Madama Butterfly

This video was quite a watch; it was funny, it was raunchy, it was odd, and I actually found it funny in the beginning. With all these characteristics integrated, the video was still able to convey different emotions very well. Before this video, I wasn’t really interested neither did I care for opera, but after, I’m truly captivated. The video was impressively creative, to say the least. This is not some kind of video you think about out of the blue, it took a special kind of person to create this. It is an animation, yes, but it’s unlike one I’ve ever seen before. I was able to feel bad for her when her husband left her to go on his initial trip, I actually felt emotional when she gave birth without any assistance and I equally felt emotion when her “husband” returned and took their child away from her. Then when he ripped the “umbilical cord” in two, I was torn apart. And the background music of the opera singer adds to the emotion the audience perceives to a great extent. 

By the standards of today’s society, this video will be viewed as relatively raunchy, overly dramatic, violent but still very much relatable in the back of some people’s minds. I say “relatable” because things like this actually happen in our world today where women do all the hard work at home and behind the scenes, raising the kids and making sure they’re okay and the man hardly plays a part other than bringing in the finances. Then fast forward to when the child/children are older, and the woman is not so young anymore (because obviously everyone ages), the man goes after another younger and “better” looking version of his wife, all this without realizing the kind of sacrifice his wife had to go through for their kid(s) to be successful. Now I am in no way saying that this is remarkably common, all I’m saying is that it still does happen. This kind of thing happens in all communities and societies, there is no discrimination whatsoever. Artists nowadays don’t display things to this extreme anymore even if they are dominant subjects in our society because they’d be labeled as “weird” or “bizarre”. This took guts and out of the box thinking.

I don’t know how the entertainment scene or film was back in the early 1900’s but I can infer from the videos we’ve watched in class that it was very raw and honest. So, I think it is safe to say that the audience wasn’t too shocked by the details of this piece. I noticed how technology was incorporated in the film but was still shown as old school. When the woman broke herself apart after losing her kid, she was portrayed as a made up of metal. In today’s world, if that were recreated, that particular scene would be so different, in the sense that “she”, would be more of a smooth-running advanced machine rather than the raggedy looking metal piece she was. 

If I were a 21^stcentury director, I would turn this piece into a video game similar to the already created game called “episode”. For me, this would be a more of a psych-social game, I would start the game off with the two individuals, man, and woman. Then I’d display options for what the player wants to do next and they get to decide every step of the way, there’s no right or wrong answer. And since it’s a game, no one would be scared to answer right or wrong, everyone would answer throughout the game honestly and it would prove how a population of people think and behave. Once again, this video was oh so fascinating and I appreciate you sharing this with us.