Sleight of Hand follows a poor street magician as he tries to win a magic competition to gain money, but gets in a little over his head when he realizes the prize is more than he bargained for.
As a piece, this work mainly explores how the actions of bystanders, no matter how ineffectual they might be, are still better than doing nothing in a situation that’s harmful to others. In the real world, the way many bystanders to abuse or bullying decide to step in is based on their amount of schadenfreude– how much pleasure or joy one takes in seeing someone else’s injuries or troubles– for the situation, which itself stems from how much they believe the victim deserves such behaviour. As a common theme for older fairy tales has taught us, though, there is no pleasure to be found in the suffering of princesses or damsels in distress– not unless you’re a villain– and that princesses must be saved by a hero. So, when this story shows a princess in need of aid, then, the viewer’s automatic first instinct is that the protagonist will be able to rescue her– an idea that is quickly crushed when the true nature of the competition is revealed, and our hero is revealed to be powerless. In this way, the magicians who are competing to marry her become the villains, and our hero downgrades to simply ‘underdog.’
Though there is no outright or physical fight between the hero and villains in this story, it still becomes a clash of morals. While the protagonist chooses not to ignore the princess’ plight and participate in her passive mistreatment despite his powerlessness and inability to help her outright in the situation, the other two mages’ choose to participate in active mistreatment of her by fighting for her hand regardless of her clear distaste for the situation.
Through the protagonist’s choice to still act, even knowing that he won’t be able to help, he actually ends up giving the princess the opportunity she needs to save hereself, which ties into a narrative concern I am also working with in this piece: the idea that in fairy tales, “women wait; men act” (Rapunzel, 427). Ironically, this statement is both true and untrue in my piece; though the princess initially can do nothing but wait, it is through the magician’s opportunity that she is finally able to do something herself which switches the traditional roles of competent hero and incompetent princess.
In the process of creating this project, I have had to come up with the plot, design the characters, thumbnail, storyboard, sequence the boards, and animate to create the (hopefully) final project. The program used to storyboard so far has been Adobe Photoshop, and the program that’s being used to finally animate is Adobe Animate.