ANALYSIS OF A FILM OPENING: JUNO

Juno is a comedy-drama film from 2007. It was directed by Jason Reitman and written by Diablo Cody. It stars Ellen Page as Juno, a young teenage girl who falls pregnant, and Michael Cera as the father of her child. The film follows Juno's choices in giving the baby to a rich couple who can not have children, and what happens to all the families involved during the duration of the pregnancy. Although the subject of the film is teenage pregnancy and is not often a happy thing, the main feeling of the film is up-beat. The opening is Juno walking to the chemists to get a pregnancy test, and is done in animated form. 

The pace of the opening is quite slow, as we follow Juno on her walk to the chemists. It begins in live action but changes into animation shortly after the walk begins. In order to create the title credits more interesting it seems that they have made an animated short, instead of just having the plain boring text pop up on screen like many films do. Since it is an animation, you cannot convey the same moment as you can in live action so the cinematography is quite simple. There is clever used of soft pastel background colours which contrast with the hard colours of Juno's clothing. She is contrasting the soft background, and really stands out. Also, at some points there is no colour at all in the background, but Juno stays coloured in. The main prop is the bottle of Sunny D which Juno regularly drinks from. There is also a lot of nature; trees, falling leaves, etc. The location is animated, but gives the impression that we are in a small town as we see cars, houses and small shops. The background music is a very important part of the opening. The whole film has a very similar sounding soundtrack and songs are used regularly. The opening lasts as long as the song does, it is quite a happy song which match the calmness of the opening. At this point in the film the viewer is unaware that Juno is pregnant so don't understand where she is going. The music almost tricks the viewer into thinking she is going somewhere nice and fun, when in fact she is going to find out her fate. The names of those involved in creating the film appear on numerous places in the animated form of the town. For example, on walls or windows. The font is quite thick and looks as if it has been hand coloured, much like the animation itself. The narrative is

basically a young girl walking through her neighbourhood drinking Sunny D. It's a regular moment that happens millions of times a day all over the world. The enigma is 'what is her purpose? where is she going? why is she going there?'. We are introduced into the character of Juno, and all we know about her is she is young, apparently likes Sunny D and is going somewhere. We have no reason to dislike her, and she looks like quite a nice girl so the audience is more likely to be sympathetic to her once they discover her situation. We also briefly see high school runners, but they are in the background and are not really focused on. The titles give an impression that this is a low budget indie film due to the use of the basic animation. Not many clues are given to the genre, we know it will relate to young people so assume it will be some sort of teen movie. It doesn't really grip the viewer, but charms them. It almost grabs the viewer by the hand and says 'hey, come watch this, it'll be nice'.