In order to analyse the opening sequence of Juno (Jason Reitman, 2008) I will look at the different micro elements and try and establish how they are used to set up character, narrative and genre.
The music chosen for the opening sequences is by anti folk artist Kimya Dawson. It is evocative of Bob Dylan and helps to establish the low key feel of a US independent - on which the film was successfully marketed. The lyrics tumble along in the style of a quirky, downbeat love song listing partnerships like ‘if id be a tree you would be my leaves’, this helps set up the character of Juno as both innocent and pensive, alluding to the search for romance and the coming of age story that follows.However I feel that it is the mise en scene that plays the most important part in establishing the tone and genre, as well as the lead character in the film. Juno is depicted walking through suburban USA, shiplap houses and mail boxes set up her small world in which the local shops - the guitars shack, beauty parlour and drug store - are the dominant features and from which the park represents a temporary break for reflection. The leaves falling form the trees show time passing and establish the time of year – this will become important when Juno gets pregnant. She passes an acoustic guitar and a retro TV that reinforce the teenager’s interests.
Juno’s costume acts as a kind of timeless unisex teen uniform; blue jeans, sweat top and canvass shoes. It indicates to us that she is perhaps a bit of a tomboy but neither extraordinary or pretentious. The sunny delight carton she is drinking reasserts the bland diet of the mid American teen. The college team that jogs past at the start and end of the sequence further set us in the teen world and act as a contrast to Juno’s lonesome figure.
The animation technique of rotoscoping (tracing over live action filming) suits the US independent style by alluding to independent comic books like American Splendour. It technique allows the director to simplify and mute the colours, making it graphically pleasing as well as mundane. The unfinished drawings also build on a concept of an almost incomplete environment. Some interesting slide and push edits also allude to comic books. Juno s character is sometimes on the screen in two different shots and this along with her constant presence and dominant framing establish the centrality of her character within the film. Some of the more adventurous camera angles, for example the overhead shot, are pleasing to the eye.
Of course the key function of a title sequence is as a vehicle for the main credits. In Juno these are brought in as neatly hand drawn three dimensional block letters, continuing the comic theme and not unlike a teenagers graphics project or doodling. An effect has been used that keeps the titles wobbling slightly in an organic way. The titles are framed thoughtfully to balance with the framing of the subject and many are brought onto screen from behind bits of the set or are integrated into the scene. An example is a title that appears painted on the fence by using perspective. Juno also walks in front of a number of the titles. These techniques are satisfying for the viewer and help integrate the title sequence into the film.
The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980)
The film opens with a series of shots of panoramic landscape vistas showcasing the bleak desolation of the snowy mountainous surroundings, which will provide the backdrop for the film’s subsequent narrative developments. Various birds’ eye view shots intermittently cross dissolve into one another, and depict an expansive clear blue lake, a snow-capped mountain range, and a densely populated forest of evergreen trees. The camera moves swiftly through its surroundings in each shot, sweeping past the breadth of the natural environs below it, and thus conveys to the audience a sense of the massive scale and large land span of the location depicted.
During the camera’s continual movement, it occasionally captures its views from distorted angles, which undermines the idea otherwise created by this series of shots of the benevolent purity of natural beauty and the wintry American landscape. It thus uses spatial manipulation to contradict the principal connotations of the images of nature captured in these shots, and hence foreshadows the heavy deployment of themes and imagery centred upon the supernatural that will follow.
Also indicative of this theme is the use of slow, sombre, unnerving and deliberate electronic music, which in conjunction with the seemingly oppositional images suggest a malevolence to the surroundings shown and imply an unknown danger amongst them.
Eventually the camera finds a road snaking through an aerial shot of a thickly forested area then picks out and follows a lone car in extreme high angle long shot, making its way along the road. The camera gradually moves increasingly closer maintaining its birds’ eye view position, but also gradually rotates to distort the angle and create a sense of unsettling foreboding in the manner described above. A series of shot changes track the car’s journey and depict a range of different natural backdrops indicating the traversal of time and space. As the camera finally tracks speedily in to a mid shot of the car from behind, revealing it to be a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, credits rise up through the frame from below in blue typeface, and each gives way to the next, departing the frame by rising out of it.
The moving camera overtakes the car and veers away to the left, aerially crossing country before again finding the car and tracking its journey, once again with another series of extreme high angle long shots, while the eeriness of the electronic score continues to aurally unsettle the viewer.
The camera’s point of view eventually shifts to depict an extreme long shot of a remotely located building amongst the mountains, trees and lakes. It slowly circles the building, getting gradually closer. This building is the Overlook Hotel, and will be the yellow car’s final destination, and the principal location for almost all of the film’s subsequent action.
Overall, the opening sequence has been gradually building up to this elaborate establishing shot of the hotel, and has served to highlight its isolation and remoteness and communicate an implication of danger, that the audience should by now have associated with this idyllic yet spectral location and its backdrop.
