Animation

Genre and Authorship

Paul Wells

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231851343
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Animation: Genre and Authorship explores the distinctive language of animation, its production processes, and the particular questions about who makes it, under what conditions, and with what purpose. In this first study to look specifically at the ways in which animation displays unique models of 'auteurism' and how it revises generic categories, Paul Wells challenges the prominence of live-action moviemaking as the first form of contemporary cinema and visual culture. The book also includes interviews with Ray Harryhausen and Caroline Leaf, and a full timeline of the history of animation.

1 WHAT IS ANIMATION?

Animation is arguably the most important creative form of the twenty-first century. Animation as an art, an approach, an aesthetic and an application informs many aspects of visual culture, from feature-length films to prime-time sit-coms; from television and web cartoons to display functions on a range of new communications technologies. In short, animation is everywhere. It is the omnipresent pictorial form of the modern era. Like all art forms it has a history, but in its particular case there are many histories which are still being researched and reclaimed. Long dismissed as merely children’s entertainment, only in recent years has there been clear recognition of animation as an art; as a form that encompasses more than the American animated cartoon tradition; as a medium of universal expression embraced across the globe.

This short study will concentrate on four aspects of animated film. Firstly, its multiple ‘histories’; secondly, the forms and approaches that make up its distinctive vocabulary and its intrinsic ‘modernity’; thirdly, its problematic relationship to ‘genre’; and finally, its equally complex relationship to ‘auteurism’. I will seek to contextualise films that may be unfamiliar to the new reader, but I will also be taking for granted some familiarity with Disney features, prominent recent animation in the 1990s, and the high-profile television presence of cartoon/sit-com animation. Again, these assumptions are made on the proposition that any analysis of the animated form of whatever length can only be a variation of seeking to pour a quart into a pint pot, and it is my intention to provide as much of an introduction to the form here as I can legitimately fit in without misrepresenting its importance and value.

Animation as a form has predominantly been understood as a ‘cartoon’ medium, and largely defined by the presence and performance of Disney animation from 1928 to the present day. It may be argued, therefore, that all other forms of animation may be addressed through the ways they relate to or differ from the Disney model. Many animation studios across the world have sought to imitate Disney aesthetically, industrially, technologically, and commercially, while others have resisted this approach, viewing it as something which may misrepresent their own engagement with the medium.

It may further be suggested that the American cartoonal tradition, in general, has determined how animation should be viewed. The work of the Fleischer Studio, Warner Bros. and MGM, to name but the most significant, challenged the Disney style and approach, but in doing so arguably created a further ‘ghetto’ for animation in a particular style of character-driven, anarchic comedy. Although there are many arguments to challenge these perspectives, it is worthwhile noting that many studios worldwide have insisted upon using their own indigenous fine arts traditions, mythologies and cultural imperatives in order to differentiate their own work from what may be regarded as a diluted form of American artistic and cultural imperialism. Chinese animation, for example, is often characterised by calligraphic approaches; Czechoslovakia recalls its long tradition of marionette theatre in its puppet animation; and Russian animators prioritise the cut-out and drawn forms in their work.

Another highly contentious, complex, and contemporary issue is the place of computer generated imagery (CGI) in film-making. The era of the post-photographic film has arrived, and while it is clear that for the animator, the computer is essentially ‘another pencil’, it is also clear that animation and its aesthetics will be affected by the production enhancements afforded by CGI. Arguably, this has already reached its zenith in PIXAR’s Monsters Inc. (2001), and the novelty of the technique may have passed (see Wells 2002).

Consequently, it remains important to note that while Europe has retained a tradition of auteurist film-making, also echoed elsewhere in Russia, China, and Japan, the United States has often immersed its animation within a Special Effects tradition, and as an adjunct to live action cinema. In many senses, CGI could once again make the art of the animator invisible, using animation within live-action contexts in a way that makes it indistingushable from its context. All this, after many years in which animators, critics and lobbyists have fought for its elevation, and the recognition that animation operates as a distinctive art-form in its own right.

It can be argued, though, that this view has been implicitly accepted by the film industry in the United States because many more feature length animations are being made, and animation has a high profile on television and on the web. It may be further evidenced by the fact that feature length animations had their own Academy Award category for the first time in 2001. But this may be another ‘double-edged sword’: while giving animation prominence, it may also make it live-action’s poor second relation, once again. Problematically, too, many films now have such a degree of animated effects that it may be difficult to prevent certain ostensibly ‘live action’ films lobbying for an Animation Oscar. Where, for example, would Star Wars (1977) or Jurassic Park (1993) be without their post-production animation? Interestingly, however, the Oscar category may also offer independent animators who do work to full-length – Bill Plympton, for example – an opportunity to gain recognition in a way that their films never would in the main category.

The issues which accrue around the American animation industry, like this, have served to operate as a distraction from work conducted elsewhere, and indeed, the prominence of the main studios in the United States has also served as a distraction from different uses of animation in America itself. Historians have reclaimed the pre-Disney pioneering era, and insisted upon the recognition of other more experimental traditions as the true measure of the potential, variety and freedom of animation as a form. In recent years, the success, for example, of Japanese animé, and the Oscar-winning triumphs of Briton Nick Park, have challenged the hegemony and implied homogeneity of the American product. There is, of course, a whole range of animation from across the six continents that has consistently challenged this, and is worth noting in this context as the fullest example of the appeal of animation to express personal, socio-cultural and national concerns that bear no relation to the American context at all.

Defining animation

Preston Blair, veteran animator of the ‘Dance of the Hours’ sequence in Disney’s Fantasia (1940); director of the ‘Barney Bear’ shorts at MGM; and most famously, the designer of the dancing girl ‘Red’ in Tex Avery’s Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), defines animation as ‘the process of drawing and photographing a character – a person, an animal, or an inanimate object – in successive positions to create lifelike movement.’ He continues:

Animation is both art and craft; it is a process in which the cartoonist, illustrator, fine artist, screenwriter, musician, camera operator and motion picture director combine their skills to create a new breed of artist – the animator. (Blair 1994: 6)

Blair’s comments provide a useful platform from which to engage with the issues addressed in this discussion. Simultaneously inclusive, comprehensive and yet significantly limited, his definition recognises the centrality of drawing in animation; the idea of animation as a craft-oriented process; the implicit tendency in some forms of animation to ape the codes and conventions of ‘realism’; and the multiplicity of creative production roles either played out in a quasi-Fordist industrial hierarchy, or conversely, by one person.1 While these observations suggest an initial set of frameworks by which to address the animated form, it is equally pertinent to take note of their immediate shortfalls. While drawing self-evidently underpins many approaches in animation, the field is characterised by many other styles and techniques – clay animation; puppet or model animation; the manipulation of objects and materials; sand on glass; cut-out and silhouette animation; computer generated animation and so on – all of which use the graphic and cinematic space in different ways. Although it remains the case that animation is a craft-oriented process, it is important to stress that the impact of new digital technologies has profoundly altered the nature of this process, and while in no way minimising the amount of time required to make an animated film of any significant length, it has challenged the myth of the animator presented in Bob Godfrey’s Do-It-Yourself Cartoon Kit (1961), where ‘it takes eight million separate drawings to make the lady’s arm move from there to there’ and ‘the best part of six years working day and night to complete that particular movement’!

Blair’s attention to the idea of creating ‘lifelike movement’ is also predicated on the assumption that Disney’s now orthodox hyper-realist styling, informed by close engagement with authentic, anatomically viable movement forms, is the predominant language of animation. Clearly, this need not be the case. More developmental and experimental forms of animation (see Wells 1998) frequently strive for the very opposite effect, where notions of the ‘lifelike’ are jettisoned and other expressions of configuration and movement are privileged. Maureen Furniss has suggested that consequently, all animation may be placed within a continuum between mimesis and abstraction, each film operating in a way that places it along the continuum in relation to the varying applications of its representational forms (Furniss 1998: 6). Finally, perhaps the most important of Blair’s perspectives is the recognition of the number of roles that combine in the creation of a certain type of animated film, each in a sense having claim to a mode of ‘authorship’. These roles may change and vary, however, within the making of any one animated film, and may even be transfigured in a way that facilitates small groups or individuals to make films, and as a consequence of that process, arguably challenges aspects of the definition of an auteur as it has been predominantly constructed in live-action cinema. This issue is one of the central preoccupations of this book.

Where Blair is completely correct is in his view that ‘animation is a vast and virtually unexplored artform’ (Blair 1994: 7), and although a great deal of work has been done in recent years to address this, each new exploration is of great value. This particular discussion cannot in itself redress the shortfall, but it will seek to introduce the form and consider ways in which the distinctive vocabulary of animation may be applied to issues of genre and authorship. It is not the intention of this book, however, to reiterate the history of animation, but to draw from its rich and various traditions in order to pursue issues concerning the distinctiveness of animation as a visual language, the particular ways that this distinctive language has been used in order to facilitate an authorial signature, and the inflections upon generic orthodoxies which render genre films in animation as notable sub-genres in their own right. The ‘Animation Timeline’ provided in the Appendix should be used as an aide memoire by which the reader can engage in a range of issues explored in the following pages which may encourage further research.

First though, some further considerations of the ‘definition’ of animation, or as may already be clear, the self-evident variety of definitions which may enable the widest possible interpretation of the ‘openness’ of the form. Fundamentally, to make an animated film, it is necessary to create the illusion of movement frame-by-frame through a variety of technical applications. This apparently simple concept, like Blair’s perspectives, hides a multitude of possibilities. As Bugs Bunny is the first to point out in Scott McCloud’s influential study, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, animation is more than just ‘sequential visual art’, provoking McCloud’s graphic alter-ego to note that ‘animation is sequential in time, but not spatially juxtaposed as comics are … however, you might say before it’s projected, film is just a very, very, very, very, slow comic’ (McCloud 1993: 7–8). This observation becomes of interest for two reasons. First, it points up a pertinent relationship between the codes and conventions of comics and animated films, stressing that in the case of animation, images move through time, and that it is the act of recording the individual frames which enables the form to move beyond proto-animation – best illustrated by a ‘flip-book’ in which figures and forms appear to become animated if we ‘riffle’ consecutive pages – and become ‘an animated film’. Second, it draws attention to the individual cels or frames, particularly in the field of two-dimensional cartoon animation, as specific works of fine art made distinctive by virtue of their necessary place within the 25 frames required to make one second of full animated movement onscreen. Significantly, such frames, particularly drawn from the ‘Golden Era’ of American studio animation now constitute highly collectable art-works in their own right, but arguably, while promoting the aesthetic qualities of a once-neglected popular form, this misrepresents the very specificity of motion at the heart of animated film which is its intrinsic art. Animator Richard Taylor has noted:

It is more important to emphasise that the quality of the sequence is more important that the quality of the images. It is possible to make a bad film with beautiful drawings or models – the art of the animated film is in the action. (Taylor 1996: 7)

In what has become one of the most oft-quoted insights about the animation process, master animator Norman McLaren suggests: ‘How it moves is more important than what moves … what the animator does on each frame of film is not as important as what he or she does in between’ (quoted in Solomon 1987: 11). In his first statement, McLaren directs the animator to think about the act of movement and what it is seeking to express. This is just as relevant to the viewer of animated films in the sense that this very concentration on the specificity of movement is one of the key defining elements of animation, as its creation is of a different order and of a greater freedom than that determined by live-action film. The animator can create ‘action’ which is outside the vocabulary offered by its mainstream counterpart. The potential reorientation of the physical and material environment under these terms and conditions also re-configures the ways in which the psychological, emotional and physical terrain may be explored and expressed.

Crucial in this is McLaren’s second observation. While the material recorded on any one frame of film is unique and fundamental to any animation, McLaren suggests that the animator’s creative process, evidenced in the decisions that the animator makes in the continuing application of paint on paper, the manipulation of clay, the ‘tweak’ of a model and so on, but which occurs between the frames, more accurately defines the animator’s art. This view creates a major problem for the viewer or critic. Under these conditions the intrinsic nature of the animator’s work, like that of the comic strip artist, becomes in McCloud’s term ‘an invisible art’, but once again McCloud’s insights about comic design, and the function of the ‘gutter’ space between individual panels may be of some help here. He suggests that the artist is in essence inviting the reader of images to achieve some degree of ‘closure’ in reading the information and implication of one image in order to achieve an ‘associative’ relationship with the following image. This process also shares some characteristics with the concept of montage, but in the case of animation this finds its application on the most detailed and minute scale.2 The animator must ensure that technical, aesthetic and conceptual continuity is achieved frame-by-frame, and that the ‘closure’ implied in any one sequence of movement, or in any one tendency in the visual ideas being practically conceived, reveal its associativeness to the viewer in the flow of imagery. Again, by tracking the very process by which the smallest constituent elements of the animated film is made, and looking at the ways that ‘closure’ is implied through the inter-connectedness of the images, viewers can begin to assimilate the distinctive process in animation where aesthetic choices underpin different forms of narrative, and the visual construction of meaning. The following case studies will seek to consolidate some of these initial points.

Un Point, C’est Tout (A Point, That’s All) (1986)

Claude Rocher’s film, Un Point, C’est Tout is a mock-philosophic account of the visual orthodoxies of traditional picture making in the Western world, which are exploited and challenged in a fashion which demonstrates and offers an understanding of the graphic freedoms intrinsic to the animated film. Using the simple premise of challenging the predominance of the ‘vanishing point’ or ‘perspective’ in picture making, determined by Filippo Brunellschi (1377–1446), Rocher reveals that ‘life is one long optical illusion’ and that ‘the eye is an unreliable witness’, using his film to undermine ‘the unshakeable order of geometry’. By collapsing the simple principle that ‘the size of an object is inversely proportional to the distance between it and the observer’, Rocher shows how an image of a huge tyre in the foreground and a small man, in perspective, in the background, is fundamentally altered by moving the man i...