DIY Mysticism: 8-Bit Cinema - Ferris Bueller's Day Off

8-Bit Cinema: Ferris Bueller's Day Off

Toonstalgia

I don't just watch cartoons from the 20s and 30s. I do watch new things. 8-Bit Cinema's Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in 2015 and based off a movie from 1986.

I judge how much I like something based on a few categories including how much I laugh, whether I want to watch it again and whether it inspires me. 8 Bit Cinema got me in all three categories.

8-Bit Cinema is posted on YouTube to the Cinefix account.

Details, Details, Details

One of the best parts of cartoon shorts are the details skilled animators are able to fit into seven minutes. 8 Bit Cinema only had 3 minutes to adapt a classic comedy film. They did and infused the short with so many perfect details. Like the pixelized version of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The Parts They Adapted

The script is perfect in my opinion. The plot of the short is limited to Ferris Bueller's experiences during the course of the movie. The temporal real estate is so limited that much had to be sacrificed to tell the story but I didn't miss anything.

The Music

The soundtrack of the movie makes the cartoon so much better. Ferris Bueller had a well familiar song cues like Blue Danube Waltz (the song Ferris plays with sick noises on his synthesizer), the theme from I Dream of Jeannie, Love Missile F1-11 by Sigue Sigue Sputnik, The Celebrated Minuet (in the restaurant),

I'm sure I missed a couple references. I had to watch it several times to figure out the music. Enough times that I still enjoyed it with every view but I did notice they called the restaurant "Chez Luis" when it's "Chez Quis" (The L is a very stylized Q).

Inspiration

One of my favorite episodes of Community was Digital Estate Planning. I've played Journey to Castle Hawkthorne a few times and this cartoon makes me wish for a Ferris Bueller game. It would be even better and if you watched Digital Estate Planning you would know why a Ferris Bueller game would be better than a game conceived by a fictional hate filled monster.

I think, the adaption of Ferris Bueller works perfectly because the original movie was a mission by Ferris with places to go and goals to achieve much like a video game of this style. If I were a different sort of person (the kind capable of learning to program. I keep trying!), I would build the game but I would do a retrotastic dream Batman first because Bats...anyway...This takes me back to my point from the beginning. This episode and this show inspired me to work.

I have no more experience with vaguely pixel artwork than the art for this post but I wanted to create a fitting title card.