escapee

At first, the
protagonist
falling out was
supposed to
disintegrate while
the clay transmutes
into all kinds of materials, like threads, orange peels, cloth, etc., as the protagonist loses its shape outside of its frame and is trying to find ways to adapt by imitating the things here, which is their habitual behaviour, like how they formed their alter ego. But I ran out of time again... In the end, the protagonist is "saved" by ROOBEET, and wakes up on the stairs noticing the viewer and starts running away again.

The assignment was a self-portrait so this animation and the symbols are quite personal, so I'm putting in here some annotations, as I want to keep working on this, maybe as a late self (-indulgent) introduction too :D
As for the protagonist in this animation, they were mainly inspired by these two of my favourite paintings. They both depict persecuted figures, in a seemingly interior space that has a claustrophobic feeling. Which sets the premise of the story, the endless looping attempts of escape of a minimal and fleeting self image.

The use of different styles is supposed to represent unstableness and the lack of a self-maintaining/regulating core
of the protagonist, and I tried to integrate the motif of boundaries
in every scene, serving as the protagonist's mechanism of self protection and also isolation;
a schizoid condition.

< A deleted scene showing how the pillow is almost like the shadow of the protagonist, in every part of their daily life, while they discover/ get inspiration on their computer how to escape (which leads to the syringe). This scene has the glasses and the square room as the frames. But the computer takes away the sense of isolation, so I changed it to have the protagonist notice the swing instead.

But it’s also possible that they just wanted to try out the see-saw swing and wanted to find another to balance it (which would be a sensible plan if it could help them cope and come to peace (an inner balance) with themselves, so they can exit the frames without disintegrating))

I tried to make the background (a geodesic dome) look as if it was under a microscope, with each frame showing small variations, so I tried linocutting with this scene. The last picture was dropped onto a rain puddle when I was walking back home, the texture became a lot more interesting, and more like Degas’ painting, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, which I was trying to imitate to some extent.

The playground setting, the game style, and the game in the later scenes represents the protagonist's inability to grow into a 'person'.
The background has the silhouette of one legged doll (sawyer), it haunts the protagonist with their past and guilt, but also is a familiar object that invites them to confide in this world.

The green pyramid is the main habitat and resting place,
it is in constant motion but making seemingly no progress.

The cat had escaped from the borders of the comic panels for two frames, it was this moment that inspired the protagonist to see the crucial role balance plays in their world's operation, and thus scheme their escape by inviting another over to take their place.

The syringe extracts content out of the pillow and the protagonist injects the content into their mirror image and a new character emerges from the mirror.

ALTER EGO:
It has a pillow as its head, symbolizing sleep as a method of temporary escape. The spider constructs nets to catch its dreams. The robot presents a hatred of one's sentimentality and a longing to possess an 'invincible' architecture.

During the memory card game, it posed a threat to the protagonist by being able to annihilate them by being counted as a pair of matching cards. The protagonist's identity is now threatened by their creation, they panicks and accidentally falls out of the frame.