Animated Landscapes

History, Form and Function

Chris Pallant, Chris Pallant

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628923506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Animazione

Winner of the 2017 McLaren-Lambart Award for Best Book on the Subject of Animation Studying landscape in cinema isn't quite new; it'd be hard to imagine Woody Allen without New York, or the French New Wave without Paris. But the focus on live-action cinema leaves a significant gap in studying animated films. With the almost total pervasiveness of animation today, this collection provides the reader with a greater sense of how the animated landscapes of the present relate to those of the past. Including essays from international perspectives, Animated Landscapes introduces an idea that has seemed, literally, to be in the background of animation studies. The collection provides a timely counterpoint to the dominance of character (be that either animated characters such as Mickey Mouse or real world personalities such as Walt Disney) that exists within animation scholarship (and film studies more generally). Chapters address a wide range of topics including history, case studies in national contexts (including Australia, Japan, China and Latvia), the traversal of animated landscape, the animation of fantastical landscapes, and the animation of interactive landscapes. Animated Landscapes promises to be an invaluable addition to the existing literature, for the most overlooked aspect of animation.

Part One

History: Formal Traditions

1

Seeing in Dreams – The Shifting Landscapes of Drawn Animation

Bryan Hawkins

Every epoch sees in dreams the epoch which is to succeed it.

Walter Benjamin¹

… Nature has no Outline,

But Imagination has. Nature has no Tune, but Imagination has.

Nature has no Supernatural, and dissolves: Imagination is Eternity.

William Blake (1822)²

Introduction

The visionary artist and poet William Blake’s recognition of the significance of ‘outline’ (he always drew with an emphasis on and commitment to outline as a clarity of imagining and vision and rejected drawing directly from nature) suggests drawings’ importance as a technology of the imagination. The distinction Blake makes between the products of the imagination and ‘nature’ marks drawing as an intellectual and cultural achievement as it marks our separation, as humans, from the simplicity and otherness of nature. It can be argued that for Blake this separation parallels the significance of the Biblical exclusion of Adam and Eve from a pre-lapsarian, Edenic paradise that Blake himself imagined through the visionary and imaginative technology of drawing and outline allied to the emergent technologies of mass printmaking.

The Greek myth of the Corinthian Maid as the birth of painting is linked to an opposition of drawn outline and a physically present, tangible and sensual world. The myth marks drawing as a vital energy and form and as a substitute or alternative to the world as much as it is a representation of the world. In the myth, Dibutades (the maid) seeks to possess and preserve her, soon to be departed, lover by drawing around his shadow an outline and thus capturing his likeness. In this way the lover’s shadow projected onto a wall by what often appears, in illustrations, as the light of a lamp, or of the moon as spectral projector, becomes fixed and held by drawing as a stand-in for both Dibutades’s lover and their love. Drawing here is the fixing of this fleeting transient shadow through outline. Indeed, in certain images of the myth, the focus of the intensity of the love, desire and sensuality that is Dibutades’s motivation is shifted from lover to shadow and from relationship to art. The act and action of drawing as love and sensuality and memory becomes independent of the male lover as subject. The sensuality of the act of drawing is in some illustrations of the myth underlined by the presence of Cupid whose piercing arrow and its associations become the chosen drawing implement of Dibutades. The illustrated neglect of the lover in favour of the image suggests a dawning scoptophilia.

Drawing enacts love and the drawing replaces the lover. Drawing and outline are born, in this myth, from a heady mix of desire, fear of loss, sensuality and artifice. The act of drawing for Dibutades creates an alternative sensuous world. Through the outline as drawing, the world is given a new form and new animation. The image dreams its future.

Outline, as the basis of picture making, may also be understood in relation to the drawn marks that emerge from the pre-historic fecundity of our ancient landscapes, from nature and from the rich supply of surfaces and media nature has provided for human exploitation. These early images as artefacts and sites preserved in our museums and as tourist venues and in the preserved natural landscape provide evidence for the later archaeological myths of beginning, not only of the image but of culture/s as well. Simply the caves provide the material images and myths of our shared beginnings. The pre-historic ‘painted’ cave, engraved stones and inscribed artefacts of pre-history amaze and enthral and animate us as we animate them with what Gombrich has called ‘the beholder’s share’,³ that element of meaning and significance, and even unknowing, which the viewer must bring to the image and that the curator, critic and pre-historian must engineer.

We see clearly the caves, we think, and identify the horses, handprints and other images of the Altamira, Chauvet, Cueva de las Manos, Lascaux, Peche Merle and Sulawesi caves and yet we are divided from them by thousands of years and by an all but unimaginable cultural distance. We touch the visual language of horse and creature and movement and we see and almost touch our own hands in those hands. Yet, so much of the complex cultures that generated these animated and enchanted images eludes us and drops away as a void as dark and impenetrable as the caves from which the images came. Not only do these ancient drawings, however, mark the origins of our human history and culture but they also mark the beginnings of our narrative, our visual story of ourselves within the world. The ancient inscribed stained and marked surfaces are the surfaces from which our visual histories emerge. Through them we see first see ourselves as image and from them our visual self-consciousnesses emerges.

These images are also the surfaces upon which human history is extinguished. Before these images the pre-human is unknown to us, a part, not apart from nature. The landscape and our place in it as ‘natural’ retreats from us. We may see, through artist’s eyes, an Eden, an innocent harmony, a fantastic planet to be yearned for and imagined as other, but this innocent landscape is never again to be lived in. From the time of the first-drawn images the human landscape is changed forever as it is animated by the visual languages and images and the individual, collective and cultural and social imaginings of the human. As the drawings of the caves mark the emergence of the human we may reflect also on the extent to which drawing, animated by the filmic and the wonderful traditions of Japan and manga, for example, have contributed to our recognition of the cyborg and the ‘post-human’.

For Ruskin, the influential Victorian art critic and philosopher, drawings’ significance was intellectual, mysterious and spiritual. In the act of drawing the landscape, Ruskin encouraged artists, his disciples and his classes of students and workers to draw the ‘awful lines’. By this Ruskin suggested not bad drawing but rather the exhortation to draw those lines that might reveal the awe Ruskin saw and felt and discovered in nature and the landscape:

‘Try always, whenever you look at form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on these…’⁴ For Ruskin, drawing could, and should, be a tool for the exploration of the deep structures of plant and geology, sky and mountain, the landscape and nature itself. Such lines discovered in the landscape and nature and plants and moss and the tiniest elements of our world meant that drawing existed at the edge of the invisible. This invisible was in part the recognition of the limitations of the eye and the technologies of the lense and it was also the realization, facilitated by scientific technologies, apparatus and method, that nature and landscape conformed to patterns and laws such as the ‘law of radiation’ applied to leaves, foliage and trees and which formed part of a greater ‘organic law’. Such laws, argued Ruskin, for the artist who studied, worked and looked with vision, pointed to a revelation of the nature of the world and beyond that to god. In this, Ruskin’s attitude to drawing reflected the great intellectual trajectories and dynamics, discoveries and motivations of the Victorian period and emergent modernity.

In the painted cave

Drawing marks our beginning as it hints at our ending. It delineates the proto-human as it has suggested the post-human. The ancient drawings of the caves more recently defined as art and as emergent language, mark our emergence from the natural landscape into the landscapes of human culture as they delineate and announce the moment of the surfacing of human consciousness itself. The lion, bear, buffalo and elephant mark man from human and re-invent the embodied connections they characterize. Disney, Halas and Batchelor, and 20^th Century Fox’s Avatar (2009) are evoked and may be seen to emulate and re-think the connections between man and creature. The hand-prints and representations of the human form and body mark the emergence of our self-consciousness in their proto-photographic qualities and the shapes, patterns and hybrid creatures of the caves hold as fossils of the psyche the energy of the human imagination and its creative potential to pattern, order and understand the world. This pre-historic intellectual exploration touched many areas of human life. The clearly different and differentiated handprints arranged in neat order on the caves surface order the social. These pre-photographic images, in a sense, dream the family photograph into being.

The surface of the cave parallels and becomes simultaneous with the animated screen we know from our contemporary culture. Images come alive for us through their description of the world beyond them and as a structured separate world of images. The caves structure a landscape of dream. This creative potential resonates through the ever-imminent potential newness and exhilaration of the connection of drawing’s ability to re-materialize and re-cognize itself in our lived presents and on our multiple screens. Through animated pornography, computer modelling, self-constructed drones, avatars and Google Glass, the potential is renewed in new and in re-constructed ancient forms.

The understanding of drawing as a tool for thought links with an understanding of drawing itself as a sign and rule-based system linked to, yet vitally different from, understandings of written language and other sign systems. Charles Sanders Peirce’s⁵ reflection on the sign was deeply influential in relation to the significance and growth of semiotics and casts a significant light on drawing as a system of signs. Peirce’s marvellously adaptable trichotomy of signs identifies a way of understanding drawing’s potential and versatility, then and now. This structure marks a progression and connection between characteristics of the sign that can be identified in the earliest drawn images of the caves. This progression moves for Peirce from the indexical (the sign, connected to its referent by contact) through the iconic (the connection of the sign to meaning through likeness) and to the symbolic (the connection of the sign to the constructed meanings and associations of culture and the accretions and accumulations of social conventions of meaning). Through Peirce’s valuable looking glass we can see the implied developmental trajectory of the sign (from simple mark to complex language) and the suggestion that the images of the caves aspire to and pre-figure to the complexities of future meanings. Indeed, Werner Herzog suggests in the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) that it may even be that the genesis of the earliest human drawing emerges from the indexical marks (scratches) of animal marks connected and over-written by human marks much as the image of the Peche-Merle horse seems to have pre-existed in the shape of the rock on which it is painted. Such a trajectory moves from the naïve ‘natural’ indexical and iconic mark, through the recognition and enhancement of its iconic significance as ‘horse’, to the mysterious and complex symbolic resonances of ‘horse’ that echo through the arts, myth and culture. However, this progression is not exhausted by the caves – it remains with us.

The significance of the (indexical) mark, (iconic) likeness and (symbolic) cultural association of Peirce’s trichotomy of the sign is a definition and identification of the re-cognizable potential of the drawn. These elements remain fundamental to the image and its animation. As just one example, Phil Mulloy’s animated parody of human evolution ‘Intolerance’ is played out through the mystery of the direct, powerful and expressive indexical mark, the iconicity of drawn forms that echo through the history of visual representation and the powerful associations of the symbolic as the image leaves the anchorage of iconicity to expand into the relay of the symbolic. Mulloy’s film, which combines cultural, sexual, parodic, carnivalesque and undeniably funny imagery, provides a masterful and powerful articulation of the potential of drawn animation.

Reading the painted cave

From the natural landscapes that fostered the development of Homo sapiens and the emergence of the human come the human landscapes, communities, technologies, systems and artefacts of the contemporary world. The extraordinarily imaginative and intellectual technology we may call drawing has stayed with us. The history of drawn animation, as normally defined, is a fragment of this history of the image, but the roots of drawn imagination lie in the ancient pre-historic landscapes and the myths of the beginning of imagery as much as in the technologies of projection, the multi-platforms and the unique pervasiveness of drawing’s contemporary forms. Drawing defines and reflects our pre-historic past as its technologies contribute to the post-modern, hyper-accelerated, post-human world.

In his astounding film Cave of Forgotten Dreams, filmed using drone technology, 3D digital wizardy and using the state-of-the-art stereoscopic cameras, Herzog weaves around his filming of the ancient Chauvet caves in France and the 30,000-year-old drawings. They contain a complex parable of human imagery and film as palimpsest (a connected deep layering and archaeology of images) and polyphony (the sense in which to imagine the visual experiences of the ancient caves is to simultaneously rehearse and experience the technologies of imagery from cave to fantasmagoria, cinema to video game and the virtual). In short, as Walter Benjamin has suggested, Herzog argues in relation to the image, that each epoch dreams the next as the contemporary dreams the past.

In Herzog’s and Benja...