Fantasy/Animation

Connections Between Media, Mediums and Genres

Christopher Holliday, Alexander Sergeant, Christopher Holliday, Alexander Sergeant

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351681407
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

This book examines the relationship that exists between fantasy cinema and the medium of animation. Animation has played a key role in defining our collective expectations and experiences of fantasy cinema, just as fantasy storytelling has often served as inspiration for our most popular animated film and television. Bringing together contributions from world-renowned film and media scholars, Fantasy/Animation considers the various historical, theoretical, and cultural ramifications of the animated fantasy film. This collection provides a range of chapters on subjects including Disney, Pixar, and Studio Ghibli, filmmakers such as Ralph Bakshi and James Cameron, and on film and television franchises such as Dreamworks' How To Train Your Dragon (2010–) and HBO's Game of Thrones (2011–).

part one
ontology and spectatorship

one
wonderlands, slumberlands and plunderlands

considering the animated fantasy

paul wells

defining the territory

In his essay “Definitions of Territories,” novelist and critic Italo Calvino traces the antecedents of modern fantasy literature. First, he examines the French academy’s notion of the fantastique, mainly rooted in the cathartic experiences of gothic horror; second, in the fantastico of the Italians, who in an almost diametrically opposed definition, objectively saw worlds based on alternative logics outside the everyday; and third, in the English embrace of Renaissance forms and the Modernist desire to create progressive models of expression.¹ In this latter instance, in English literary codes, the most satisfying pleasure of “Fantasy” was not a matter of “believing” in the monstrous or supernatural or “explaining” characters and cultures outside known forms or contexts, but “in the unraveling of a logic with rules or points of departure or solutions that keep some surprises up their sleeves.”² This notion of fantasy as a quasi-puzzle—best exemplified in Lewis Carroll’s texts, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871)—essentially rendered “fantasy” in a particular way. Such texts have an intellectual credibility, in simultaneously embracing the “wonder” embedded in primitive myths and fables and the symbolic undercurrents of the “unconscious” but, importantly, in resisting the conscious construction of allegory. Most significant, ultimately, is that such texts privilege “play, irony, the winking eye, and [meditating] on the hidden desires, and nightmares of contemporary man.”³

It is this, then, that prompts my own inquiry, as I wish to use Carroll’s work, now more than 150 years in the public sphere, and still a key reference point in Western cultural logic, as a method by which to link “fantasy” with the terms and conditions of animated texts. In David Butler’s exemplary short study of fantasy cinema, written in 2009, he offers a useful corrective to the absences and shortfalls in Film Studies by addressing fantasy cinema, and promises an engagement with the “how” as well as the “why” of making such films.⁴ As such his comments about Disney’s fairy tale features, Ray Harryhausen’s Arabian Nights films, and references to Princess Mononoke/Mononoke-hime (Hayao Miyazaki, 1997), Azur and Asmar (Michel Ocelot, 2006) and the CGI in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Peter Jackson, 2001-2003) are welcome, but each largely falls back into ideological critique, rather than identifying what animation is and does specifically.⁵ Butler’s selection of Jonathan Miller’s version of Alice in Wonderland (1966) as a model of using editing/montage in world-building and the disruption of materialist filmic/social norms to present “wonderland” essentially priori-tizes how the film works as fantasy fiction over defining animation as a form in the construction of fantasy and, arguably, its intrinsic place in defining fantasy cinema. I wish to take the opportunity here, then, to explore three animated adaptations of Alice in Wonderland—the Disney version, Alice in Wonderland (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, 1951); Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988); and Tim Burton’s renditions, Alice in Wonder-land (2010) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (James Bobin, 2016)—to explore this possibility.

To be “down the rabbit hole” or “through the looking glass” is an acknowledgment of a transition into a fantasy state; a shift of perception into an altered world, a fundamental re-configuration of what has gone before. These phrases—drawn of course, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass—are an everyday acknowledgement of Carroll’s texts as key reflections on this psychological and emotional transition, but also, the way in which such shifts in consciousness—as noted by Calvino— are often embodied in the idea of accessing a new and different “territory.” This is usually a strange “land,” somehow different from, yet still intrinsically related to, the orthodoxies of a previous physical environment. In this spirit, I wish to look at the “wonderlands,” “slumberlands” and “plunderlands” of the animated “worlds” conjured in the Disney, Švankmajer and Burton adaptations, first by defining animation itself in the spirit of magic and the plasmatic; second, by looking at the distinctive language of expression in animation as it was theorized by graphic designer, director and animator John Halas, and may be recognized as traits and tropes within Carroll’s texts; and finally, in the ways that Carroll’s own conception of psychic states as aspects of faerie may be identified in the examples I have chosen. As such, I hope to use the Alice text to define animation, and show its intrinsic place within the conception of fantasy cinema—in Disney’s wonderland, Švankmajer’s slumberland and Burton’s plunderland.

animated fantasy and magic

All fantasy narratives are essentially hypothetical, and sometimes counterintuitive, but as Torben Grodal notes, “the fantastic world is rarely one in which all causality is absent; rather it is a more unstable world in which normal causality can break down and new magical laws emerge.”⁶ Katherine A. Fowkes confirms, “as a trope of fantasy, magic stands in for causality— its rejection of realistic causality is precisely its point.”⁷ I wish to argue here, however, that these “magical laws” are essentially the staple conditions of animation; the very mechanism by which the magical can be enacted. The non-literal, non-objective, non-conditional status of most animation practice inherently places the material world and its functional and utilitarian conditions into relief, rendering the perception of such a world unstable. This instability or surreality takes on the epithet of the “magical” simply because it advances the recognition that cause and effect may be fluid and unpredictable; at its most extreme, arbitrary and inchoate. Thereafter, such a world becomes unknowable and mysterious, lost to the common knowledge or gaze. As Owen Davies reminds us, however, “Magic is far more than a venerable collection of practices. We need to understand it as a language, a theory, a belief, an action, a creative expression, an experience and a cognitive tool.”⁸ Bound up with religion, science, folklore, psychology, art and entertainment, magic is inherently present as an animistic agent in the space between the supernatural and the material, itself a potentially ritualistic and rhetorical act: “it is the combination of utterance and performance that, once enacted, engenders a change of state. Magic is done when the operator declares it will be done—at least if the performance has been conducted correctly.”⁹ This points to an insistence that underpinning what might be viewed as the spectacle of difference or ultimately, “the fantasy,” are alternative methods and explanations—a specialist knowledge that reveals the “trick” behind the “smoke and mirrors.” Like all animation, magic is inherently rhetorical, because it speaks to a distance from, or an interrogation of, material reality and expectation. Fantasy is intrinsically embedded in this rhetorical space—magic tricks, animated forms, and magic as it is defined through animation are merely the ways in which it is visualized.

Underpinning the “magical” in animated fantasy, then, are the specialist narrative and technical “laws” played out through animation as a form. Grodal bequeaths the following condition to all fantasy cinema, while failing to acknowledge the particularity of animation in this achievement:

Fantasy films like Fantasia [James Algar et al., 1940] also delight in the metamorphosis of form—for example, speeding up the slow processes of animal or plant growth and transferring them to other features of the world. These accelerated transformations make the world less stable; objects may suddenly morph into something quite different. Fantasy films may also create synthetic associations between sight and sound: for example, deep tones may be linked with the motion of large animals such as rhinos, high tones with small animals.¹⁰

“Metamorphosis” is one of the fundamental characteristics of animation, not merely as an act of seamless protean transition, but as Marina Warner has pointed out, as enacted in “mutating,” “hatching,” “splitting” and “doubling” too, promoting different states of being that play out tensions between the material and immaterial.¹¹ Indeed, she cites Carroll’s interest in the photography as a way in which he sought to apprehend this state, and the faerie that exists in the mutable space between the physical and spiritual worlds. In Warner’s view, this thereafter imbued his texts with the quasi-cinematic:

Carroll’s devices of moving between them even anticipate reverse spooling and slow motion and the rewind button on the video – this is one of the sharpest examples of the future development of a medium interacting with developments in thought.¹²

Like Grodal, however, Warner fails to spot that this is actually the spatial and temporal freedom available in the fluidity of animation, and which has frequently been allied to the idea that animation can visualize “consciousness.” Consequently, animation is often best revealed when it visualizes interior states and projections (see Halas’ concept of penetration later in this discussion)—all ultimately the stuff of “fantasy.”¹³

Sound too becomes more than diegetic or illustrative in animation because it often actively plays a role in delineating the narrative and mood through suggestion and association. Every sound in an animated film, like every image, has to be specifically chosen, because it is not first and foremost based on the performances of actors, and the orthodox triggering musical motifs of the conventional soundtrack. While sound design plays an important role in all cinema, the highly specified nature of the role sound often plays as a character, an environment, or simply as a symbolic representation of a psychic, emotional or imagined state in animation, again renders it as a tool of agency and specific enunciation in the construction of fantasy.

What Grodal fundamentally overlooks when seeing these elements in all fantasy cinema is that animated metamorphosis and sound can enunciate itself both in a traditional or experimental style (cel-animation, cutouts, 2D or 3D stop-motion, clay, sand, object manipulation, CGI, etc.), or as a hyper-realistic form in digital visual effects. Animation essentially facilitates fantasy because its normative conditions enable “magic” (on all the terms cited by Davies above). There remains much irony—exemplified in Grodal’s analysis—that this in some senses remains “invisible.” The very fact of “naturalizing” the conditions and outcomes of “magic” or “fantasy” as a new representational “reality” in film essentially hides the “laws” that deliver it. This is not a new phenomenon, of course, and ultimately proved to be a fundamental imperative in helping to define animation on theoretical terms, especially after what might be termed ...