Creative Response: Research

Once I had the idea for my Creative Response, I went around my class and asked various students if they knew any animated characters who have a mental illness. I found out through asking people that there were actually few characters who have mental illnesses in animation, and if they do it is not an integral part of the narrative and often goes unnoticed to the viewer.

Luckily I found enough people to interview who had enough to talk about with each of their chosen characters. What surprised me in a good way when conducting my research was that each of the characters I discovered through other people had traits of mental illness and yet they seemed to be effected in entirely different ways.

For example I spoke to Oscar and he discussed to me the character of Korra from Legend of Korra, one of his favourite animated TV shows and talked about how she had suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in series three of the show. But then alternatively Guy and Jemma spoke to me about the character of L from the Anime TV series Deathnote who suffers from a mental illness but in an entirely different way where he has social anxiety and terrible social skills yet is incredibly intelligent.

It also became intriguing when conducting the interviews how sometimes mental health is part of an animation without it actually ever actually being mentioned. When discussing Cowboy Bebop with Olly we discussed how mental health effects all four of the main protagonists yet is never really mentioned. We disagreed on the character of Spike. I feel that the character is throughout the series in a state of constant lethargy (I also felt this after researching more in-depth into the character) and that due to his lack of desires and aspirations and fearlessness of death this makes him a negative representation of mental health, not a poor representation of mental health but definitely not inspiring. Whereas Olly disagreed with me on this and felt that Spike's attitude towards life is actually very positive and he feels that his relaxedness is inspiring and teaches the viewer to not worry about every little thing and to take what life throws at you and just go with the flow.

I found the research part of the Creative Response to be by far the most interesting part because I found it fascinating to get different peoples opinions, even if I might have disagreed with them at times.