Reading Week 6
OTHER DEVELOPMENTS - ANIMATION
ANIMATION
The Animated Film Most fiction and documentary films photograph people and objects in full-sized,
three dimensional spaces. As we have seen, the standard shooting speed for such live-action filmmaking
is typically 24 frames per second. “Animation is not a genre, it’s a medium. And it can express any genre.
I think people often sell it short. But ‘because it’s animated, it must be for kids.’ You can’t name another
medium where people do.” — Brad Bird, director, The Incredibles Animated films are distinguished from
live-action ones by the unusual kinds of work done at the production stage. Instead of continuously
filming an ongoing action in real time, animators create a series of images by shooting one frame at a
time. Between the exposure of each frame, the animator changes the subject being photographed. Daffy
Duck does not exist to be filmed, but a carefully planned and executed series of slightly different
drawings of Daffy can be filmed as single frames. When projected, the images create illusory motion
comparable to that of live-action filmmaking. Anything in the world—or indeed the universe—that the
filmmaker can manipulate can be animated by means of two-dimensional drawings, three-dimensional
objects, or digital information stored in a computer. Because animation is the counterpart to live action,
any sort of film that can be filmed live can be made using animation. There are animated fiction films,
both short and feature-length. There can also be animated documentaries, usually instructional ones.
Animation provides a convenient way of showing things that are normally not visible, such as the internal
workings of machines or the extremely slow changes of geological formations. Ari Folman took this idea
further in his documentary Waltz with Bashir. After interviewing Israeli army veterans, he sought to
represent their dreams and recollections in hallucinatory animated imagery. A recurring memory image in
Waltz with Bashir shows soldiers wading toward an eerily beautiful bombardment. With its potential for
distortion and pure design, animation lends itself readily to experimental filmmaking as well. Many
classic experimental animated films employ either abstract or associational form. For example, both
Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren made films by choosing a piece of music and arranging abstract
shapes to move in rhythm to the sound track. There are several distinct types of animation. The most
familiar is drawn animation. From almost the start of cinema, animators drew and photographed long
series of cartoon images. At first, they drew on paper, but copying the entire image, including the setting,
over and over proved too time-consuming. During the 1910s, studio animators introduced clear
rectangular sheets of celluloid, nicknamed cels. Characters and objects could be drawn on different cels,
and these could then be layered like a sandwich on top of an opaque painted setting. The whole stack of
cels would then be photographed. New cels showing the characters and objects in slightly different
positions could then be placed over the same background, creating the illusion of movement The cel
process allowed animators to save time and to split up the labor among assembly lines of people doing
drawing, coloring, photography, and other jobs. The most famous cartoon shorts made during the 1930s
to the 1950s were made with cels. Warner Bros. created characters such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and
Tweety Bird; Paramount had Betty Boop and Popeye; Disney made both shorts (Mickey Mouse, Pluto,
Goofy) and, beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1937, feature-length cartoons. Cel
animation continued well into the 1990s, with big-budget studio cartoons employing full animation. This
approach renders figures in fine detail and supplies them with tiny, nonrepetitive movements. Cheaper
productions use limited animation, with only small sections of the image moving from frame to frame.
Limited animation is mainly used on television, although Japanese theatrical features exploited it to
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create flat, poster like images. Some independent animators have continued to draw on paper. Robert
Breer, for example, uses ordinary white index cards for his witty, quasi-abstract animated films. . Cels
and drawings are photographed, but an animator can work without a camera as well. He or she can draw
directly on the film, scratch on it, and attach flat objects to it. Stan Brakhage taped moths’ wings to film
stock in order to create Mothlight. Another type of animation that works with two-dimensional images
involves cut-outs. Sometimes filmmakers make flat puppets with movable joints. Lotte Reiniger
specialized in lighting her cut-outs in silhouette to create delicate, intricate fairy tales. Animators can also
manipulate cut-out images frame by frame to create moving collages; A very simple form of cutout
animation involves combining flat shapes of paper or other materials to create pictures or patterns. The
rudimentary shapes and unshaded colors of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (as well as the television
series from which it derives) flaunt deliberately crude cut-out animation. Three-dimensional objects can
also be shifted and twisted frame by frame to create apparent movement. Animation of objects falls into
three closely related categories: clay, model, and pixillation. Clay animation, often termed claymation,
sometimes actually does involve modeling clay. But more often, Plasticine is used, since it is less messy
and is available in a wider range of colors. Sculptors create objects and characters of Plasticine, and the
animator then presses the flexible material to change it slightly between exposures. “Wallace and
Gromit” series contain extraordinarily complex lighting and camera movement. One of the most famous
feature-length puppet films of recent years is Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas. In The
Nightmare Before Christmas, an attempt to combine Halloween and Christmas ends disastrously.
Pixillation is a term applied to frame-by-frame movement of people and ordinary objects. For example, in
1908, Arthur Melbourne-Cooper animated toys in a miniature set to create dense layers of movement in
Dreams of Toyland. Although actors ordinarily move freely and are filmed in real time, occasionally an
animator pixillates them. That is, the actor freezes in a pose for the exposure of one frame, then moves
slightly and freezes again for another frame, and so on. The result is a jerky, unnatural motion quite
different from ordinary acting. Computer imaging has revolutionized animation. On a mundane level, the
computer can perform the repetitive task of making the many slightly altered images needed to give a
sense of movement. On a creative level, software can be devised that enables filmmakers to create images
of things that could not be filmed in the real world. The earliest computer animation depended on
intensive hand labor and could not create convincing three-dimensional compositions. James Whitney
used analog computer to generate the elaborate and precise abstract patterns for his Lapis. It was not until
the 1980s that computer technology advanced far enough to be used extensively in feature production.
Graphic manipulation of frame-by-frame images requires enormous amounts of computer memory, and
the first feature film to include computer animation, Disney’s TRON (1982), contained only 15 minutes
of partially computer-generated imagery out of its running length of 96 minutes. In the 1990s, George
Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic, Steve Jobs’s Pixar Animation, and other firms developed banks of
powerful computers and complex programs for creating animated imagery. Images generated on
computers are transferred to film either by filming directly off a highresolution monitor or by using a
laser to imprint individual pixels of the images onto each frame. In 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story, the first
animated feature created entirely via computer, was released through Disney. It presented an illusion of a
three-dimensional world peopled by figures that somewhat resembled Plasticine models. By 2000, Pixar’s
programs had improved computer animation’s ability to render surface textures like fur, as demonstrated
in Monsters, Inc.
Computer animation can also be used to simulate the look of traditional cel animation. Working on a
computer can make the processes of painting colors onto the cel or of joining the various layers of the
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image more efficient and consistent. For example, Japan’s master cel animator Hayao Miyazaki adopted
computer techniques for some images of his 1997 film Princess Mononoke. Miyazaki used morphing,
multilayer compositing, and painting for about 100 of the film’s total of around 1600 shots, yet the
difference from traditional cel animation is virtually undetectable on the screen In Princess Mononoke,
five portions of the image (the grass and forest, the path and motion lines, the body of the Demon God,
the shading of the Demon God, and Ashitaka riding away) were joined by computer, giving smoother,
more complex motions than regular cel animation could achieve. In 1989, James Cameron’s thriller The
Abyss popularized computer animation in live-action features by creating a shimmering water creature.
Since then, computer animation has created dinosaurs for Jurassic Park, and the realistic, humanlike
creature Gollum in The Lord of the Rings
Disney and Warner Bros. were rivals. Disney animators had far greater resources at their disposal, and
their animation was more elaborate and detailed than the simpler style of the Warner product. Warner
cartoonists, despite their limited budgets, fought back by exploiting the comic fantasy possible in
animated films and playing with the medium in imaginative ways. In Warner Bros. cartoons, characters
often spoke to the audience or referred to the animators and studio executives. For example, the Warner
unit’s producer Leon Schlesinger appeared in You Ought to Be in Pictures, letting Porky Pig out of his
contract so that he could try to move up to live-action features. The tone of the Warner cartoons
distinguished them sharply from the Disney product. The action was faster and more violent. The main
characters, such as Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, were wisecracking cynics rather than innocent altruists
like Mickey Mouse. The Warner animators tried many experiments over the years, but perhaps none was
so extreme as Duck Amuck, directed by Charles M. (Chuck) Jones in 1953. It is now recognized as one of
the masterpieces of American animation. Although it was made within the Hollywood system and uses
narrative form, it has an experimental feel because it asks the audience to take part in an exploration of
techniques of cel animation. As the film begins, it seems to be a swashbuckler of the sort Daffy Duck had
appeared in before, such as The Scarlet Pumpernickel (1950)—itself a parody of one of Errol Flynn’s
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