This gif is the debut work of a friend of mine. I want to encourage him to continue his nominal work, so to that effect I've decided to do a critique of his piece.
CATS: A pathetic lack of cats. 0/10
AESTHETIC: The otherwise thoughtful cinematography is offset by weak lighting, an incomprehensible use of lines, and a timestamp that I'm dubious lends itself to any commentary this work is trying to make. 3/10
TECHNIQUE: The gif flows nicely, but I can only attribute that to the camera work of the television production this gif come from. Allegedly, the artist added in the glasses of the gentleman on the left. You can hardly tell! 7/10
THEMATIC: What do we think about, when we see a young person taking sips of soup from an older person? We should immediately recognize that this is allegory, but to what? Animated Gif Critic suggests that this is a commentary on the Millennial generation feeding off of their Baby Boomer parents. Touché, says this Millennial critic. Scathing and accurate. 8/10
ORIGINALITY: These days, on the international informations supernet highway of dreams, you really only see six kinds of gifs:
gifs where someone is being given an upvote
gifs where someone is being given a downvote
gifs of political candidates delivering moving speeches
gifs of old ladies eating soup
gifs from the old vaudevillian television programme "Your Show of Shows"
gifs of cats
Clearly this gif is run-of-the-mill, but here's where the auteur has taken quite a risk: a younger man takes a sip of soup! I hesitate to use the word "revolutionary"...but I will say that this gif may take old-lady-soup-eating-gifs in a whole new direction, and I like that direction. 9/10
HUMOUR: A quality of being amusing or comic is often absurdity: laughter can be created simply by exposing ourselves to the unexpected. It's not at all surprising that this old bag (no offense, you old bag, you) is impressed by soup, but then lookit this guy taking a sip of soup! How old is this guy?! Now that is unexpected and therefore it is humourous. 7/10
STYLE: The animation, timestamp, and risqué albeit banal content make this an obvious work of Pop Art. Were Roy Liechtenstein alive today, he'd probably remark something like "where are my slippers?" because he'd be 91 years old. 9/10
SCALE: It's a big gif but the clip is barely over one second long, so it's a pretty small scale. Great work on the fake glasses though. 5/10
TOTAL SCORE: 48/80
