Cell Animation
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CELL ANIMATION Even though animation was conceived as early as 1824 by Peter Roget, the very first actual methods of animation were made possible by a device called a zoetrope. The zoetrope was a spinning cylinder with open slits that would allow viewing of certain still images in a certain sequence. Someone viewing a zoetrope at a particular angle could see images that appeared to be moving. After Edison and the invention of motion pictures in 1889, film director Emile Cohl combined more than 700 still drawings, which were then each meticulously photographed individually. When Cohl combined all of the shots together, the drawings appeared to be moving on the film, "Fantasmagorie," which was released in 1908. Other animated films soon followed like "Gertie the Dinosaur" and "Felix the Cat," both released around 1920. Max Fleischer had next invented a device known as the rotoscope, which allowed animators to trace over live action film frame by frame onto an animation cel. Max and Dave Fleischer created the first sound cartoon, "Song Car Tunes" in 1924, three years before the first talking motion picture. Walt and Roy Disney perfected the rotoscope technique and opened their Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in 1923. They created the first cartoon with a synchronized soundtrack titled "Steam Boat Willy," which also introduced Mickey Mouse to the world in 1928. The Disney studio also created the first color full-color animated cartoon titled, "Flowers and Trees" in 1932. However, it would be the Disney studio's first full-length animated feature movie that would be remembered by most people as the most recognized cartoon in animation history: "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves." The animated cartoon movie earned $8 million for Disney and was the beginning of the Disney empire. By 1940, Warner Brothers Studios had put its own stake into the animation and cartoon business with the release of "A Wild Hare," which starred the wisecracking rabbit, Bugs Bunny. Bugs Bunny was created by Chuck Jones along with Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner. The Looney Tunes franchise became an almost instant hit and still remains a favorite of most cartoon--loving aficionados to this day. Jones is acknowledged as the inspiration for a number of modern animated cartoons. Other than Walt Disney, no other single person had a greater influence on modern animators, animated features and cartoons. From the popular animated television cartoon series to full-length animated motion pictures, the concepts of cel animation are still used along with some very sophisticated computer technology. Cartoon and animated movies are still drawn by hand, but on a digital tablet instead of a traditional animation cel. The last cartoon to utilize hand-drawn animation cels was "Ed, Edd, n Eddy" for the Cartoon Network. CLAY ANIMATION Clay animation or claymation is one of many forms of stop motion animation. Each animated piece, either character or background, is "deformable"—made of a malleable substance, usually Plasticine clay. All traditional animation is produced in a similar fashion, whether done through cel animation or stop motion. Each frame, or still picture, is recorded on film or digital media and then played back in rapid succession. When played back at a frame rate greater than 10–12 frames per second, a fairly convincing illusion of continuous motion is achieved. HISTORY Clay-animated films were produced in the United States as early as 1908, when Edison Manufacturing released a trick film entitled The Sculptor's Welsh Rarebit Dream. In 1916, an artist named Helena Smith Dayton and an animator named Willie Hopkins produced clay- animated films on a wide range of subjects. Hopkins in particular, produced over fifty clay- animated segments for the weekly Universal Screen Magazine. By the 1920s, cartoon animation using either cels or the slash system was firmly established as the dominant mode of animation production. Increasingly, three-dimensional forms such as clay were driven into relative obscurity as the cel method became the preferred method for the studio cartoon. Nevertheless, in 1921, clay animation appeared in a film called "Modeling", an Out of the Inkwell film from the newly formed Fleischer Brothers studio. "Modeling" is one of the few known shorts using clay that was released during the 1920s. "Modeling" included animated clay in eight shots, a novel integration of the technique into an existing cartoon series and one of the rare uses of clay animation in a theatrical short from the 1920s. Pioneering the clay-painting technique was one-time Vinton animator Joan Gratz, first in her Oscar-nominated film The Creation (1980), and then in her Oscar-winning Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, filmed in 1992. In 1972, at Marc Chinoy's Cineplast Films Studio in Munich, Germany, André Roche created a set of clay-animated German-language-instruction films for non-German-speaking children. A variation of clay animation was developed by another Vinton animator, Craig Bartlett, for his series of Arnold short films (also made in the '90s), in which he not only used clay painting but sometimes built up clay images that rose off the plane of the flat support platform toward the camera lens to give a more 3-D stop-motion look to his films. Some of the best-known clay-animated works include the Gumby series of television show segments, the TV commercial made for the California Raisin Advisory Board by Vinton's studio and The WB's The PJs, produced by and featuring the voice of Eddie Murphy. Clay animation has also been used in Academy Award-winning short films such as "Closed Mondays" (Will Vinton and Bob Gardiner, 1974), "The Sand Castle" (1977), "Creature Comforts" (Aardman, 1989), and all four Wallace & Gromit short films, created by Nick Park of Aardman Animations. Aardman also created The Presentators, a series of one-minute clay-animation/CGI short films aired on Nickelodeon UK. Some clay animations appear online, on such sites as Newgrounds. Several computer games have also been produced using clay animation, including The Neverhood, Clay Fighter, Platypus, Clay Moon (iPhone app), and Primal Rage. Television commercials have also utilized the clay animation, such as the Chevron Cars ads, produced by Aardman Studios. Besides commercials, clay animation has also been popularized in recent years by children's shows such as Bob the Builder andThe Koala Brother. Many independent young filmmakers have used clay animation features for internet viewing. Probably the most spectacular use of model animation for a computer game was for the Virgin Interactive Entertainment Mythos game Magic and Mayhem (1998), for which stop-motion animator and special-effects expert Alan Friswell constructed over 25 monsters and mythological characters utilizing both modeling clay and latex rubber, over wire and ball-and- socket skeletons. Rather than building the models in the cartoon-like style of Wallace and Gromit, Friswell constructed the figures after the designs of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen to make them more compatible with the game's often violent playing tactics. STOP MOTION ANIMATION Stop motion animation has a long history in film. It was often used to show objects moving as if by magic. The first instance of the stop motion technique can be credited to Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton for The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1897), in which a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life. The great European stop motion pioneer was Wladyslaw Starewicz (1892–1965), who animated The Beautiful Lukanida (1910), The Battle of the Stag Beetles (1910), The Ant and the Grasshopper (1911). One of the earliest clay animation films was Modelling Extraordinary, which dazzled audiences in 1912. December 1916 brought the first of Willie Hopkins' 54 episodes of "Miracles in Mud" to the big screen. Also in December 1916, the first woman animator, Helena Smith Dayton, began experimenting with clay stop motion. She would release her first film in 1917, an adaptation of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In the turn of the century, there was another well known animator known as Willis O' Brien. His work on The Lost World from 1925 is known, but he is most admired for his work on King Kong, a milestone of his films made possible by stop motion animation. 1960s and 1970s In the 1960s and 1970s, independent clay animator Eliot Noyes Jr. refined the technique of "free-form" clay animation with his Oscar-nominated 1965 film Clay (or the Origin of Species). Noyes also used stop motion to animate sand laying on glass for his musical animated film Sandman (1975). In 1975, filmmaker and clay animation experimenter, Will Vinton, joined with sculptor Bob Gardiner to create an experimental film called "Closed Mondays" which became the world's first stop motion film to win an Oscar. Will Vinton followed with several other successful short film experiments. In 1977, Vinton made a documentary about this produces and his style of animation which he dubbed "claymation" and he title the documentary "Claymation". Soon after this documentary, the term was trademarked by Vinton to differentiate his team's work from others who had been, or were beginning to do, "clay animation". While the word has stuck and is often used to describe clay animation and stop motion, it remains a trademark owned currently by Laika Entertainment, Inc. Disney experimented with several stop motion techniques by hiring independent animator- director Mike Jittlov to do the first stop motion animation of Mickey Mouse toys ever produced for a short sequence called Mouse Mania, part of a TV special commemorating Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary called Mickey's 50th in 1978. Jittlov again produced some impressive multi- technique stop motion animation a year later for a 1979 Disney special promoting their release of the feature film The Black Hole.