The Art of Animation Margo Sivin | Shanefessor | December 2010
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The Art of Animation Margo Sivin | Shanefessor | December 2010 For nearly a century, animation has been a unique influence on the human experience. From an early age, American children watch Disney Princesses sing with woodland creatures, Bugs Bunny tease Daffy Duck and Tom chase Jerry, not to mention the various commercial business that have utilized animation in marketing and artists as a form of expression. Animator and educator Howard Beckerman writes, “Pictures on the screen move in time and, unlike pages in a book, are not meant to be studied individually. This matter of time directly relates to the spaces between drawings and their duration in a sequence. Time is the soul of animation, and it is animators respect for timing that casts them as actors.” (Beckerman 5) According to Merriam-Webster, to animate or be animated is to give life, or act in a spirited way. In a parallel leap forward with live-action motion pictures, animation brought drawings, clay, and other objects to life and gave way to a distinct form of art and entertainment. Animation is fairly young art form; it piggybacked its way through history on artists, toymakers, illustrators and scientists. Animation, like other scientific and artistic breakthroughs and movements of the 20th century, did not exist in a vacuum: animation influenced, and was influenced by artistic expressions like design, music, literature, and art. The following research represents mere snapshots and highlights in the history of animation. EARLY BEGINNINGS: Bringing pictures to life If the word “animation” refers to pictures in motion, animation began with the attempt to create motion in still paintings found in caves. But while the “blurred” legs of animals suggest motion, the beginnings of modern moving pictures came in the form of toys like the thaumatrope, phenakistoscope, and stoboscope in the Eighteenth century. Animation and movies were made possible because of the combined use of sequential images, perforated, flexible strips, lenses, shutters, and detants. The following invenetions contributed one, or many, of these necessary elements (Beckerman 10). The thaumatrope, invented by Dr. William Henry Fitton, is a disc like a large coin with different images on each side with two strings attached on the right and left sides. When twirled quickly, the two images appear to overlap. This concept of merging imagery prompted The Thaumatrope further inquiry by John Herschel, Michael Faraday, Peter Mark Roget Illustrated by Howard Beckerman (Beckerman 5–6). 1 Joseph Antoine Ferdinand Plateau (1801–1883) of Brussels created the phenakistoscope and Ritter von Stampfer (1792–1864) of Vienna created the stroboscope. These similar novelty items were wheels with slits and a series of closely related designs that, when spun facing a mirror, appeared to move. Plateau drew the designs himself, which makes him the world’s first animator. Most artists and illustrators who made designs for the phenakistoscope, stroboscope, and later zoetrope, were generally anonymous animators (Beckerman 6). In 1892 in Paris, Emile Reynaud replaced viewing slits of the zoetrope with rectangular mirrors that faced the drawings and revolved as the drum spun. He dubbed his invention the praxinoscope, expanding it into an elaborate theatre attraction via mirrors and lenses and a belt of painted transparencies, called theatre optique. Accompanied by appropriate sounds, the projecting praxinoscope was a forerunner of what would become screen animation. PHOTOGRAPHY’S AID Following the invention of photography and the first photograph by Joseph Nicephore Niepce in 1826, the zoetrope progressed to include lantern slides (Beckerman 8). In 1872, Eadweard James Muybridge began photographing animals and people in motion using twelve cameras with shutters tipped off in sequence. Beckerman states, “The importance of Muybridge was in the fact that they were continuous shots of actual motion, not posed stills,” as opposed to photographs previously depicting motion (8). Inspired by Muybridge, Parisian physiologist Etienne Jules Marey devised a gunstock camera that took a series of photographs on a revolving plate through one lens. He exposed twelve exposures per (top) The Zoetrope second. By 1888, he had developed a new camera design that could Illustrated by Howard Beckerman take successive pictures on a moving roll of celluloid film. Eadweard Muybridge, 1872 The first true movie is generally credited to Thomas Edison and his The Lumiere Brothers Cinematographe invention of the kinetoscope viewing machine in West Orange, New Illustrated by Howard Beckerman Jersey. The camera that recorded motion, the kinetograph (1894), was a large apparatus that pulled the film through horizontally and was controlled by an enormous electric motor (Beckerman 8). The kinetograph was only for one person to view. The Lumiere brothers Louis and Auguste created the cinematographe, which was a portable camera that also served a projector. This device allowed films to be made in any location, and to be shown to a large audience. It was the invention of the projector that opened the path to longer and more complex motion pictures. THE FIRST ANIMATED FILMS & NEW TECHNOLOGY The first film to purposely employ drawn animation was James Stuart Blackton’s Humorous Phases of Funny Faces in 1906. The film uses frame-by-frame shooting technique to make blackboard drawings 2 come alive. There was no story, only simple animation like smoke curling from a cigar and an eye blinking. Blackton’s early experiments in animation inspired others and encouraged further developments (Beckerman 16). In 1909, Blackton and his partner Albert Smith founded the Vitagraph Corporation of American. In early drawn animation, two elements were common: the first was the cartoonists hand as instigator of the animation (which was usually a cutout of a still photograph); and the second was the stealing of ideas or imitation. Largely considered to be the first animator, Emile Cohl, a French caricaturist, dedicated his life to designing, photographing, and animating his drawings. Cohl is an excellent example of animators working closely with other artists. His background would later influence his animation work. His mentor, political caricaturist Andre Gill, introduced him to a bohemian circle including artists, poets, journalists, and critics that would eventually belong to the symbolist movement (Crafton 63). Cohl became part of a group obsessed with insanity as an aesthetic issue, the Incoherents. Beginning in 1882, their group organized charity balls and exhibitions of their strange work that attracted artists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Cheret. Before he began working on animations at the age of 44, Cohl was a popular graphic artist, illustrating books, songsheets, and magazines. Cohl’s cartoons beginning in 1908 features childlike white outlines of characters on a black background, which was a nod to Blackton’s chalkboard technique (Beckerman 18). Cohl also made puppets and paper cutouts for his films dedicated to the Incoherents. Cohl was one of the first to bring the necessary qualities of intellect, imagination, strong work ethic, and the obsessive love of drawing that would mark other great animators (Crafton 61–64). Until just before the start of WWI, animation was a sideline occupation. Hoping for success in the steady stream of cartoon reels to movie theatres, two entrepreneurial newspaper cartoonists, Raoul Barre and John Randolph Bray organized studios in New York. Certain technical problems needed to be solved, however, before animated shorts could begin cranking out. The first challenge, maintaining constant position of drawings as they were being sketched and then shot was solved by the Peg System. Raoul Barre came up with the idea to punch holes in drawing paper that were then set upon pegs set into the drawing board. A secondary challenge, quivering backgrounds, was solved by Cels. Earl Hurd was the first to employ celluloid, the material that ran through cameras. First, the Humorous Phases of Funny Faces, 1906 backgrounds were drawn on the celluloid sheets (cels) and placed James Stuart Blackton over the animation, and later, characters were traced onto cels. This Fantasmagore, 1908 opened the door for more detailed backgrounds and rendering of Emile Cohl tones. Eventually Hurd and Bray merged, creating the Bray-Hurd Newspaper cartoon, 1938 Process Company, which licensed out the technique and collected This cartoon illustrates animation’s debt to Cohl, royalties well into the 1930s. who was largely unknown at the time of his death in 1938. Although some still considered animation an art form, Bray made animation an assembly-line, factory style job. Among these were artists employed in the assembly lines were those who would become 3 producers in their own right, like Max and Dave Fleischer. The Fleischers created a projection-tracing device, the rotoscope, in 1917. They filmed live-action sequences and then traced single-frame projections of it. This technique made animating considerably faster, as well as smoother. They introduced the Koko the Clown series, whose hallmark was the combination of the characters with photographic backgrounds. Dave acted as Koko’s model (Beckerman 23). STUDIOS AND FULL-LENGTH FEATURES In the 1920s, animation in the United States was centered around production in New York studios. Cartoons at this time had a specific look: inked in heavy black, with white, mask-like faces. They moved on a white plane with occasional black lines showing scenery. From 1919 to 1930, Otto Messmer and Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat was the number one crowd-pleaser. Through clever animation based on Charlie Chaplin, Felix could think and solve problems. For instance, using his tail, he could form a telescope. During this time, animation was never as serious as the feature-film that seceded it. One man would change that: Walt Disney. Walt Disney’s success came from a mouse. Mickey’s first success was with Steamboat Willie, Disney’s third Mickey Mouse short, but the first with sound. In the 1930s, color cartoons were shown in theatres in between black and white features, newsreels, and advertisements.