on around the main character’s thoughts during the interactions with J and the state of relationship they have. Most of the dialogue is through text typed up on screen. I think it also fits into the perspective of how this part of her life had a great effect on her. It is not happening in the present, but it her past helped to mold the present she is in as of right now in context of the film. There is no vocalized dialogue as the only record of this time was through digital formats and old papers from that time. We don’t know anything about other characters other than the main character and the text messages she reads. The parts are labeled in months and with the years to ground a sense of time, almost like going through an archive of some sort rather.

tommy o.

Hello DTC 354.

I chose “Meshes of the Afternoon” because it was very difficult for me to understand, and I’m not sure that I do understand it. I am interested to hear more about this film in class discussion.

There is no dialogue so the viewer is left with musical scoring and visual information to interpret the film. The general flow is a loop in time where the central character changes perspective each time. Each perspective changes reveals an aspect that may not have been seen or understood before, which heightens the tension between understanding and curiosity. It’s like a spiraling journey of recognition.

The music was moody and at times discordant, which fostered unease. The initial shots were mostly of high contrast shadow which added a disconnected feeling and an urge to understand what was beyond the metaphorical shadow.

Very early on I thought the main character was, or would be dead. Unfortunately, I have yet to connect why I guessed that so early in the film. With each progressive loop the story moved more strongly in that direction eventually being represented visually by the knife being the key to understanding the story and unlocking the memory or reality of the end.

I found the visuals disorienting through the use of camera movement, camera angle, and harsh lighting. Both running and use of slow motion also built a sense of urgency toward grasping the final understanding that the main character is dead, leaving behind things unfinished like a drink on the table, a disconnected phone, and turntable with a played out record.

Building stories without words is fascinating to me. Using visuals that have a dream-like or not quite real quality to them intrigues me. I’d like to know how each of you would tell a story without dialog.

She & Her Cat is about seeing the character ‘she’ through her cat’s eyes. The short film is narrated by her cat, and it shows what appears to be their entire relationship. We see the cat growing fonder of her near the start of their relationship, and we hear that she received a saddening phone call before she leaves, presumably for ever. There isn’t much of a conflict because these two characters like each other, and nothing is displayed in detail. Because the narrator, our audience surrogate in a way, is a cat, very little detail is given in the plot. When she leaves for work, the cat says that he doesn’t know or care where she goes. She leaves, and she comes back. The short film is straightforward, almost exactly a narration of “this event happened, then this event happened”, with the feelings of the cat interspersed. We see that he gets a girlfriend who is another cat. He doesn’t like her nearly as much as she seems to like him, the only hint of a conflict we’re given. Near the middle of the film, a bit of the story is loosely told in many quick snapshots. Because I can’t read Japanese, I can’t discern what they say, but they don’t seem to move the story along as much as the cat narrator. This short film seems to be about the cat loving and trying to understand his owner. Towards the end of the movie, the cat wants to know the nature of the saddening phone call, and she leaves him in the apartment. The closing line is “This world, we love it” said in tandem by the cat and her, the only time we hear her voice.

The short film that caught my attention was the Small Deaths movie. For the first minute or so I didn’t understand they were even speaking English, they had such heavy accents. I also believed the short film was an anthology of stories not relating to one another until the end credits rolled and said different actresses for Ann-Marie, the main character. In the first “act”, titled “Small Deaths,” a very young Ann Marie sings and plays during her last few minutes before bed as her mother brushes her father’s hair, who is about to be going out. I couldn’t understand why he was leaving, but as he exits the house, he doesn’t say whether he would or wouldn’t be back that night when asked. Anne Marie stares at the doorway where her father was just a moment ago. In the second “act,” titled “Holy Cow” Anne Marie and her sister play in the fields. Several other children play as well, separately. As she and her sister walk through the foliage, Anne Marie sees a fatally injured cow- assumed to be the aftermath of the young boys’ cruel games. She looks onto the cow as it passes. The third “act,” titled “Joke,” shows a young adult, disheveled Anne Marie kissing a young man in a stairway. They separate and he goes upstairs, then immediately calls for her. She shows some resistance to the call but eventually goes upstairs to sees a woman appearing to have overdosed, surrounded by other men. They yell at Anne Marie to call an ambulance as she stares at the woman. Eventually she moves, and the men and woman all start to laugh at Anne Marie. She leaves the room and pauses at the top of the stares. A baby starts to cry. The young man from the beginning moves past Anne Marie and down the stairs, and she follows him shortly after.

To me, this short film seems to be about Anne Marie’s life and her experiences with very heavy topics. She seems to be the type of person who simply freezes when faced with, for lack of a better word, an uncomfortable situation. As a child, every emotion feels so big because we haven’t had the chance to have such big feelings yet. As Anne Marie looks at the doorway in “Small Deaths,” it strikes me as feeling lonely. Her eyes say, Why did Pa leave? But she can’t do anything about it. “Holy Cow” has a feeling of helplessness, and perhaps a loss of innocence. Suddenly faced with the cruelty of the world and other people. The cow didn’t deserve that, but all Anne Marie can do is watch. “Joke” shows Anne Marie caught up with the wrong crowd, people who humiliate her for fun. Who fakes an overdose to prank someone? It’s sick. I get a feeling of not belonging and remembering the finality of death. Also, Anne Marie seems to be surrounded by people who just don’t care. Her mother didn’t ask more questions to the father who may or may not return that night, her sister didn’t seem to be interested in acknowledging the dying cow, her assumed lover didn’t care their acquaintances were making fun of Anne Marie. The film is heavy. It’s not meant to make you feel good. It’s showing what life can be, and surely is, for some.

For this blog post I watched She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and 160 Characters by Victoria Mapplebeck. I will only be discussing 160 Characters, however, because it was one of the longer videos. None of these videos, as stated in the instructions, follow the Aristotelian plot structure, the three part structure that can be simply generalized as the beginning, middle, and end. Or the inciting action, climax, and moment of last suspense. The videos we watched followed a more abstract or episodic element. In 160 Characters there were dates following the chronological events that happened in the story, fragmenting them into episodic sections.

The conflict and strife are not a giant tragic circumstance that follows the main character, but smaller tragedies that do not overwhelm, but encumber whoever the story is following. For 160 Characters, an absent paternal figure continually failing to be present are the small tragedies throughout. As tragedy cannot make up an entire story, there are happy moments in between those events. The baby being born and healthy, bonding with the baby, taking new pictures and loving each other, etc.

Their words were a large part of the story, coupled with the visual effects. I cared more for the words than them because they carried the story, the heart of it at least to me. Meaning, every detail was kept in the words. The words themselves as well as the voice acting for each line made them feel real and genuine. That a woman was disappointed in a man, but happy she now has a child she cares for.

The narrative patterns, from what I can see, are more episodic, like I said before. They feel like a mix of episodic and kishōtenketsu 4-part structure because of absence of intense conflict. But 160 Characters is also a personal anecdote as a fictional story. Though it may have happened to her in reality, she molded it enough to fit a narrative that evoked more emotion or the emotion she felt she was going through. Either way, phenomenal stories!

In simple terms, Fargo is about a man, Jerry, who is desperate for money to fix his family’s financial situation. He hires two guys, Gaear and Carl, to kidnap his wife and hold her for ransom. He expects his father-in-law, Wade, to pay the ransom and Jerry tells the kidnappers he will give them a portion of the ransom. This plot drives each character to act according to which pieces of the plot they know and understand.

These actions reveal flaws and transformations in each of the main characters. Jerry for example reveals his flaws throughout the movie. His character tends to not think things through and his actions are usually desperate in nature. He doesn’t have h best communication skills and he has issues really understanding the reality of his situation.

Carl is one of the kidnappers and at first, he seems like a pretty low-level “bad guy”. He accepts the kidnapping job thinking it will be easy money, but his flaw here was in trusting Gaear to be his accomplice. Gaear is a more hardened criminal and Carl realizes this when they are pulled over by the police with Jerry’s wife in the trunk and Gaear kills the officer. This in turn causes the “simple kidnapping” to become a much larger ordeal and Carl panics as things get messy. The events cause him to murder two people and eventually lead him to his death.

 Aristotle argues, “Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude. A whole is that which has a beginning, a middle, and an end” (14).  Based on this definition of tragedy, Fargo fits the description. A beginning, according to Aristotle, “does not itself follow anything by causal necessity, but after which something naturally is or comes to be” (14) and in Fargo, the beginning isn’t a tragedy on its own, but rather sets up the entire plot of the tragedy to follow. Aristotle goes on to say that the ending “naturally follows some other thing, either by necessity, or as a rule, but has nothing following it” (14). The end of Fargo wraps up the entire plot of the movie, and while the characters would likely move on and live their lives after the tragedy, the end of the movie ends the tragic incident that is central to the plot. Not only that, but it ends tragically with multiple deaths and devastation.

The movie Fargo was really interesting to watch and now to discuss. According to Aristotle, a tragedy consists of 6 things: Plot, Characters, Action, Spectacle, and Song and Thought. The whole plot is that Jerry runs into some money troubles and hires a guy to kidnap his wife so he can collect the ransom from his rich father-in-law. I think a major flaw in Jerry is his refusal to ask for help and see reality as it is. Getting your own wife kidnapped? Are you kidding me? Take out a loan or better yet, swallow your pride and explain the situation to someone who, if not on your side, is at least on his daughter’s side. Throughout the movie, we see more and more Jerry’s inability to think through a situation, when the kidnapping ends up becoming bigger than they anticipated, when he doesn’t get the investment from his father-in-law, or his nervous behavior when being questioned by Marge. He doesn’t have any emotional bandwidth to process the mess he made; his major flaw is he cannot control his emotions enough to think through a situation clearly. For Marge, she is similar but opposite. She treats everyone perhaps too kindly and ends up missing details. She is comfortable in her small-town police chief bubble. It’s only until she is faced with an incredibly uncomfortable situation where an old friend Mike breaks down in front of her, then she finds out he lied, that she recognizes where she may have gone wrong before. Aristotle describes this as Recognition,

“a change from ignorance to knowledge, producing love or hate between the persons destined by the poet for good or bad fortune,” 

There’s a switch that flips inside of her and she goes back to question someone who acted very suspicious, but she gave the benefit of the doubt beforehand- Jerry. While Jerry cannot control his emotions, Marge prefers to keep big emotions out of the picture entirely, which she displays as she fearlessly puts herself in dangerous situations.

One short film that caught my attention was “She and Her Cat” by Makoto Shinkai. The movie follows the relationship between a woman and her cat from the animal’s perspective. Given its four minute run time, the story is simple but is explored in a unique fashion. We’re only given access to the cat’s thoughts and perceptions of what occurs around him. The limited scope makes exploring the narrative interesting as we’re never given all the details on the conflict that unfolds. An example of this is when the girl receives a phone call and becomes upset afterward. We don’t quite know what the subject of the conversation was or what exactly causes her to feel sad. We are only privy to the cat’s perspective on the event. In a way, this reminds me of Fargo as it takes a similar approach of deliberately leaving out information. It only includes what we need to know in order for the plot to make sense. For this short, I felt as though the creator left out the cause of the woman’s emotions because they don’t necessarily relate to the overarching storyline. In the end, the plot explores the relationship between the owner and her pet, so the backstory doesn’t feel needed. All that matters is the cat’s reaction to the woman’s feelings, not what actually happened to her.

I thought the events that led up to this moment were also well-placed. The relationship between the two cats at the beginning establishes how the main animal has feelings for their owner and is solely focused on that. By placing this early in the video, we know why the owner’s reactions to events matter so much to the cat. The film avoids the Aristotelian plot structure by building its outline around their relationship rather than a central conflict. Both the cat and the woman reach their own conclusions about life by the end of the video, which gives the movie its ending. Overall, I thought the film was a cute, wholesome way of exploring the relationship between humans and animals while illustrating how not every story should be told the same way.

This is my first time watching the film, and each of the characters had interesting personalities. One character that surprised me the most was Jerry Lundegaard. Even though he is a husband and a father, his character doesn’t seem to care about his family’s feelings. He puts his needs, in this case money, before family. In my perspective he can also be an antagonist because of the way he acted during the whole situation with his wife. Jerry is an important part of the plot, without him and his need of obtaining money, there wouldn’t have been any kidnapping or assassinations, no story, and no interference from the police. Act of ignorance coming from him. 

The Aristotle: Poetics book explains on page 10 chapter VI, “Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude…”, and “action implies personal agents, who necessarily possess certain distinctive qualities both of character and thought…” Which applies to the tragedy that happened in the film. In this case the action taken in the film that led to the tragedy was the kidnapping of Jean Lundegaard. The action was taken which led to assassinations and police involvement. 

The character Marge Gunderson was the opposite of Jerry. She was too nice, polite, and also fearless. It is interesting how she is a police officer and is always calm and professional doing her job trying to catch the assassin. Which is totally different to her character reaction when she meets with Mike Yanahita. She was nervous when he was expressing his feelings, something her character won’t show during the dangerous situations she encounters.

Hello everyone,

The short film that I chose to watch was called “She And Her Cat.” It follows the story of a Japanese woman who adopts a male cat. The cat soon falls in love with her, and later on, in the story rejects the affection of a female cat that he later meets.

Toward the end of the story, the woman receives a phone call that causes her a great deal of distress. She starts to cry intensely and falls into a depression. The cat can’t do anything but comforts her. As time goes on, she eventually recovers and the show ends in a happy tone.

This short gives me “slice of life” vibes. There is no overarching conflict, just something that appears randomly and isn’t foreshadowed at all in the short, just like what can commonly happen in real life.

The short invoked feelings of nostalgia in me, as it reminded me of the cats I had in my childhood home. A lot of the things the cat said invoked feelings of romance and longing, which makes perfect sense given the tone and setup for the relationship between the cat and his owner.

The narrative structure that I found reminds me greatly of the kind found in the previously mentioned slice-of-life genre. It’s really just two people (or one person and a cat in this case) going about their lives and dealing with life’s mundane problems as they are handed to them. This makes the plot more relatable, but it comes at the cost of making the stakes much lower.

– Gibson

When we think of stories Aristotelian plot structure comes to mind. There is usually clear central conflict and a hero to rise to the occasion to conquer it! Well some stories don’t have that type of structure. They tell their stories in different ways. The Short stories that I watched were very interesting and were all so different from each other. Some were split up into sections and some were very artsy. What seem to connect them all was that the conflict in all of them was more of an idea rather than a physical thing. For example, in Small Deaths, I got the sense that the main idea was small tragic events in a person’s life that can add up to change and develop who a person becomes. That was my take away. My personal favorite short film was 160 Characters. The title is quite clever as 160 characters was all you could type in one message on nokia cell phones. The world was based through those messages as well as a little dialog here and there for context. But, the main way of storytelling was through those messages. This conflict between Victoria and the Father is very real and a conflict that isn’t clear cut. There is a pattern between all of the short films as there is still a hint of tragedy among all of them. Each story has a different conflict told in a certain way but all tend to be negative and have a moment of shock within them. It’s kind of like they all have their own rising actions and climaxes. It’s very interesting to observe.

Hey Everyone!

I’m Nichole. This is my last term at WSUV. I’m a humanities major with a focus on English and communications and a minor in creative writing. I graduate this May and intend to continue my education at Portland State University in their publishing program.

I’m a freelance book/story editor and a mom of four. My favorite story media is, obviously, books (given my career choice). I spend nearly all my free time reading or listening to audiobooks. I do enjoy movies and games as well, but I feel there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

My favorite genres to read vary. I tend to gravitate towards fantasy and sci-fi stories most often, but I also highly enjoy YA books, horror, and the occasional romance.

I’ve been freelancing since early 2021 and finally have a client base large enough (for me) to turn my “side gig” into an actual business. I launched PNW Editing at the beginning of the year, which is incredibly exciting. I’m hoping one day to turn my small editing business into a small publishing company.

When I’m not in class, working, or shuffling kids around town I’m usually at home in my PJs reading and snuggled up with my cat, Flash.