Onions, potatoes & turnips : exploring film noir aesthetics through anthropomorphic vegetables

• Main Author: Xu, Mingjie
• Other Authors: School of Art, Design and Media
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2014
• Subjects: DRNTU::Visual arts and music
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/59515
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The Film Noir movement has had a lasting impact on the film industry, in particular through the application of striking black-and-white aesthetics and dark themes as a storytelling medium. “Onions, Potatoes & Turnips” sets out to explore the possibilities of Film Noir in the realm of graphic novels. This paper outlines the approach and challenges to applying the aesthetics and ideas of film noir to a cartoon setting. In particular, the setting of a social satire based off different classes of anthropomorphic vegetable characters was selected as the storytelling medium of expression. While the difficulties of describing vegetable forms as monochromatic representations were overcome to some degree, it was found that the tone choices in storytelling had the most impact on the translation to the film noir aesthetic and for successful application certain elements such as humor and physical gags had to be restrained.