Animating Space

From Mickey to WALL-E

J.P. Telotte

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780813125862
• eBook ISBN: 9780813139791
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Animation

1

EARLY ANIMATION

Of Figures and Spaces

One of the abiding images of early animation is of a hand reaching into the film frame to sketch a variety of characters or things on a sheet of paper, a large easel-mounted pad, or a chalkboard. Whatever is sketched then usually undergoes a series of amazing or simply amusing transformations at the hand of “the hand.” As most historians have noted, this signature scene, which we can find in the work of J. Stuart Blackton, Emile Cohl, Harry S. Palmer, Earl Hurd, the Fleischer brothers, Walt Disney, and others, emerged from the tradition of the “lightning sketch,” a common act in vaudeville programs and music hall shows of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Described by Donald Crafton as “a hybrid of graphic and performing art” (48), these live presentations centered on an artist, alternately facing the drawing matter and then facing the audience, as he quickly illustrated a figure or scene and proceeded, with a few rapid changes of line or shading, to produce a surprising alteration in the image. This standard type of entertainment is certainly one of the key influences on early animation, not only because it provided the subject matter for many films in an era that Tom Gunning has evocatively labeled “the cinema of attractions” (“Cinema” 63), but also because of the way in which it forecast the early animated film's recurrent emphasis on amazing transformations. Yet in that reaching or sketching hand, I suggest, we might see more than just a lingering trace of influence, of the transition from one sort of entertainment to another.

Almost like a pointing finger, the sketching hand directs our attention to a boundary—or several boundaries—crucial to the emergence of the animated film, almost as if it were tracing the form's early history. Most obviously that hand calls our attention to a fundamental media border, that between the live lecture presentation from which these works emerged and the filmed entertainment that was already bidding to take the place of such vaudeville-style amusements. It also designates what we might term a generic border, one separating a live-action cinema that had first been unveiled to the public around 1895 and that had quickly developed a focus on narrative and a set of common practices for producing narrative, and a world of animated images that was still developing its own conventions and audience appeal, and for both of which it drew heavily on other media, such as the newspaper comic strip and magazine cartoon. Moreover, the sketching hand signals a fundamental aesthetic distinction, that between a three-dimensional world that was captured in the live-action portion of the presentation and a flat, two-dimensional one that often recalled those newspaper and magazine entries. It is in the crossing—or in some cases, the intentional blurring—of these different borders that our various standard histories of animation have essentially measured out the historical emergence of the form.

But all these boundaries or borders share a more fundamental importance for the films in this vein, since they also point up some key dynamics of the form. All these early animated efforts “draw” much of their capital from the nature of that liminal play they depict, that is, from their filmmakers’ ability to violate or play at and with those borders. As an example we might consider a work that is still thoroughly informed by the lightning sketch model, is widely available, and is often cited today, J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing (1900).¹ This film produces its humorous effects through the depicted artist's ability to “enchant” drawn material so that it seemingly—and in lightninglike fashion—turns into real objects that can then be grasped and used by the artist who has materialized them (Blackton himself). Thus, a sketched bottle of wine and a glass, thanks to stop-motion effects, become a real bottle and glass in Blackton's hands, and the expression on the face of a man he has also drawn instantly changes to one of displeasure when the sketched material disappears from the paper world he occupies. Blackton then repeats the process with a hat and cigar, drawing both, liberating them from the canvas via stop-motion, demonstrating his use of these now three-dimensional objects, and then returning them to the sketchpad, again producing a changed expression on the face of his drawn man, who is now visibly pleased with what he has. It is a sense of pleasure, we might assume, that the film's viewers shared at Blackton's ability not only to enter into or affect that sketched world, but also to draw out from it practically anything he might desire, even a recognizably human response from a figure he has manifestly created. This bringing drawings to life that we find in The Enchanted Drawing, as well as such similar Blackton efforts as Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906) and Lightning Sketches (1907), is not, strictly speaking, true animation, but it does point to both a common impulse and a common satisfaction to be found in these proto-animation efforts—that found in the power of transformation and in the very plastic nature of the world these films envision.

With a nod to the prevalence of such scenes of drawing, inking, or demonstrating, Crafton in his landmark history of early animation argues that they also signal one of the central characteristics of the form throughout its first three decades. They are all signs, he says, of a common pattern, as I noted in the introduction, of “self-figuration, the tendency of the filmmaker to interject himself into his film,” which seemed to give the animator a “special status”—as “a demigod, a purveyor of life itself” (11). And he ties the attraction of these initial efforts directly to this reflexive dimension, suggesting that audiences found a very real appeal not just in the rather primitive illusion of life that the animated film put on display, but also in their “vicarious participation in the ritual of incarnation” (12), in their own implied figuration. It is an appealing argument, especially insofar as it can help us better appreciate that still-formative relationship between viewers and filmmakers that was evolving in the early cinema. Moreover, it dovetails with Michael O'Pray's theory that one of the key pleasures we viewers derive from animation lies in its “objectification of our own desire for omnipotence” or control (200). We might remember, however, that Crafton's interpretation depends on a relatively few surviving films, those that, as he notes, managed to escape the prevailing attitude that animated films were “better suited for the dustbin than for any other repository” (4); and, too, it is an explanation that ultimately calls for some amendment or expansion that can easily be found if only we follow those pointing hands of the lightning sketchers.

This recurrent image of figuration not only frames the artist in the context of his animation; it also underscores the relationship between the real and animated worlds. It points up all that is out there—or, to be more precise, all that is in there, in the world of animating space. On the one hand, it hints at a kind of mise-en-abyme, at the potential for an almost infinite movement within the frame, as frames themselves become fluid or movable (as we see in a work like Emile Cohl's La retapeur de cervelles, 1911), and as a single point or line can quite literally become the starting point for all sorts of new and surprising images (as happens in Cohl's Fantasmagorie, 1908). But on the other, it also points up the difficulty of that movement within, as these other planes of action simply do not resemble our world and seem bound by different rules—to be, as Cohl might have put it, phantasmagorical. If at the end of his famous Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) the artist and presenter Winsor McCay seems to enter the frame of his drawn world to ride off on his “pet” dinosaur's back, it is a feat he accomplishes, as we see on close inspection, only by fashioning a cartoon figure of himself, that is, by willing himself into this other space and becoming an image of the same nature as his creation Gertie. And yet that moment of entry is certainly one of the most effective parts of the film, an unexpected “topper” for all the other tricks Gertie has done and a hint of the attraction that inheres in the deep—and still unexplored—space of the frame.

This ability to move within represents a very fundamental appeal of animation, yet it is also of another sort than just the figurative. It speaks to a new sense of space—and of the individual's experience of space, even of trying to control space—that, as I noted in the introduction, was characteristic of the modern world and that was finding representation across the arts in this period, although most notably in architecture, the graphic arts, and especially film, where the camera was readily demonstrating how easily we might construct—or reconstruct—reality, and where those constructions seemed to point to a correlative possibility for reshaping or controlling our own world. On the one hand, that movement within signals an increasing effort in early animation at imitating live-action cinema, at following the path that Andre Bazin has famously staked out as the movies’ own, that of a “complete illusion of life” (22). But on the other, it also suggests a rather uncanny sense of space that, as Anthony Vidler has argued, was emerging in late modernist culture and that would find a new means of expression in the novel realms of animation. For that uncanny effect, Vidler notes, “destabilizes traditional notions of center and periphery” (Architectural 10), causing us to reassess our normal sense of boundaries, much as do those drawing, gesturing, pointing hands of the lightning sketchers.

It is to the various strategies at revisioning space—a space that could be used to stage and mobilize the sort of possibilities Vidler describes, as well as to further that Bazinian myth—that I turn here to set the stage for our more detailed case studies of the relationship between those figural and spatial forces, or what we might more simply term the figural-spatial dynamics of the form. The early history of animation demonstrates a great many different approaches to animating space, as practitioners set about exploring both the broad parameters of their art and a dominant direction that it would take. Though the drawn mode rather quickly assumed a primary position in the world of animation, its own approach to spatial matters had to be worked out over time, particularly as animators sorted out the relationship of their essentially two-dimensional art to the still developing patterns and conventions of live-action cinema, and as their own methods, such as the use of multiple cels, became standardized. At the same time, other techniques—some further emphasizing that two-dimensional character and others moving in quite the opposite direction, grounding themselves in a pointedly three-dimensional world—appeared. Thus, early cinematic animation encompassed not only the hybrid efforts that recall the lightning sketch, but also conventionally drawn films, silhouette films, doll and puppet films, Claymation, and the like. All could stake a claim as a type of animation thanks to their common concern with giving life to things, that is, with animating space, but all are equally interesting for their different strategies at constructing or appropriating an animating space, for fashioning a world that, as those sketching hands suggest, invites us in. And more fundamentally, all include the two most basic factors that Charles Solomon has described as fundamental to “a workable definition of animation: (1) the imagery is recorded frame-by-frame and (2) the illusion of motion is created, rather than recorded” (10).

One approach to opening the door into the animated world is very similar to the tactic of live-action cinema, that is, the creation of a mise-en-scéne that furthers the illusion of depth. Among the most effective visual tactics that had become commonplace even in early live-action film were such effects as layering, directed motion, emphasis on a vanishing point, lighting and shadow effects, and the use of oblique lines to direct the eye into the scene. Some early cartoons, in part because they were based on comic strips or magazine cartoons that employed elaborate visual styles, naturally drew on these established techniques. As Norman Klein observes, they were often viewed as “an expansion of the illustrated or printed page” (5), as we see with Winsor McCay's efforts that recall his work as a comic-strip artist for the New York Evening Telegram and Herald. Because of the immense labor that was involved, though, McCay, who did almost all the drawing himself, was able to produce relatively few animated films in his career. Given the work involved in doing shading, detailed backgrounds, and complex line schemes, most others only sketchily employed these techniques, opting instead for a more streamlined graphic style that could be adapted to a quickly evolving assembly-line approach to cartooning.² In the various Phables cartoons (1916) that he illustrated, for example, another former cartoonist and key pioneer of the form, Raoul Barre, seldom provides backgrounds for the action, and a lack of perspective lines makes the action seem to be happening in an almost abstract space.

Like several other companies, William Randolph Hearst's International Film Service produced and distributed a number of series that capitalized on the various comic strips that his newspapers were already syndicating, including Tom E. Powers's Phat Phables series (on which Barré worked), George Herriman's Krazy Kat, and Frederick Opper's Happy Hooligan. That sort of dual development of the same property was quite natural since, as Crafton notes, “the films would publicize the comics, and vice versa, and that was good business” (178). Though the comics’ creators were seldom involved with the film adaptations of their work and the various animators who were employed—and these included some of the most noteworthy illustrators of the day, such as Leon Searl, Gregory La Cava, and Frank Moser—pointedly tried to imitate their styles, it was always within the constraints imposed by the rapidly evolving “industrialization of the cartoon” (Crafton 162) and thus, in effect, by certain “house” practices. The result was, in the period 1916-1918, a cartoon style that both recalled those comic-strip antecedents and stood as testimony to the new fascination with, and need for, speed and efficiency in both production and content. Graphic complexity was generally deemphasized, and the line became the governing principle in what Norman Klein has termed “the typographical cartoon” (5) of this era.

As an especially noteworthy example of that adapted style—one that emphasized the figural while offering a context that still suggested the world of the comics—we might briefly consider one of the many newspaper cartoonists who turned his attention to film animation in these early days of cinema. Earl Hurd, who had drawn the comic strips Trials of Elder Mouse (1911-1915) and Brick Bodkin's Pa (1912), created a series of Bobby Bumps cartoons, first for Universal and then for Bray Productions, the dominant American animation studio from 1914 to 1920. In moving into the animation field, Hurd developed several new techniques that eventually became standard practices for cartoons, while also providing new means for promoting their sense of depth. He used a single background sketched on paper that was then overlaid with characters drawn on a transparent medium—celluloid, or cels, as they came to be known. This technique not only increased efficiency, since only the image produced on each cel would have to be redrawn for every element of a character's motion, but also produced an effective visual separation of characters and backgrounds. And those effects would only be enhanced by adding other cels, which made it possible to do multiple layers of animation, thereby suggesting a more complex, indeed more natural, world. The effect of that approach shows up repeatedly in the composition of many of his Bobby Bumps efforts. For not only are his scenes highly detailed and marked by a sense of perspective that leads the eye into the frame, but they also typically make effective use of offscreen and layered spaces—in effect, of a newly conventionalized three-dimensionality that was further empowered by those technical developments he had brought to the industry-leading Bray studio.³

To illustrate these techniques, we might consider a relatively early entry in this series, Bobby Bumps Starts a Lodge (1916). In this film young Bobby enters pulling a rope attached to something offscreen, a stubborn goat, we learn, when it suddenly appears and butts Bobby into an adjoining yard, into another offscreen space, but this one hidden by a foreground fence. Though this play of offscreen and onscreen space is basically horizontal, Hurd resorts to a diagonal plan for the subsequent scene in which Bobby tries to share his pain by getting the goat to similarly butt a black friend: Bobby places the goat in the frame's background, arranges his intended victim in the foreground at an angle, and then sets the goat running on a diagonal, only to have his friend foil the trick by turning at the last moment. When Bobby then chases his friend, the action again shifts to conventional horizontal movement, but Hurd adds a layering effect by arranging various pieces of foreground scenery—shrubs and rocks—in the space between the camera and the running boys, and the entire chase is done with a “tracking” camera to further suggest movement within real space. An added spatial effect occurs when the black boy finds himself up a tree and trapped there by a bear. Again, most of this scene is played out in a conventionally horizontal manner (Bobby on the left and his friend, the tree, and the bear on the right side of the frame), but Hurd inserts an inventive high-angle shot as Bobby bargains to help the other boy. Not simply a closer shot, it is one in which the point of view shifts to a diagonal on the previous action while also looking down, as if we have actually moved—tracked in and right while craning up over the treed boy's shoulder—within the previous scene. That vantage allows Hurd to maintain the visual relationship between the two boys as they bargain, while also dramatically linking the viewers to the precariously positioned boy in the tree and thus aligning not only our point of view but also our sympathies with the little black boy. In this short film, then, Hurd manages to deploy an impressive array of visual techniques. Though some of these techniques could be found as well in both comic strips and the live-action cinema, they also point to a desire to capitalize on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Early Animation: Of Figures and Spaces
• 2. Winsor Mccay'S Warped Spaces
• 3. The Stereoscopic Mickey
• 4. The Double Space of the Fleischer Films
• 5. Ub Iwerks'S (Multi)Plain Cinema
• 6. Looking in on Life: Disney's Real Spaces
• 7. What's Up—and Down—Doc? Warner Bros., Chuck Jones, and Abstract Space
• 8. Toontown Spaces and the New Hybrid World
• 9. The Pixar Reality: Digital Space and Beyond
• 10. Digital Effects Animation and the New Hybrid Cinema
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index