Concerning the Aesthetic Autonomy of Animation and Why the Short Film is Not Just a Shorter Feature

Keynote Address at Filmfest Dresden, 1995.

Dr. William Moritz

For the last thirty years, at least, the live-action feature film has been considered an artform — joining written Literature in College curricula, becoming sections of Art Museums, and celebrated in thousands of books, most of which have little to do with Art, and a great deal to do with Sociology. Since the live-action feature, by and large, is a representation of some particular social reality, critics can easily decipher the symbolism of Ingmar Bergman, dissect the melodrama of Douglas Sirk, decode the syntax of Robert Bresson, dismantle the narrative strategies of Orson Welles, or dismember Alfred Hitchcock’s intricate plots to find behavioral patterns, prejudices and assumptions, struggles between races, classes, creeds and sexes. For the Marxist, the Feminist or the Semiotician it is almost irrelevant that cinema happens to be the current vehicle, for the same proofs of conviction can be found in novels, opera, television series, MTV video clips, comic books, or any other medium with a social-based narrative structure.

Animation has been almost completely neglected by film critics, and when it has been treated, only the industrial cartoon and feature-length animations (from Snow White to the hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) have been considered, precisely because they also yield to analysis for sexism, racism, excessive violence, and audience demographics.

This neglect of Animation among film critics and historians is particularly ironic since of all cinema-based activities, Animation is the only one which should automatically be Art — since it is made by hand with artwork, its very images designed, frame-by-frame, made up entirely — rather than found or arranged from existing objects which are then recorded in real time, as in “live-action”. Of course, among the dozens of media available for animating (painting on cels, drawing on paper, slicing wax, modeling clay, shaping sand, moving models, scratching on film, re-arranging jointed silhouettes, etc.) there are also uses for real objects — in the pixillation of humans or the time-lapse of a changing environment — but here the significant difference from live-action remains the chosen, regulated pause between each exposure. In Norman McLaren’s famous definition, Animation is what happens between the frames. The animator makes 24 choices for each second of film; at any one of these points of decision everything or nothing might change, anything could happen, not bound by laws of nature or conventions of probability. Animation can be truly magic, truly unique, fresh, unprecedented. Indeed, so great is the potential of Animation to become extraordinary that it is tempting to amend McLaren’s definition to read: Animation is the imaginative, impossible things that happen between the frames of a film. True Animation is what could not be done in live-action, as Max Fleischer insisted.

Now critics (and some audiences) are comfortable with the industrial cartoon precisely because it usually does not violate regular sense or reality, it does not do anything that is not done in live-action comedy. Stage clowns long ago perfected the illusion of mayhem — the rubber hammer to clobber your friend with, the pratfall, the impossible escape from a falling object, or the trick door. Before World War I, live-action film comedies had extended the clown vocabulary to more extravagant action thrills: falling buildings, crazy car chases and fearful menace from huge (a little stupid) villains who stalked the weak-but-crafty-or-lucky comic hero. Tom and Jerry, Bugs and Elmer Fudd: what can they add to this? Only the substitution of animal protagonists for humans — also an ancient practice, except that Aesop and the medieval Japanese Choju Giga, and Reynard the Fox used animals as a masquerade which allowed satire of forbidden subjects and powerful people — a possibility sorely neglected by the industrial cartoon.

Many of the earlier cartoons created in the smaller studios — Charlie Bowers’ Mutt and Jeffs, Otto Messmer’s Felix the Cat, some of the Fleischers’ Koko and Betty Boop cartoons — contain ingenious plot turns, moments of genius, flights of wild visual imagination — possibly because Messmer actually devised and drew many Felixes personally, and the key animators on the small Fleischer staff were allowed to develop their own material, so we can recognize Willard Bowsky’s penchant for surrealistic transformation as social satire (Mysterious Mose and Minnie the Moocher) or Shamus Culhane’s love of opera and ballet in various imaginative touches (the pirouetting bull in Cow’s Husband.) But too many of the sound cartoons suffer from committee production, unevenness, repetitions of gags — and little wonder, because thousands of cartoons were turned out since Emile Cohl first adapted the newspaper comic strip “The Newlyweds and Baby Snookums” to a series of cartoons shorts. It would be a miracle if any gags remained fresh, if truly new gags could be invented at this point.

The committee structure of studio production also accounts for many of the cartoons’ weaknesses. Each of several craftsmen worked on a given cartoon in succession — an assembly-line process (and we know all about them from René Clair’s A nous la liberté, which Chaplin borrowed for his Modern Times) — and each immediately began work again on another cartoon under severe deadline pressure. Despite the cult of cartoon directors, no one was ultimately the author of most cartoons. Chuck Jones worked to scripts and gags by Michael Maltese and others — so who’s to blame for the bad jokes or excesses of violence, racism and social mishaps — and the just plain dull, silly or redundant failures among the more-celebrated lively “masterpieces”? Tex Avery was never an animator; he designed and created gags (through an alcoholic haze) — but the brilliant sinuous movements of the city wolf vs. the jerky movements of the country wolf in the 1949 Little Rural Riding Hood (a rehash of the 1943 Red Hot Riding Hood) were created by Bobe Cannon, a true animator who also designed memorable movement for UPA’s 1951 Gerald McBoing Boing and 1949 The Magic Fluke (which Tex Avery shamelessly plagiarized and vulgarized in his 1952 Magical Maestro).

It is also easy to see how the dependence on social realism limits the imagination of industrial cartoons — most obviously, perhaps, in television series like The Flintstones, which depends entirely on spoken dialogue, and could just as well be a live-action sit-com (and indeed, it was successfully re-filmed as a live-action feature). But the same is essentially true of many predictable formula cartoons — Woody Woodpecker, Donald Duck or the Roadrunner, for example. They owe their success and prevalence to marketing and nostalgia rather than any genuine fresh artistic achievement.

Similarly, feature-length animation films follow a strict formula set by Snow White, including a song every ten or fifteen minutes — a formula borrowed from successful live-action musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, but long since abandoned for live-action films. Yet the formula is mindlessly repeated in a continuous stream of animated features, including ones on such unsavory topics (unsuitable for children and adults alike) as a kidnapped cat held prisoner in a brothel (Gay Purree) and the crimes of gangster gambler dogs (All Dogs Go To Heaven). Meanwhile, the dazzling beauty and imaginative whimsy of earlier features such as Lotte Reiniger’s 1926 Adventures of Prince Ahmed or Ladislas Starewitch’s 1928 The Magic Clock or 1930 Reynard the Fox languish unseen and mostly forgotten because they lacked the intense commercial exploitation and promotion of Disney and the American studios.

It may be best to regard the industrial cartoon, short and feature-length, as a separate genre of Animation, a sub-genre. This may sound as if I despise industrial cartoons, but I don’t. I see them all the time (perhaps too often). But they are definitely on the low end of Imagination and Creativity — especially when compared to other narrative animations. Take for comparison what Hans Fischerkoesen made of the ordinary cartoon format in his ingenious, moving Weather-beaten Melody and The Snowman, or Anthony Gross in his elegant, whimsical abstractions Joie de vivre and The Fox Hunt — or Oskar Fischinger’s apocalyptic barroom brawl in Spiritual Constructions. Each of these films are motivated by fresh ideas, and fresh graphic concepts to express them. And each of them is a single artist’s film — indeed, Fischinger worked entirely alone. Fischerkoesen and Gross used a staff of craftsmen to help execute consecutive artworks, but the conception and design all came from the single artist. Hundreds of other narrative artist’s animations could be cited: Norman McLaren’s Neighbors, Caroline Leaf’s The Street, Ladislas Starewitch’s 1912 Revenge of the Cameraman (which truly uses the “beast fable” for cutting satire of bourgeois foibles), Jiri Trnka’s political protest film The Hand, Frédéric Back’s epic Crac! (which manages to trace a century of Canadian history through the fortunes of a rocking chair) — and even more intricate, expanded narratives: the cryptic Home by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica (following the fantasies of a waiting woman), the poetic Tale of Tales by Yuri Norstein which unravels nostalgia and artistic responsibility, or the multi-layered Luncheon on the Grass by Estonian Priit Pärn, which chronicles the separate hardships of four people trapped in a fascist state, who long to enjoy a moment of pure art.

The more-or-less linear narrative is only one trend in Animation. We might also recommend the pure transformation film (such as Danish Lejf Marcussen’s surrealistic Public Voice, Clorinda Warny’s Beginnings, Joan Graetz’s Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, or Sara Petty’s Furies and Preludes in Magical Time; musical interpretation films such as Night on Bald Mountain by Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff or Norman McLaren’s folk song “Rowing”; the absolute abstractions of Walther Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger, James Whitney, Jordan Belson, Harry Smith and Larry Cuba; and conceptual films, either the systematic permutations of a chosen system as in Harry Smith’s Film No. 11, Jane Aaron’s Traveling Light, Christine Panushka’s Sum of Them or Jan Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue — or a free-form evocation of some mood or atmosphere as in the Quay twins’ dark Street of Crocodiles.

This little catalogue of artists’ Animations represents only the “tip of an iceberg.” A thorough History of Animation has only appeared in the last half-dozen years: Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Cartoons — Italian version 1988, French version 1990 and English version 1994, but no German edition yet! Bendazzi shows that there is just as much (if not more) independent artists’ Animation as there are commercial cartoons, that Animation artists flourish in almost every country of the world — and many of the finest artists are women. Why are artists’ Animations not better known than cartoons? The obvious answer — lack of marketing and commercial distribution — while certainly true, avoids a deeper issue which affects not only artist Animation but also the live-action short and experimental films.

The 100-minute “feature-length” film is basically a marketing strategy developed by Hollywood studios to allow a two-hour turnover in their cinema theaters. “Feature-length” also allies itself to longer narrative fiction — novels and stage plays — which thrive on development of linear adventures, surprise reversals, overcoming obstacles, working out problems, gradual change in character, such as “coming of age” stories. Classic feature films are said to have a three-act structure: Act I introduces the characters and situations, then some change or new development (called a plot point) causes Act II, with change, struggle and suspense, maturation of the protagonist or whatever keeps us interested for 45 minutes, when another plot point precipitates Act III, a resolution, climax or closure (in the case of some unresolved stalemate or repeating situation). This classic structure can also be seen in, say, novels like Dickens’ David Copperfield and Great Expectations (which follow the hero from childhood through adversities to success and love), as well as psychological fiction like Henry James’ Washington Square (filmed as The Heiress) or Oscar Wilde’s play A Woman of No Importance in which few actions and no adventures occur, but situations and conversations reveal gradual changes of mind: maturation, disappointment and bitterness, acceptance, generosity and self-sacrifice — in short, internal, psychological adventures.

On one level, this three-act structure corresponds to the more universal beginning/middle/end which actually functions in every artwork in whatever medium, since it means simply getting to know what the parameters of the artwork is, studying it and getting more involved with the artwork, and then departing from it with some satisfactory closure. But indeed the three-act structure for long fiction (including feature films) functions quite differently from other, shorter artworks. A short story, while it has a beginning, middle and end (which could also be called Act I, Act II and Act III), can not thrive on extended, linear adventures, but rather chooses a single representative situation or a symbolic event to concentrate a lifetime into a few pages, a few minutes. In this sense, the short story approximates lyric poetry, which also thrives on concentration rather than linear development, which also seizes only the symbolic moment and builds it to a climax of intensity through scrutiny.

We can also observe a similar difference between long and short forms of other arts. Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde functions rather differently from a Madonna videoclip. Wagner needs his three hours for a linear development from Isolde’s first-act angry violence of her curse, through the second-act’s no-less-turbulent guilty erotic passion, to the ecstatic resolve in her third-act deathbed revelation. Madonna, on the other hand, chooses one intense moment — for example, “I’m just as sexy as Nastasia Kinski in Paris Texas, so you can lust after me all you want” — to represent her whole life, and thus she can say all she need to or ha s to say in three or five minutes.

It is important to reiterate that long fiction and feature films are not better nor more difficult to make than poetry or short films — indeed, they are simply different, just as a lied of Schubert is not in competition with Strauss’ Rosenkavalier, they are simply different. However, more people see elaborate opera productions than attend “Liederabend” song recitals — and I am not so convinced that an evening made up of 20 or 30 songs is a good idea, just as programs of 15 short films are problematic — precisely because the “feature-length” entertainment is planned and paced for that duration, whereas each short concentrated work has its own mood and intensity and climax. Fifteen of them have too much intensity, too many climaxes, and most probably some conflicting and contradictory moods. Even if the “moods” are carefully arranged in a smooth profile or progression (as they usually are not), nonetheless, the multiple climaxes are likely to be exhausting.

Schubert wrote his lieder in an era during which many people played piano and many people sang, so that his songs could be performed at home, at parties, after dinner, one or three or however many felt right for the occasion, which would also include perhaps a sonata, a waltz or an instrumental solo or trio, depending on the available talent. The modern equivalent might be video, which is also a home medium, albeit a passive one, at best exercising connoisseurship in programming. Unfortunately, video is basically a second-rate medium that cannot reproduce very much contrast, and offers no stable color fidelity, so many of the finer nuances that the artist may have slaved to achieve — the aethereal glowing lights of Berthold Bartosch’s The Idea, Oskar Fischinger’s carefully modulated color palettes, or the murky shadows of Borowczyk’s or the Quay twins’ decaying rooms — become murky and undecipherable on video. “Feature-length” also remains an economic unit for video, so the available shorts on video tend to be trapped in package programs of 10 or 15 items. Broadcast and cable television have certainly absorbed the documentary film, but live-action and animated shorts have not fared so well. Cable channels frequently use shorts to play during the 7 or 17 minutes between the end of one program and the beginning of another, so I have seen Igor Kovalyov’s stunning, mysterious, surrealistic Andre Svislotsky at least a dozen times, sandwiched between a comedy and a musical, a commercial and a newscast, a gangster film and a war documentary — but never listed in the program guide! Always an anonymous filler that you could happen on only by chance.

What is the answer for distribution and exhibition of short films? Is it the private party screenings — the cineclubs of the 1920s and 1930s which Germaine Dulac fought so hard to establish and promote? Festivals? Schools and colleges? In all these, only a small privileged audience sees the films. And I know that access to the rich heritage of short artist-films is vital to the continued creativity of younger artists. Shakespeare became a great playwright partially because he had a tradition to build on: he didn’t have to invent Hamlet or King Lear, but rather could concentrate on refining them, giving them new, sharper meaning. E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf could write more intricate and adventurous novels precisely because they knew Jane Austin and Dickens and George Eliot and Emily Brontë, which freed them to forge ahead with assurance. Our young animation and live-action short-film-makers live, by and large, not only in deprivation of a knowledge and sense of their tradition, but also in a negative situation in which random ideas and motifs from short-film art are regularly appropriated, banalized and exhausted in advertising films and music video clips, without the young viewer ever even knowing the original context where the most conscious, subtle, meaningful use of this material or style occurred.

In any case, our duty, as the privileged people in attendance at this festival, must be to work as a missionary, bringing the fine films we see here back to the broader communities in which we live.

Moritz, William. “Concerning the Aesthetic Autonomy of Animation, and Why the Short Film is Not Just a Shorter Feature Film.” Keynote Address, Filmfest Dresden, 19 April 1995.