Concept overview:
Anger is an abstract look at what it feels like to be completely overwhelmed by rage. The main idea is to visually show how isolating and explosive intense anger is. It feels like a huge pressure inside that has to get out.
Synopsis:
An asteroid falls from the sky and crashes to the Earth. An alien crawls out of the crater and wanders around. Then a rock falls on its head, triggering anger that turns into a total meltdown. The alien starts running and destroying everything around it. It then completely goes out of control in a full spiral before vanishing.
Video:
Artist’s statement:
Anger is an abstract metaphor for overwhelming rage. It explores how isolating and explosive intense anger feels: an extreme internal pressure that, once out, leads to destruction. Although the design is abstract and non-human, I used key animation rules to make the emotion feel real. This project, inspired by the Uncanny Valley discussed in the stop-motion lecture, explores how rage can be communicated without words.
I used Krita for its range of tools and brushes. Rather than drawing defined forms, I worked using soft and rough strokes, allowing shapes to emerge through movement. This emphasised the emotional state and helped make the animation feel unsettling through distortion. Emotion is communicated purely through sound, movement, colour and shape.
The main challenge was depicting anger in its simplest, most abstract form without relying on familiar facial expressions or emotional poses. The raw look draws from the idea of making the abstract experiential. The creature embodies anger and acts as a substitute, allowing the audience to feel the rage.
Its movement is intentionally unnatural, inspired by the kinetic biology seen in the Edge of Tomorrow or A Quiet Place. Its motion is both fluid and jagged, symbolising the volatile nature of intense anger – the eerie calm before an outburst versus the painful, aggressive reality of the explosion.
Metamorphosis is the central visual tool. The creature never holds a fixed shape, beginning as a loose, fluid form before compressing and expanding into a destructive solid state. This reflects the feeling of being “transformed” by rage. As Paul Wells states, transformation is the “constituent core of animation itself” (Wells, 1998). The creature cannot hold its form because there is “too much rage in one body.”
Peter Millard’s Bomb (2014) influenced my use of an unpredictable, messy, janky style. Although the creature avoids human realism, its unstable movement creates eeriness—something familiar in a completely alien body.
This is a deeply personal expression of anger: an intense experience of when “words don’t suffice”, and a creative process aimed at getting the anger out of my body and onto the screen.
Through this process, I gained a deeper understanding of how abstract movement and form convey emotion, and I plan to develop these ideas further. If developed further, I would push the abstraction by using unconventional viewing angles to increase instability.
Creative process:
Mind Map:
Colour symbolism in emotions:
Colours are always part of my animation and art process because colours are tied to emotions, and they are important to me when I create characters. In this case, I want to create an animation that shows what it feels like to be angry. This is very personal to me, as I have trouble expressing my emotions properly. I always think about emotions in colours. Different cultures use colours with different meanings and symbolism. Anger is most commonly symbolised by the colour red, which also represents blood, fire, danger, and rage. Black is another colour that can represent intense anger, mystery, or the unknown. In India, for example, black can represent evil, negativity, and a lack of energy. In other contexts, it can be a powerful accent colour. My plan is to use both of these colours in my animation to underline the power of my character’s anger and rage.
BOMB BY PETER MiLLARD
I like the messy and violent feeling when watching Bomb by Peter Millard. The sudden changes in the character’s shapes and the immediate disappearing of those shapes make me think about how rage appears suddenly before disappearing. It also feels unstable, which is how I want my character to feel.
Moodboard:
The concept is a meteor falling from the sky and crashing onto the earth, revealing an amalgamation of two creatures in one, inspired by the Death Angel from A Quiet Place and the Mimic from Edge of Tomorrow. I want the creature to have the feel and movement of the Mimic while keeping the Death Angel’s aggressive movement. I also want the creature to move like liquid metal and then transform into a solid form when enraged.
The Death Angel from A Quiet Place
The Mimic from Edge of Tomorrow
Sketches:
Storyboard:
The storyboard starts with an empty frame, then a meteor falls from the sky and crashes into the earth. It doesn’t feel like a smooth animation — it looks like something that suddenly slammed into the ground. The camera snaps or zooms in, like someone observing the crash site, trying to see what’s there.
A creature emerges from the crater. It isn’t animated smoothly; it twitches and glitches out. Each frame feels scribbled and abstract, making it feel unnatural, like an amalgamation — a creature that shouldn’t exist or be here. Its movement is wrong and unsettling.
The creature crawls out of the crash area in an awkward, unnatural way. Its fingers twitch, its body moves strangely, and it looks around while walking at the same time, as if it has multiple faces or heads reacting at once. As it wanders, a rock falls and hits it directly on the head. The camera zooms in, switching between the rock and the creature’s face.
There’s a pause, like it’s processing what just happened. Then it becomes enraged, almost like a tantrum exploding out of nowhere. Its movement is not like an animal, insect, or anything recognisable. It doesn’t walk or run normally. Everything about it is abstract, unnatural, and unsettling, focusing more on emotion and feeling than realism.
This internal turmoil is visually externalised when the creature’s face splits open, depicting the sensation of being “split apart” by overwhelming rage – a visual substitute for internal screaming or an explosion from the inside out. The creature’s subsequent chaotic charge reflects an uncontrollable expulsion of this internal pressure, an effort to externalise an unbearable “too much rage in one body.” This constant state of metamorphosis underscores the creature’s emotional and physical instability.
The sequence culminates with the creature self destructing and disappearing.
The animation uses a monochromatic colour scheme to show anger, mainly red or dark crimson. Different tones, shades, and tints of red show movement, emotion, shadows, and possibly glowing. Black or grey is added to give it a rocky, almost liquid rock appearance. The creature feels like it’s from another world, abstract and unnatural.
Production in Krita: showcasing use of brushes
Contact Sheet:
Bibliography:
Uhrig, M., 2018. Emotion in Animated Films. New York: Routledge, pp.39–58
Uhrig discusses how animation represents emotions in unconventional ways through audiovisual metaphors, such as personifying emotions as animals. Similarly, I explored this by creating an inhuman creature with unnatural sound as a metaphor for anger.
Wells, P., 1998. Understanding Animation. London: Routledge, pp.59–68.
This chapter discusses experimental versus traditional animation, particularly the Uncanny, as described by Freud, which blurs the line between the imagined and the real. I explored this by presenting a familiar human emotion in an unfamiliar, non-human form to create discomfort.
Wells, P., 2008. The Animated Bestiary: Animals, Cartoons, and Culture. London: Rutgers University Press, pp.64–76.
Wells discusses using animals to represent human characteristics and describes metamorphosis as a way to show changes in space, time, and existence. Similarly, I used the transformation of an abstract creature to illustrate emotional change through metamorphosis.
References:
A fireball (n.d.) [Online image]. GeologyIn. Available at: https://www.geologyin.com/2016/09/huge-meteor-crashes-to-earth-as-flash.html (Accessed: 10 December 2025).
Bomb (2014) [Film]. Directed by P. Millard. UK.
Cecepbinsae (n.d.) Red abstract background. [Online image]. Freepik. Available at: https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/red-abstract-background_42646550.htm (Accessed: 7 December 2025).
Garzilli, A. (2022) Why links between colors and emotions may be universal. [Online article]. Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/color-psychology/202202/why-links-between-colors-and-emotion (Accessed: 7 December 2025).
How do the mimics in Edge of Tomorrow reproduce? (2023) [Online forum post]. Reddit. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/scifi/comments/17dz33p/how_do_the_mimics_in_edge_of_tomorrow_reproduce/ (Accessed: 10 December 2025).
Kushnaryov, P. (n.d.) Abstract chrome metallic shapes flow smoothly, shiny glossy liquid metal. [Online image]. Dreamstime. Available at: https://www.dreamstime.com/abstract-chrome-metallic-shapes-flow-smoothly-shiny-glossy-liquid-metal-c (Accessed: 10 December 2025).
Paramount Pictures (2024) A Quiet Place – Death Angel. [Online image]. Entertainment Weekly. Available at: https://ew.com/everything-we-know-about-the-creatures-from-a-quiet-place-8674939 (Accessed: 10 December 2025).
Rugged stone texture (n.d.) [Online image]. Stockcake. Available at: https://stockcake.com/i/rugged-stone-texture_119450_12288 (Accessed: 10 December 2025).