Animation in the Post-Industrial Era
The Oxford History of World Cinema, 1996
Animation in the Post-Industrial Era
Dr. William Moritz
By 1960 cartoon shorts were no longer screened as part of the regular program in cinemas, and studio animation units were closed or producing exclusively for television. For independent animators the major distribution focus became the film festival, which could make films known to an international audience of entrepreneurs and connoisseurs who in turn might arrange for them to be screened on television, or in cinemas as part of package programs. At first animation had to vie with live-action features at general film festivals like Cannes or Venice, but after the creation of ASIFA (The International Association for Animated Film) in 1960, festivals specializing in animation began in Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa, Hiroshima and a number of other locations, allowing independent animators from around the world to meet yearly and share their films.
Experimental Animators
A small number of experimental animators had already enjoyed an alternative community for some decades, as a part of experimental art film. The presence of Oskar Fischinger in Los Angeles encouraged the brothers John and James Whitney to turn from music and painting to the creation of abstract animation, with hard-edged geometric imagery synchronized to astonishing “electronic” music drawn directly on the film strip by a series of finely-calibrated pendulums (Five Film Exercises, 1943-44). In 1946, the San Francisco Museum of Art held the first of some dozen Art in Cinema festivals which screened classic avant-garde films of the 1920s (Buí±uel, Man Ray, Cocteau) beside new works by Maya Deren, Fischinger, and the Whitneys. This encouraged two other young painters, Jordan Belson and Harry Smith, to take up abstract animation; Belson favored dynamic polymorphous color manifestations (Allures, 1961; Samadhi, 1967; Light, 1973) while Smith tended toward geometric forms, at first hand-painted on the film strip (Film No. 1 and 2, 1947-49) then later composed by the superimposition of pre-animated melodic units in a live, multiple-projector performance which was then refilmed from the screen (Film No. 7, 1951).
Fischinger, James Whitney, Belson and Smith were all devoted to mystical, spiritual ideals. Smith combined his abstract imagery with sacred representational figures cut out from 19th-century lithographs and animated in intricate synchronization to music of Thelonius Monk and Dizzy Gillespie (Film No. 10 and No. 11, 1955). While these four artists formed the core of a “California School of Color Music”, by 1957 Art in Cinema festivals had shown abstract films by 17 other west coast and 9 east coast artists. The 1949 Experimental Film Festival in Brussels not only awarded Fischinger the Grand Prize, but also recognized the Whitney brothers’ Film Exercises as best use of sound. After the Second World War, John Whitney turned more to technological experimentation and became a pioneer of computer graphics, while James Whitney (like Jordan Belson) continued producing hand-made animations of great beauty and spiritual grandeur (Yantra, 1955; Lapis, 1963; Wu Ming, 1976; Kang Jing Xiang, 1982).
Other abstract animation artists flourished in various locations. The New Zealander Len Lye created the 1928 Tusalava (drawings and cut-outs) in London and the 1958 Free Radicals (scratched directly on black film) in New York. He made ten other abstract films in between, while working for the British GPO unit (Colour Box painted on film in 1935, and Trade Tattoo, optically printed live action and abstraction together, 1937) or supporting himself with painting, sculpture and commercials. In Ohio and New York, painter Dwinell Grant made nine abstract films (including Themis, 1940; Stereoscopic Composition, 1945; Composition 6 “Dream Fantasies”, 1985) while supporting himself by designing for the theatre and animating medical films. Hy Hirsh lived off still photography while making clever oscilloscope patterns synchronize with infectious Caribbean and African music (the 3-D Come Closer, 1952). He then turned to spectacular optical printing of live-action and animated footage (as Lye had done in Trade Tattoo), for Gyromorphosis and Autumn Spectrum (1958), Scratch Pad (1960), and La couleur de la forme (1961).
This tradition of abstract animation continues unbroken to the present, with artists like Jules Engel who (in addition to commercial work at Disney, UPA, and an Academy Award nomination for the 1963 Icarus Montgolfier Wright) has created some thirty abstract animations. These range from refined computer graphics (Silence, 1968) to dynamic studies in kineticism (Rumble, 1975) and hand-drawn parallels to his canvas paintings (Villa Rospigliosi, 1988), and are all infused with a fine conceptual wit. Computer artists Larry Cuba (Two Space, 1978) and David Brody (Beethoven Machinery, 1989) control the complex potential of their technology to produce a subtle visual music, while artists like Sara Petty (Preludes in Magical Time, 1987) and Dennis Pies (Luma Nocturna, 1974) continue to render thousands of delicate drawings for each film.
The British artist Robert Darroll (now resident in Germany) created, by intricate layers of hand-painted images, a trilogy of films Lung (Dragon, 1985), Feng Huang (Phoenix, 1987) and Stone Lion (1990), based on his experience with Korean Buddhism, and subsequently made Memb (1992), which uses the computer’s warping facility to give an intense impression of an abstract cosmos in a time/space flux. In a 1988 statement, Darroll spoke for many of these abstract animators:
I am not interested in Film as visual literature, or trying to communicate other information that could better be expressed in words. I am interested in Film as a visual process which can evoke via physical awareness, also a metaphysical awareness. During concentrated perception, each pictorial area becomes a closed system which indicates the possibilities of seeing, experiencing, understanding the way in which things exist – to understand what is experienced, rather than merely experiencing what is already understood.
Norman McLaren enjoyed the greatest career of any of these experimental animators. In 1933, as an art student, he drew an abstraction directly on the film-strip. John Grierson hired him to work at the GPO film unit in London, and there he did such diverse things as shooting a documentary film about the Spanish Civil War and drawing directly on film a Surrealist ad for air mail, Love on the Wing (1939). A pacifist, he fled to America in 1939, first to New York (where he animated a film for Mary Ellen Bute, Spook Sport, 1940), then to Canada, where he would spend the rest of his life at the National Film Board. He made 42 films for NFB, ranging from the education to the political, from the representational to the abstract.
Only 8 of these films are specific “propaganda” films – and one of these, the charming 1942 drawn-on-film Hen Hop, still screens as entertainment, long after the “buy war bonds” message became obsolete. Six other “educational” films include a documentary about Parker and Alexeieff’s Pinscreen, and Rhythmetic (1956) and Canon (1964), two films of such wit that they also continue to entertain, while teaching subliminally about mathematics and musical structure. Five illustrate Canadian folk songs (the 1944 C’est l’aviron, with its dynamic canoe “zooming” through the landscape, is particularly impressive), and five others, like the Surrealist Phantasy (1952), are representational art films. Three films depict ballet from different perspectives: the 1967 Pas de Deux analyzing movement, by optically printing the many stages of a gesture together in the same image, the 1972 Ballet Adagio slowing down the movement, and the 1983 Narcissus creating a magical filmic world to express the mythic dance. Four of McLaren’s NFB films might be categorized as “political”: the Oscar-winning Neighbors (1952) showing the absurdity of “pixillated” (live actors shot single-frame) neighbors’ escalating warfare; the scratched-on-black-film Blinkety Blank (1955) celebrating diversity; and A Chairy Tale (1957), recommending equality for servants, as does Opening Speech (1960).
The largest group of McLaren’s NFB films is his 11 abstract films, which range from the folksy drawn-on-film Fiddle-de-dee (1947), the superb Abstract Expressionism with Oscar Peterson’s jazz Begone Dull Care (1949), sensuous oscilloscope patterns of the 3-D Around is Around (1951), the structural trilogy Lines Vertical, Lines Horizontal and Mosaic, and his summation Synchromy (1971), for which he composed a drawn soundtrack and used the actual sound elements logically deployed across the screen as the picture. McLaren’s masterful achievements were made possible by the security of steady financial support from the NFB over 45 year, and also the continuing collaboration of his co-workers – including Guy Glover, Evelyn Lambart, and Grant Munro.
Animation in Eastern Europe
Government support systems like Canada’s NFB also sustained flourishing animation studios in many of the new socialist republics of eastern Europe. In Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, Karel Zeman and Jirí Trnka distinguished themselves as puppet and cartoon animators. Zeman advanced from conventional puppets to a new level of artistry with his 1948 Inspirace (“Inspiration”), in which he follows the reverie of a (live-action) glass-blower who imagines his glass creations coming to life. The film gathers a great deal of its magic from the careful conceptual balance in the imagery, between the fluid rain on the window and the mirror water in “glass-land”, between the fragile rigidity of crystal and the astonishing flexibility of the dozens of moving glass figures, including a racing chariot pulled by a team of horses. Zeman made ten features, including four children’s stories (Poklad Ptaciho ostrova, “The Treasure of Bird Island”, 1952), and six which combine live actors with animated models and drawings, often in the style of old engraved book illustrations, which allowed live actors to perform the “science fantasy” of dinosaur hunting (Cesta do praveku, “Prehistoric Journey”, 1954).
Jirí Trnka worked as puppeteer and book illustrator before 1945 when he began making animated films with five sophisticated cartoons. His 16 subsequent puppet films show increasing subtlety and brilliance: from the hilarious spoof of Westerns írie Prérie (Song of the Prairie, 1949), to the feature-length version of the popular Czech satirical novel The Good Soldier Schweik (Osudy Dobrého vojí¡ka Svejka, 1954); from the lovely feature-length textless version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské, 1959), to the bitter satire of Boccacio’s Archandel Gabriel a Paní Husa (The Archangel Gabriel and Mrs. Goose, 1964); and his final masterpiece, Ruka (“The Hand,” 1965) which protests all forms of totalitarianism through the conceptual allegory of a giant (live-action) Hand that tries to force a puppet potter to make only images of Hands instead of flower pots.
Czech animation flourished with dozens of artists producing hundreds of films; including Hermína Tyrloví¡’s children’s puppet fables, Eduard Hofman’s feature Stvoreni sveta (“The Creation of the World”, 1957), and Bretislav Pojar (who began as Trnka’s assistant, won the grand Prix at the first Annecy Festival in 1960 for his Lev a písnicka (“The Lion and the Song”), and later worked in Canada at the NFB). Many of the lesser-known Czech films are superb, e.g. Jana Marglova’s chilling 1966 Genesis (in which dolls are manufactured only to be beheaded), or Lubomír Benes’ beautiful 1980 Král a skrítek (“The King and the Gnome”), which updates the fable of Midas’ golden touch into an environmental parable. The animator Vlasta Pospísiloví¡ collaborated on two fine films in 1982: Jirí Barta’s Zanikly svet rukavic (“The Extinct World of Gloves”, which nods ironically to Trnka’s Ruka in its excavation of a era in which elegant gloved hands rule lush decor) and Jan Svankmajer’s Moznosti Dialogu (“Dimensions of Dialogue”, which won grand prizes at both Berlin and Annecy).
Svankmajer, a graphic artist as well as puppeteer, belongs to a living Czech surrealist tradition, and each of his 28 films (including several MTV video clips) balances a dream-like absurdity, menace, and eroticism in the true spirit of Surrealism. His experience with the famous Laterna Magika theatre in Prague (where live actors perform with puppets, projected animation and other “special effects”) inspired him to employ mixtures of live action with all sorts of animation from drawn and puppet to clay and pixillated objects. Beginning with his first film in 1964, almost every one of his animations won major festival prizes. The 1971 Jabberwocky consists primarily of genuine Victorian toys interacting in combinations that suggest the cruelty and sexuality inherent in Lewis Carroll’s classic tales. He elaborated this in the eerie feature-length 1988 Alice, which follows a live-action Alice through an animated land of wonders rather starker than Carroll may have intended. The breathtaking masterpiece Moznosti dialogu presents three episodes: a confrontation between two heads composed alternatively of food, tools, weapons, and other contrasting objects which can devour and absorb each other; a romantic encounter between two clay figures who melt into one another; and an ironic dysfunction between two officials who offer proposals and challenges as objects on their tongues – and effect such excruciating misunderstandings as sticking a tongue in a pencil sharpener. His 1994 feature Faust updates Goethe to post-Cold-War Europe, again mixing a live-action hero with animated marvels.
Svankmajer’s Surrealism has had a profound influence on other animators, especially the American twins Stephen and Timothy Quay, who attended the Royal College of Art in London, and have done most of their animation in Britain, supported by Keith Griffiths at the British Film Institute and by Channel Four Television. Their 1984 The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer preceded their moody masterpiece Street of Crocodiles, which takes motifs from the memoirs of Polish artist Bruno Schulz (killed by the Nazis in 1942), such as the eroticism of tailor’s dummies or the sinister decay of buildings in the old quarters of town, weaving them into an atmospheric, mysterious pageant of seamstresses sewing meat and screws releasing themselves from bondage.
Other eastern European countries maintained a tradition parallel to (if not as rich as) the Czech: Ion Popescu-Gopo in Romania (Scurta istorie, “Brief History”, 1957); Marcell Jankovics (Sisyphus, 1974) and Ferenc Rí³fusz (A Bogar, “The Bug”, 1980) in Hungary; the “Zagreb School” of cartoonists in Croatia – Dusan Vukotic’s 1961 Surogat becoming the first foreign cartoon to win an Oscar – and busy studios in Bulgaria. Only Poland, however, has left a legacy as original and complete as the Czech, with three geniuses, Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica (who fled to France and Germany after their brilliant collaboration Dom (“Home”, 1957) won a grand prize at Brussels), and Witold Giersz.
Dom depicts the fantasies of a woman waiting at home in a series of episodes composed with different techniques: a pixillated wig roams a kitchen devouring food, a live-action woman makes love to a male mannequin who disintegrates beneath her passion, old postcards and scientific diagrams are collaged in cut-outs, and live-action gestures repeat (through optical printing) until they reach a pitch of absurdity. Borowczyk showed similar virtuosity in the eight films he made in France, with pixillated objects (Renaissance, 1963) and cut-out graphics (the haunting Jeux des anges, “Games of Angels”, 1965, an elegy for the victims of Auschwitz), before turning to live-action features. Lenica used cut-outs in his own ten films, including the classics Labyrinth (1962), Rhinoceros (after Ionesco, 1963) and A (1964), as well as two features, Adam II (1969) and Ubu Roi (1977).
After five conventional films, Witold Giersz turned to painting on glass as his primary animation medium – beginning with the 1960 Maly Western (“Little Western”). He continued this technique with Czerwone i czarne (“Red and Black”, 1963), in which the painted characters in a bullfight take over the animation process by turning the camera on the filmmakers, and his two masterpieces Kon (“Horse”, 1967) and Pozar (“Fire”, 1975) in which the textures of brushstrokes become an integral part of nature’s processes.
The Olympiad: Animation Around the World
At the time of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, a large international jury was convened for an Animation Olympiad. The jury chose Yuri Norstein’s Tale of Tales, (Skazka Skazok, 1979) as the greatest animation film of all time – a well-deserved and probably enduring distinction. The film’s protagonist, a little wolf of Russian folklore and also the animator’s alter ego, accepts the burden of memory – in sequences recalling the Romantic era of Pushkin, the World Wars and childhood loss of innocence – and so asserts the role of the artist in keeping the past alive. Norstein’s wife Francesca created the cut-out characters, which Yuri animates with grace, expressive nuance and vigor. Another prize-winning animation (Grand Prix, Zagreb 1988), the Estonian Priit Pärn’s Eine Murul (“Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, made in 1983 but suppressed until 1986), also focuses on the fate of the artist in society. It tells the tale of a Picasso character who is hounded by bureaucrats until a tank runs over his arm, transforming it into a wing. His story is interwoven with the lives of four people who suffer severe trials and humiliations in order to experience a peaceful picnic, which coalesces for an instant into the Manet painting of a century before. Pärn’s stylized figures drawn with thin uneven lines evoke expressionistic grotesqueries – particularly emphasized not only by the contrast with Manet, but also, for a moment in which one of the protagonists dreams of being a world-class playboy, with a lush air-brushed scene of almost photographic realism.
Pärn’s contorted graphic style influenced the Russian Igor Kovalyov in his films Ego Zhena Kurica (“His Wife the Hen”, 1990) and Andrei Svislotsky (1992), but, though Kovalyov also protests against the bureaucratic nightmare, his weird Surrealism contrasts sharply with Pärn’s ultimately poetic Realism. Ironically, Kovalyov has ended up in the United States making realist television series cartoons like Rugrats. The gentle nuances of Norstein’s cut-outs and the sharp stylization of Pärn and Kovalyov both contrast with the romantic films of Alexander Petrov – Korova (“The Cow”, 1989) and Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992) – which are painted on glass with great skill and detail.
Caroline Leaf’s The Street (1976), also painted on glass, took second place in the Olympiad of Animation, as well as an Oscar nomination and the Grand Prix at Ottawa. Its sensitive illustration of a story by Canadian author Mordecai Richler shows a boy’s viewpoint of the death of his grandmother. Other Canadian animators also produced superb work. Jacques Drouin’s Le Paysagiste (“Mindscape”, 1977) made on the Parker/Alexeieff pinscreen, and Clorinda Warny’s Premiers Jours (“Beginnings”, 1980), both NFB Productions (as was The Street), also got high placings in the Olympiad, while the animation colleges were the source of Wendy Tilby’s 1987 Tables of Content, and John Minnis’ Oscar-winning 1983 Charade. Remarkable animations have also been produced for commercial sources: the Canadian Broadcast Co. supported the remarkable animator Frédéric Back, who emigrated to Canada in 1948 at age 24. In six early films (1970-1978) Back refined and developed his technique before creating the 1981 masterpiece Crac!, which encapsulates Québí¨cois culture by following a rocking chair through generations of family and festivities until it is discarded, then “recycled” by a museum guard. Back avoids sentimentality but remains truly moving – as in Crac!‘s closing sequence when the paintings come to life and dance – partly because of his fluid graphics, drawn on frosted cels with colored pencils, allowing perfect control of delicate nuance or bold strength of design. Crac! placed sixth in the Olympiad, and won an Oscar, as did Back’s 1987 half hour The Man Who Planted Trees, illustrating Jean Giono’s ecological parable.
Independent animation flourishes in almost every country of the world, with so many memorable films that only an encyclopedic work like Bendazzi’s 500-page Cartoons can hope to give an adequate overview. Each country boasts masters – from Belgium, Raoul Servais, who produced the unforgettable mythological Harpya, with its subtle mixture of live actors and animated models (Palme d’or Cannes 1979); from Denmark, the solitary genius Lejf Marcussen whose Tonespor (“Soundtrack”, 1983) provides one of the most compelling visualizations of music, and whose magnificent Den Offentlige Rost (“The Public Voice,” 1989) zooms for 10 minutes into the hidden depths of a surrealist painting; from Italy, the delightful stylish opera renditions of Luzzati and Gianini; from Germany the austere conceptual line drawing of Raimund Krumme’s Seiltänzer (“Rope Dance,” 1986), Solveig von Kleist’s dramatic scratch-on-film Criminal Tango (1985), and the Oscar-winning puppet film Balance (1989) by the twins Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein; from Britain Nick Park’s witty Creature Comforts (1989) with its juxtaposition of immigrant voices with caged zoo animals, and also Barry Purves’ dazzling Shakespearean pageant Next (1989) and his serene, elegant Japanese Screenplay (1992); from Japan the wild, wicked Yoji Kuri, the delicate puppeteer Kihachiro Kawamoto, and the prolific Osamu Tesuka, who has made on the one hand comic-book (limited-animation) action films like Astro Boy (1963) and Kimba, Emperor of the Jungle (1965), and on the other hand experimental films like the spectacular Jumping (1984), with its flying landscapes, and Broken Down Film (1985), which spoofs traditional cartoons by applying true laws of gravity and tensile strength to standard gags.
Experimental animation flourishes, including Jane Aaron (Traveling Light, 1985) and Al Jarnow (Incidence of the Northern Moon, 1981), with their fascination for time-lapse; Christine Panushka (Sum of Them, 1984), Maureen Selwood (Odalisque, 1981), and Susan Pitt (Asparagus, 1979), who explore women’s dreams and visions; while Ruth Hayes (Reign of the Dog, 1994), George Griffin (Lineage, 1979) and Gary Schwartz (Animus, 1981) practice flip- book work as well as film-making.
A number of film artists produce personal animations as well as pursuing a career in commercial animation: thus the Belgian animator Paul Demeyer has made the highly individual Papiers animés (1977), but also, in a very different vein, the children’s film The Goose Girl (1989, for Channel Four Television); Joyce Borenstein is author of the personal Traveller’s Palm (1976) while mainly working with the NFBC; and Joan Gratz, a modeller for Claymation, won an Oscar for her individual Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase (1992). Such independent artists also collaborate on “Anijams” (reminiscent of the surrealist “exquisite corpses”), in which several animators each privately do a brief segment, linked by a medium (Candy Jam, 1987) or a soundtrack (Pink Komkommer, 1990).
Features
Other than television production (including sit-com series like The Simpsons, commercials and MTV rock videos), features are the only area in which industrial animation still flourishes, because cinemas can accomodate them. Hundred have been produced, from most countries of the world, but few of these enjoyed success, perhaps because animation needs special qualities, mood and development to maintain audience interest for more than an hour. Experimental features, like Borowczyk’s 1967 Théí¢tre de M. et Mme Kabal, with its endless domestic violence and grotesque graphics, are often too bizarre and demanding for the prolonged concentration of all but a few. However, many ‘mainstream’ animated features have also proved to have a limited audience; numerous Disney-imitation fairy-tale/animal features have had too little charm or intricacy to sustain interest (some shipwreck on the Disney convention of musical numbers) – and even Disney itself suffered from recherché banality in its 1970s features (Robin Hood might just as well have been live-action, before a new crew of younger talents began making the highly successful updated features The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and The Lion King (1994). Serious subjects, such as the 1954 Halas-Batchelor Animal Farm, based on Orwell’s political satire, constantly teeter on the expectation of cuteness that Disney films engendered. On the other hand, certain serious features – Masaki Mori’s Hadashi no Gen (“Barefoot Gen”, 1985), Isao Takahata’s Hotaru no Haka (“Tombstone for Fireflies”, 1989), and Jimmy Murakami’s When the Wind Blows (1986), all of which deal with effects of radiation from nuclear blasts – gain precisely a sympathetic perspective and access to young audiences by their use of animation.
A number of excellent animated features have triumphed over these obstacles. René Laloux’s 1973 La Planí¨te sauvage (“Fantastic Planet”) and Jean-Franí§ois Laguionie’s 1985 Le Livre de Sable (The Book of Sand, or Gwen) both employ elaborate hallucinatory cut-outs to tell ecological science-fiction parables for adults. Yellow Submarine (1968) remains a stunning document of the psychedelic revolution of the late 1960s, with its Beatles music and colorful mod graphic style. Director George Dunning brought decades of experience with experimental animation (At the NFB in the 1940s and UPA in the 1950s) to the design of the imaginative musical numbers, which also employed the talents of other distinguished animators including the Dutchman Paul Driessen (Cat’s Cradle, Spotting the Cow) and the Irish-American Bob Mitchell (Further Adventures of Uncle Sam, K-9000, A Space Oddity). The great beauty of Dunning’s 1971 Damon the Mower (with pencil-drawn images on small pieces of paper that move following the action) and surviving fragments of a proposed feature-length animation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, make us regret that this feature was left incomplete at his death in 1979.
Bruno Bozzetto’s 1976 Allegro non Troppo offers a brilliant satire on Disney’s Fantasia, with a live-action frame that mocks Disney’s high-serious treatment of Stokowski’s orchestra by making pretension and labor relations key issues, and six animated musical numbers that parody Disney’s episodes: Ravel’s Bolero is presented as a plodding evolution of dinosaurs and humans into monsters (re. Rite of Spring), and Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun as the pathetic attempts of an aging satyr to seduce pretty young nymphs (re. the perverse sexuality of Pastoral Symphony‘s nipple-less color-coded centaurettes). Bozzetto’s vivid graphics and wit triumph in these musical numbers, but also, in the Sibelius Valse Triste, he ingeniously manages to transform a big-eyed cat that might have drifted in from a kitsch greeting-card (or a Disney film) into an object of genuine sentiment when we understand its loneliness as it wanders through the ruins of a demolished apartment building where it once lived. Similarly, Bozzetto manages a chilling sequence showing live-action animator Maurizio Nichetti drop a piece of paper on which he has drawn a cartoon character; the paper catches fire and slowly burns, as the animated character vainly struggles to preserve himself from the encroaching flames. This scene as well as dozens of other gags Bozzetto devised for a “false ending” climax to Allegro have been continuously plagiarized by other independent animators
New Technologies
New technology and contemporary art trends have altered animation radically in recent decades. The rise of “Performance Art” found its echo in the animation world by artists such as Kathy Rose and Dennis Pies, who danced live with film material they had specially animated for performance. Video technology improved enough for animators to shoot frame-by-frame directly on to video (Ruth Hays’ Wanda, 1989), and many animations shot on film are now seen exclusively on video (Henry Selick’s 1989 Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions, contracted to MTV). The distinction between “film” and “video” seems more tenuous – and all festivals now screen video beside film. Pat O’Neill, for example, had done superior, more complex matting and optical printing in such films as Saugus Series (1974) which had not been accepted as animation, but when Zbigniew Rybczynski won both the Grand Prix at Annecy and the Oscar for animation with his 1980 Tango, an optically printed live-action film, the barriers against expanded-definition, new-technology animation were definitively broken.
Early experimental computer graphics were costly and time-consuming, and produced awkward and simplistic imagery. Although useful for abstract patterns, only a rare gifted artist, like Peter Foldes, could realize how to exploit with representational figures – as seen in his biting 1974 film Hunger. By the mid-1980s, improvements in imaging technology allowed artists to simulate three-dimensional shapes, but tended to provide only glossy textures in limited colors. Again, a particular artist – John Lasseter, who had studied traditional character animation at California Institute of the Arts – had the artistic imagination to couple these potentials with a story that suited them: two desk-lamps, mother and son, disagree about playing ball. Luxo Jr. (1986), won prizes at Annecy, Berlin and Hiroshima as well as gaining an Oscar nomination.
Only a few years later, scanners would allow a photographic image to be altered by computers, and suddenly the field of animated special effects took on new significance. Many special effects had been animated since the silent film days. Willis O’Brien animated models of prehistoric animals for The Lost World (1925), King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1947); Warren Newcombe painted mattes (for hundreds of films, including The Wizard of Oz, 1939) that allowed actors to appear in imaginary surroundings; Linwood Dunn optically printed actors together with models, paintings or other film strips (Citizen Kane, 1941; The Birds, 1963). In many films these effects are compiled together in scene after scene – in the Ray Harryhausen mythological Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a live-actor Neptune rises up out of the sea in slow motion to push apart two cliffs (one a matte painting, one a model) so that a model ship can sail through, narrowly missed by falling boulders (a real-time live-action film strip). The success of Kubrick’s 2001 (1968) depended heavily on the brilliance of its special effects including intricate models and slit-scan motion-control camera work, and a staff of more than 25 technicians.
George Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic company integrated all forms of animation, from models and make-up to computer effects, to provide comprehensive service not just for the Star Wars films, but also for an increasing number of science-fiction, horror, fantasy and action films dependent on dazzling visual magic to sustain them. The introduction of computer scan and morphing modification allowed frames of film to be altered (including combining two or more image elements from different sources) on computer-video, then transferred back in the enhanced form to a final film negative. This process can be used for individual special effects in pure live-action features, like Terminator 2, and as a continuous live-action/animation meld (as in the 1988 Disney feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for which the animated characters were shaded to correspond with their equivalent live-action movements while being printed together with the actors), or as an integral part of the creation of all-animated features like Aladdin (for which, for example, the magic carpet was designed as a flat object, and the computer “animated” all the curves and ripples in its pattern as it flew). Today, through the wonders of Industrial Light and Magic’s computer animation, Tom Hanks’ Forrest Gump can walk and talk with John Kennedy and John Lennon; soon Tom Hanks will be able to star in a new film of Chekhov’s Three Sisters with Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe, Tyrone Power and Laurence Olivier”¦
Bibliography
Bendazzi, Giannalberto (1994) Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation
Edera, Bruno (1977), Full Length Animated Feature Films
Halas, John (1987) Masters of Animation
Noake, Roger (1988), Animation, A Guide to Animated Film Techniques
Pilling, Jayne, ed. (1992), Women and Animation, a Compendium
Russett, Robert and Cecile Starr, (ed.) (1981) Experimental Animation, Origins of a New Art
Moritz, William. “Animation in the Post-Industrial Era.”
The Oxford History of World Cinema. Ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996, 551-558.