Brave Farce
Newgorunds
Creators: Mark Levi, sountrack from Paramount Pictures
Length: 3 minute
Watch The Cartoon

Film and animation students have always used movies to learn their craft. Here, budding animator, Mark Levi borrows a sequence from Paramount's Braveheart and adapts it into a Flash animated cartoon. This is the sequence where rebel warrior, William Wallace, played by Mel Gibson, in the movie, gives a pep talk to his troops before they fight the English army.

The story is not complicated at all as it lifts an existing sequence from a film. Even if it's a student film, seeing some experimentation with the editing or an attempt to spice up the original sequence would have been fun. Had I not seen this film before, I wouldn't have understood exactly what's going on. One wonders why go to all the trouble of doing such an exact adaptation.

Although Levi does a good cartoon adaptation of Mel Gibson, there is some inconsistency in the shots of the Scotsmen. In the long shot, we see a very crowded and compact band of warriors. In closer shots, the same band is sparse. Although much of the shots are lifted from the movie, they are too long and static and don't work for a cartoon. Levi doesn't yet master lip sync.
Hervé