Emotion in Animated Films

Meike Uhrig, Meike Uhrig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351399449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Ranging from blockbuster movies to experimental shorts or documentaries to scientific research, computer animation shapes a great part of media communication processes today. Be it the portrayal of emotional characters in moving films or the creation of controllable emotional stimuli in scientific contexts, computer animation's characteristic artificiality makes it ideal for various areas connected to the emotional: with the ability to move beyond the constraints of the empirical "real world, " animation allows for an immense freedom. This book looks at international film productions using animation techniques to display and/or to elicit emotions, with a special attention to the aesthetics, characters and stories of these films, and to the challenges and benefits of using computer techniques for these purposes.

Part I
Introduction

1 AnimOtion

Animating Emotions in the
Digital Age

Meike Uhrig

Only decades ago, computer technology was regarded as “too cool and technical to be involved in artistic projects” and even labeled as an “invention of the devil” (Kerlow 2009: 16) by media artists. Thus, it seems paradoxical today that computer animation appears to be the first choice when it comes to creating emotional film contents and/or eliciting emotional reactions in recipients – especially as the potential irrationality and often subconscious character of emotions diametrically oppose computer technology’s calculatory nature.

Some early pioneers, however, defied the predominant skepticism that shaped computer technology’s early years. As one of the first artists, David Em created stills of fantastic planets based on NASA’s jet propulsion theory (JPL) simulation “Voyager 2” in the late 1970s. In 1989, Loren Carpenter, Boeing employee and later cofounder and chief scientist of Pixar Animation, presented his adaption of fractal techniques for landscape animations in Vol Libre. Also, George Lucas’ film team for his first Star Wars (1977) movie consisted mostly of members from New York Institute of Technology’s Computer Graphics Research Group (for more details see Kerlow 2009; Isaacson 2011). Together these techno-artists started experimenting with the new art form and have played their part in promoting computer animation to its current status as a widely used, highly approved art form.

Furthermore, along with its technological development, computer animation began to unchain itself from its preliminary flaw of being suppressed by its technological restrictions and has begun to develop its potential as a technique offering various stylistic and aesthetic possibilities for media production. Ranging from blockbuster movies to experimental independent shorts to documentaries or educational videos, computer animation shapes a great part of media communication processes around the world.

Today, films are spread out on Internet platforms or via DVD collections (Animation Show of Shows, Animation History), provided by filmmakers themselves, by film schools, or by companies. Furthermore, they are presented at several hundred animation festivals worldwide – starting with the Annecy International Animated Film Festival in France that has taken place since 1962 – with some of them focusing on particular forms of animation such as the Scottish Puppet Animation Festival or on specific filmmakers as the Tricky Women Festival in Vienna. Also, special events such as the International Conference on Animation, Effects, VR, Games and Transmedia (FMX) in Stuttgart or the annual conferences of research societies for animated films (e.g., the Society for Animation Studies) display the artistic potential and spectrum of animation.

Computer animations are given special attention at the annual conference of the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) renowned Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH). Here, animation artists such as Chris Landreth, Bob Sabiston, or Ton Roosendaal present their works, which comprise both technical innovation and artistic delicacy. It was at SIGGRAPH where John Lasseter presented Pixar’s first short film Luxo Jr. in 1986 – a milestone in the history of computer-animated films.

Since the late 1990s, not only niche festivals or conferences honor the artistic potential of animated films; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) has also paid tribute to the art form by adding an award in 2001 for Best Animated Feature to the annual Academy Awards ceremony.¹ The reputation of animated films changed from margin to mainstream as today they make up a high percentage of the total amount of new releases in movie theatres.² Computer animation thus plays an increasing role in the area of popular blockbuster movies.

This increase of popular formats brought a specialization in content, claim, and effect. While animated films have been used for political, intellectual, and even subversive causes from the beginning, their popular mainstream variants show an increasing tendency to entertain a wide variety of viewers – including even specifically aiming at children and adolescents (see Chapter 10). Accordingly, popular computer-animated films bring their emotional impact into focus and use their artistic potential to elicit emotions and glue their diverse audience emotionally to their stories and characters. This tendency is also being mirrored in the list of genres represented in computer-animated films. Between 1995 and 2015, emotionally charged genres, like comedy (70%), adventure (70%), and fantasy (35%), make up the largest part of completely computer-generated films in movie theatres – while many films are categorized as meta genres, containing elements of more than three (emotionally diverse) genres at a time (‘family’ is being used as category in 82% of the films). In addition, science fiction, action, drama, romance, mystery, and thrillers are represented in computer-animated films as well, more or less frequently (ranging from 12% of sci-fi films and up to 2% of thrillers – with thrillers being categorized as romantic and comic at the same time).

Accordingly, typical overarching emotionally charged themes of (computer-) animated films include those connected to childhood and growing up and to friendship. However, loss and loneliness also build on experiences that almost every viewer can relate to on an emotional basis and that may elicit feelings such as nostalgia, sentimentality, or melancholy in almost every viewer (see Chapter 2).

Furthermore, these popular variants display specific characteristics that aim to elicit emotions that are often equated to a film’s success – and thus its box office results. These characteristics include the film’s focus on a story that tends to subordinate its style (that again supports the narration to allow for a maximum of its effective force; see Chapter 7), its specific dramaturgy (a film’s most important means to manage and even intensify emotions; Eder 2007), and likable – even if often undefined – main characters (Uhrig 2014, 2018).

Along with these general characteristics of popular movies, computer-animated films use their specific freedom to push their creations to an extreme, that is, by designing likable characters that display accordingly likable characteristics. Here it is not only the freedom in the choice of the referent of a character itself – be it a human, a bug, a toaster, or even a fictive being – but also the design of the characters, along with the film’s focus on their expressions, that especially supports emotional engagement with the heroes. These characters are designed to transport their inner lives – feelings, thoughts, intentions – by way of the effects caused by their symbolic and metaphoric quality and also by their physiques, their physiognomies, and their expressions. Primarily, the design of computer-animated characters seems to aim at their potential to elicit certain emotions by emphasizing faces in general and parts of the face particularly. Here, the eyes of a character appear to be a major elicitor, as they are central in displaying most of the eight basic emotions according to Paul Ekman’s Facial Action Coding System approach. Conversely, the reception of eyes most notably find resonances in the viewers’ mental reactions (see Chapter 6). More than ever, characters displaying baby schemata, featuring big eyes together with high foreheads and round cheeks, elicit empathic reactions directly on a biological level. Thus, characters with huge eyes seem to set a new status quo of face aesthetics in computer-animated films (Uhrig 2016, 2018). The special importance of the characters’ faces as transporters of emotions over the exaggerated body language in traditionally animated films is mirrored in the camera work and editing with the films’ use of close-up shots – so-called scenes of empathy (Plantinga 1999, referring to Balázs 1952; see Chapter 9).

The films’ character designs, along with the cameras’ focus on their emotional (facial) expressions, therefore allow the viewers to both (emotionally) comprehend and thus empathize with the characters’ actions and involve themselves in the (often fantastic) adventures that they experience. The films’ narrations are further supported by emotional cues that are transported by their formal elements such as music, editing, or their mise-en-scène (Smith 1999; Uhrig 2014). Basic principles of animated films that support emotional engagement have already been described by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in the 1980s, who mentioned aspects such as exaggeration, anticipation, or staging to support the emotional impact of a scene. In their often more naturalistic approaches, where style seems subordinated to stories, popular computer animations inherit these aesthetic traditions by, at the same time, developing their generic characteristics with respect to the use of movement, music, or color (on the application of principles of traditional animation on computer animation see, e.g., Lasseter 1987; see Chapter 8).

Next to fictional (mainstream) variants of digital animation and next to (early) experimental and art house films that often thematize unpleasant emotions and complex, indirect, and even subversive messages and taboos (see Chapter 4), documentaries and educational videos provide emotional contents and effects. Due to the seeming directness of the events portrayed in documentaries, along with the capability of animation to show the otherwise impossible, animated documentaries possess the potential to display and cause intense effects while at the same time being able to soften sensitive or savage contents with the help of their generic artificiality (see Chapter 5). Furthermore, health campaign videos, displaying emotional contents and/or contents aiming for specific emotional effects, seem omnipresent (see Chapter 3). In the context of clinic autism studies, for example, the potential to control, manipulate, and alter representations of faces is being used in order to study the effects of facial expressions and/or to adapt computer-generated expressions to certain forms of the disorder to help patients learn to recognize emotions. Also, videos on emotional disorders such as depression are being widely used for both educational and therapeutic reasons, making use of the benefits of digital technology to display and elicit certain emotions.

Research in ‘AnimOtion’

Films in general and animated films especially have been subject to emotion research from the beginning. Appearing already in the earliest theoretical approaches, early film theorists described the potential and possibilities of the moving image to transport and elicit emotions like no other art form (e.g., Arnheim 1932; Münsterberg 1916) and even adapted their theories to film projects (Eisenstein 1924) and experiments (Kuleshov 1921). In the 1980s, psychoanalytical film theory started including the viewers’ dispositions and early childhood experiences in their approaches and concentrated on sexual and gender-related aspects (Metz 1977; Doane 1982; Studlar 1984; Baudry 1994; Mulvey 1999, etc.). These were further developed by phenomenological approaches that emphasized bodily aspects of cinematic sensations (Sobchack 1992, 2004; Marks 2000, 2002). Furthermore, film technology seems indispensable especially when it comes to experimental and implementation emotion research. A field of research that conducts studies that combine films as the scope of investigation and use films also as a means to elicit emotions is cognitive film studies. Here, approaches from areas such as psychology, philosophy, and film studies are combined in an interdisciplinary manner. Within the last years, computer-animated contents have gained special attention within the field (e.g., Tan 2005; Flückiger 2008; Visch and Tan 2009; Visch et al. 2010, etc.). However, systematic research on emotions and animated films is still missing. This is surprising as the artificiality of computer animation makes it ideal for various areas connected to emotions – be it the portrayal of emotional characters in moving films or the creation of controllable emotional stimuli in scientific contexts. With the ability to move beyond the constraints of the empirical ‘real world,’ animation allows for an immense freedom of the portrayed – its aesthetic covering the full spectrum from stylized or abstract to photorealistic. Thus, computer animations are a powerful tool for depicting, studying, and manipulating emotions.

An area of research that genuinely focuses on animation as an art form and uses animations as a point of departure for their studies (rather than as means to experimentally manipulate variables or to use animated content as an example among others) is the field of animation studies. A major part of animation studies is shaped by its interest in media, especially television and film contents. These media scientific approaches to animated films date back to the beginning of film history (e.g., Irzykowski 1924; Holtz 1940; Poncet 1952; see also Eisenstein 1986) and culminate in an ongoing attempt to establish an independent research field that systematically studies animated films. An increasing interest in research into animated art and its preservation in the late 1980s and 1990s helped to promote this field. In these years, the Society for Animation Studies was established (1987), and some renowned researchers created elementary standard works, including Paul Well’s monograph Understanding Animation (1998) and Marueen Furniss’ Art in Motion (1999). In addition, with Animation Journal (since 1991), animation: an interdisciplinar...