Intertextuality

As human beings we naturally get inspired by others, learn from others and in some ways take other people's ideas and adapt them to make them our own. During my early teenage years I hated using other people's work as reference and a way of coming up with my own. I saw it as 'cheating' or 'copying' other people's ideas. I always wanted to come up with my own ideas and insisted i wasn't influenced by anything, but as I know now this is impossible. Without being influenced by every day objects or people for example, I don't see how you could ever draw. You would have zero knowledge on the visual appearance of anything, so you would never be able to record it on paper.

Intertextuality explores this idea. Julia Kristeva came up with the term 'Intertextuality' and is described as 'The term intertextuality denotes the transposition of one or several sign systems into another'. This is used in many different ways. Such as during character development, remakes of old films or cover songs by music artists made by other people.

Commonly during films, animations or games we see the same kind of characters that are used over and over again that have been used in the past. For example from the Disney animated film 'Snow White' the witch is ever so similar to the witch character during the digitally animated film 'Tangled' that has recently been released during this year. Features from the previous witch have been borrowed during the character design for the witch show in 'Tangled'.

 There are two different types of intertextuality, one being unconscious and the second being (self-)conscious. Unconscious meaning that it is out of the author's control, they are not aware of it. (Self-)conscious meaning that it is deliberate, the author has put the intertextuality there for a reason for whatever that maybe. I believe an example of unconscious intertextuality is the similarity between the narrative of the disney animated film 'Pocahontas' and James Cameron's 3D film 'Avatar'. The plot of both films is very much the same, but I would argue the fact of how similar they are but at the same time being so very different. I would not of thought that James Cameron intended this to happen.

An example of (Self-)conscious intertextuality would be from the 'Only fools and horses' series where the main characters of the show dress up as 'Batman' and 'Robin' from the DC comics. The 'Only fools and horses' series uses the intertextuality to make the scenario funny. They achieved this by giving the smaller of the two characters the role of 'Batman' and the taller one 'Robin'. They then run into a number of complications that build upon this.