Cities and Film

A lot of art forms - animation and film especially, use cities to show the context - both time and setting of the story and to inform the viewers. The city can also be used to set the tone and atmosphere of the piece. This is very common in animation as by the time animation became big and was much more mainstream, film and photography and other art had already created these stereotypes around certain cities and places.

The film Ratatouille uses these stereotypes to set the tone of the film; Paris is known as the city of love, and is very associated with food. This lets us know that it will be a film involving food and romance, which is then reinforced by the lighting and colours of the film. There are also very solid split/separation/line between good and bad, poor and rich, with the beautiful, very idealised and shown in everything piece of media about Paris, and very not beautiful parts of the city - the much more realistic side. These locations are used especially, with the city centre/restaurants and sewers to show the split between the people with money and opportunities, to the people who have nothing, and would never normally get these opportunities. It shows how the idealised city isn't actually ideal and how the city can make you feel like more than you are. Remy, a rat who is one of the main characters of the film, feels like a person, very involved now in big Parisian life and following his dream, but then realises what he actually is when back home and does not feel a part of them anymore. This shows that however much you build up a place, it is never going to be as perfect as you think.

The game Fallout New Vegas is set, quite obviously, in LasVegas.This is a city of win or lose, all or nothing. Las Vegas takes capitalism to the extreme, putting emphasis on how people are part of 'the system's machine'. It has a retro-futuristic setting, taking inspiration from the post-war culture of America, and it's 'combination of hope for the promises of technology and lurking fear of nuclear annihilation'. It is this hope, but uncertainty, that suggests you can still do what you want and try to make your own way through the world. As the player's actions do influence the world, this atmosphere works very well, even if the game will never feel a optimistic as it would if it was in a setting with a much lighter history.

LA Noir is set in 1947 Los Angeles, again with a post-war kind of setting. It uses everything we associate with the Noir genre, including giving us a cynical/negative atmosphere as opposed to the optimism of the post-war time period. Since this genre and setting is so closely associated with detective stories/novels, the game puts great emphasis and story telling as opposed to mostly concentrating on game play. The lines between film and games is probably at it's blurriest in this game, and uses everything we would assume about this game from it's genre to inform us and add something to it's narrative.