Maus and Barefoot Gen.

I was really impressed with both of these works.  Maus was a great novel that I really enjoyed.  I didn't get a chance to read it until after our class discussion about it but I feel like hearing other peoples responses helped me to analyze it on a few different levels I would not have realized otherwise.  The first thing I noticed was the art work.  I was done it a deliberate crude fashion that really fit the mood of the story and I felt the staging was brilliant.  I was really struck by one of the very first panels where the father was riding his bike and his son was trying to get him to tell his stories of the war.  As the father says to him nobody wants to hear his stories you see the son framed by his father hunched over the bike and you see the tattooed numbers on his forearms from the camp.  That frame to me told the story in itself.  I couldn't help but look for different framing techniques used.  Another cool example was when you see the father telling the story sitting in his chair and the background was still in the story being told.  I also really liked the train ticket with the text telling the story in the middle and the information about where the train was heading on the sides.  Other things I appreciated that where touched on in class were the different races and nationalities made animals.  It brought emphasis to the ridiculousness of the situation and the simplistic roots of a complicated situation.  My favorite part of the novel was the framing and story telling in general.  It was something that I personally have never seen before and I was really impressed how seamlessly it worked and how much it influenced the story as a whole by setting the pace and bringing clarity.

Barefoot Gen was another beast in and of itself.  That was really hard for me to watch.  Having family on both sides of the war I really connected emotionally with the film.  I often don't know what to feel when I see things like that and they always make me think about my ethnic background and where I come from.  Overall it was a very well done and was very successful film in accomplishing what it was meant to do and I cant imagine how difficult and liberating it had to be for the creator to tell his personal story in such a powerful way.