Bug Bites: Résistance

 As a bug person I of course cannot resist the urge to make as many bug pun titles as possible!

Bug Bites is my way of showcasing short films that feature fictional arthropods or are bug themes, most of the time it'll be independent works that I feel need more exposure and attention. After all being a tiny bug in this large cold hostile universe means we all need to stick together in order to swarm it over and devour all!

For my first pick I have a special french dish for you all! And if you try to resist this generous offering of mine... well then, you better be ready for a fight!

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"Résistance"

by Alex Chauvet, Anna Le Danois,

Quentin Foulon, Fabien Glasse,

Juliette Jean, Julie Narat

I mentioned in the previous (and first for this blog) post how the explosion of CGI quality and accessibility during the 90s made it easier for creature designers to experiment with less conventional morphology and overall organism types and biology, leading to more widespread examples of less humanoid and tetrapod creatures and lead to a small but noticeable shift towards body shapes found in the invertebrate and even microscopic world.

Sadly in the same way this planet never really saw another Cambrian explosion event of sudden and mind boggling diversification of complex lifeforms in fiction and art the general bold creativity and experimentation with arthropodal monster designs steadily declined. Usually modern bug movies tend to go either for a more literal one to one recreation of an actual arthropod type but sized up considerably or go into the completely opposite philosophy of making the creature as weird, bizarre and out there as possible as long as it still retains some key insectoid traits in order to pass as a bug movie.

I have nothing against both approaches, in fact I have several all time bug movie darlings that follow either one, the problem arises when this becomes the only possible paths to take when designing your bug monsters.

Obvious when you want more creative freedom and wilder imagination you want to go for the more bizarrely arranged creatures but then you'd have to abandon a lot of what is expected of the type of organism you're making, on the other hand you'd want to keep at least some traits associated with the real life being you're using as reference or inspiration, so in essence you're still somewhat limited in what you can design, at least as long as you attach a term or designation to your creature. Calling your monster movie a bug monster movie sets such limitation unless you're willing to go completely wild and subvert the very expectations you set with your personally chosen definition.

Then there's the other side of the coin, making your creature more scientifically sound and comparable to whatever type of organism you're using as a base. The earliest examples of bug movies used this, mainly in the big bug movie genre of the 50s and 60s. The reasons weren't solely based on delivering on what you've promised your audience but also due to more technical and financial limitations. Filming or using footage of real arthropods to later scale up and add to your movie sure makes it easier but also less creative and a lot more limited in what you can truly express as a designer. Again with the arrival of more advanced CGI these "true to life" bug monsters could now be modified a bit. Mimic's Judas Breed are a good example of staying scientifically accurate while also making a unique beast. But even then there's the obvious limitation of following the same rules that apply to whatever designation you gave your creature. An insect must look like an insect or at least make sense in the world it inhabits, you can't just make a tentacled slug thing and call it a beetle, if the audiences back in the day saw a bug as just a "bug" the moviegoers of today can certainly look at your creation and blog about how silly the design is online and why the name suggests something different entirely. Again subversion of expectations doesn't apply here.

So what does all this rambling have to do with the excellently creative but also true to life design of the beetles in the impressive french short film?

Well I just said it... The insects in this film are both creative and true to life... But how does that work exactly?

Lets look at the beetles in question!

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It's giant bipedal beetles. That's it!

And that's brilliant!

It's brilliant monster design because of how it's literally a true to the name, lifelike, genuine giant coleopteran and yet it looks and feels alien! That is an accomplishment rarely seen when dealing with giant bugs in fiction.

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I can go on and on how much attention to detail and entomological research must have gone into making this short film!

Making the mundane and ordinary seem fantastical and imaginary is by far the greatest skill a creature designer can have and the people behind this short film have managed to create giant beetle monsters that feel more like characters than your average scaled up creepy crawlies.

We may never get to experience another Cambrian explosion of life but we sure can make our own little explosion of diversification of fictional lifeforms from the most bizarre and logic bending to ones that blur the fine line between art and science, it's all up to you!