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On Animation: the Importance of Movement

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On Animation: the Importance of Movement On animation: The importance of movement Animation to me is bringing ideas to life in front of your eyes. Storytelling has always interested me, initially through visual media with film and then discovering animation, it opened up the doors of my imagination and the wealth of possibilities,‘if you can imagine it, then it exists’ (Wells,P. Hardstaff,J. 2008, pg96). You can create a character from your imagination and bring it to life and make it do unimaginable things. Before I new it at a young age, I was already animating characters and telling stories with flipbooks and puppets. I think that animation is creating something for another persons’ enjoyment and taking your ideologies and communicating them to someone, through creativity. In a way your animation is your baby that you have worked hard on for a long period of time and put a lot of effort into, and when it arrives you have created new life for everybody to enjoy and you can feel proud that you created it from the small being it was at the beginning. The purpose of this essay is to achieve a greater understanding on what animation is, its origins and how it is used. The aim is to help me gain more knowledge and understanding about animation and help to improve my work. In this essay I will research into the basics and origins of animation, what it really means to animate and the secret behind giving a character personality. My research will include books, films and speaking to people who work within animation. Including talking to Ross Mullan, an actor and his view what it means to him to be animated. Commencing with the origins of animation and its innovators and then delving into the deeper purpose of animation and the importance of animating a character through motion. Animation is nothing new, even though it has developed over the years it dates back to over 35,00 years ago when animals were painted on cave walls with multiple pairs of legs to show motion. In Egyptian and ancient Greek times still images were painted in a series, of the stages of movement. In 1824 Peter Mark Roget discovered the vital principle, ‘the persistence of vision’. Understanding that to create illusion we must trick our eyes in believing in the movement. ‘To animate, and the related words, animation, animated, and animator all derive from the latin verb, animare, which means ‘to give life to’’ This principle led to animated mediums such as the Thaumatrope, Phenakistoscope, Zoetrope and the Praxinoscope all methods by spinning stills to create the illusion of movement. Once the understanding of animation was achieved creators started to play around with personality, which lead to ‘gertie the dinosaur’, the first case of an animation with personality. (Williams. R, 2009) Contrary to popular belief Snow white and the seven dwarfs was not the first full length animated feature but was Lotte Reinigers The adventures of Prince Achmed. An animated feature using cutout black card to create a silhouette (The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926). The pioneers of animation are people who have helped mould and shape our understanding of animation and helped it progress experimentally and technically through the years. Etienne Jules-Mary and Edward Muybridge discovered the secret to animation through Chronophotography, which is defined as “a set of photographs of a moving object, taken for the purpose of recording and exhibiting successive phases of motion.” It is derived from the Greek word "chronos" (time) combined with "photography". Marey's chronophotographic gun was made in 1882, this instrument was capable of taking 12 consecutive frames a second, and the most interesting fact is that all the frames were recorded on the same picture. (Wikipedia, 2014) This was fundamental when understanding animation and was the beginning of how animation developed to the magical moving images we see today, taking the images and making them move and come to life ‘we’ve taken our stills and leapt into another dimension’ (Williams,2009, pg.11). It is the view of Sorenson that ‘It is through a succession of frames in time that they become organic metaphors imbued with symbolic meaning, becoming stories and experiences that reveal our individual and collective imagination. It brings our dreams, myths and memories to life.’(Visual Music, 2014) What is the purpose of animation? Essentially animation comes from storytelling, using a narrative, so in a sense it is similar to writing but with visuals. Jane Hankin a creative writing lecturer talks about how storytelling is taking your experiences or ‘currency of ideas’ from life and ‘communicate how you see the world…communicate something about yourselves’ because you have a ‘responsibility to create change…to make a difference’ (Hankin.J. 2014). These are the main aims of writers and animators alike, to make the audience/reader to see the world from your view in order to make people think differently about life as they know it. Wells writes how ‘animation can redefine the everyday, subvert our accepted notions of ‘reality’ and challenge the orthodox understanding and acceptance of our existence’ (Wells, 1998,pg10,11). Animations are also a projection of yourself and this can come across through the animation ‘I write to discover what I know’ (Goodreads:Flannery O’Connor, 2014). Another benefit of animation is expressing your strong views of the world through animation so it becomes more acceptable, ‘In this kind of culture there can be a tendency to dilute a point of view’ such as the film Persepolis. Wells and Hardstaff talk about how ‘the power of the global media has shaped the ways in which people think of other cultures and philosophies’ and that animation should be used ‘to encourage a greater understanding of other cultures’ In Persepolis it challenges political views on the revolution in Iran in 1979 and ‘shows the bigger picture of Iran beyond these received images and stereotypes’(Wells,P. Hardstaff,J. 2008, pg40). But a narrative needs a way to come to life, to animate, and it is done through a character that an audience can connect with or relate to. The foundation of any animation is a character, an object that is brought to life and given personality via movement. So what does it mean to animate a character? From McKee’s chapter: Characters are not human beings, he changes the perception of what character means ‘A character is a work of art, a metaphor for human nature’, it ‘is the clay we twist and shape,’ talking about how we are artists but with life experiences as materials (Mckee, 1999, pg135). This is evident in many animations where human beings are not used in many Pixar shorts such as Luxo Jnr. The Birds (Pixar shorts: volume 1, 2007) and features e.g. Toy story, Cars, Bugs Life. Yet they all have a character and personality. Your character is your ‘innermost self, is the awareness you carry with you twenty four hours a day that watches you do everything you do.’(Mckee, 1999, pg135) To animate a character we give it movement and the way it moves gives it personality. I found this interesting in our acting session where we created a character simply from a walk, it was not necessary to have dialogue, narrative, costume etc. Ross Mullan explained to me that he was originally influenced by cartoon characters and then achieved his dream of being a cartoon character via acting, as he now plays monsters and villains in film and tv. He discussed to me how he animates through his work ‘I animate text and bring to life the characters put before me. Breath life into them if you will.’ ‘You can do this to nearly anything in the world. When we do this we animate the object/drawing/character/literature with our own experience and vision of life how we see it.’(Mullan,R. 2014) I find this link to acting interesting, as I had never connected them before. In a sense, an animator needs to know the works of an actor to understand the movement they need to put across in their character ‘the supervising animator may be an excellent actor because he or she is expert at endowing a character with a dynamic illusion of life.’(Hooks,2005, pg10) What I didn’t realise is how much of animation relies on movement rather than character design or narrative. Hooks explores back to the idea of personality from movement rather than design ‘when you animate a character, you are expressing its thoughts and emotions through the illusion of movement’ ‘there must be movement if the characters thoughts are to mean anything to an audience. And the way the characters thoughts are expressed amount to its personality.’ (Hooks, 2000, pg19) He also talks about how Disney based Felix the Cat on Charles Chaplin and took movement from his acting. Because silent movie actors had to communicate emotion through the body rather than speech Chaplin was a good example as his personality came from his acting in order to made us feel empathy and sympathy for him.(Hooks, 2000, pg40/5) So a character is animated through movement and this portrays true personality. If you strip animated feature films down to its bare minimum, no location, character design, colour, or sound you get the character alone and how it acts/moves and you can still get a character and narrative just from this. For example Play by Matt Abbiss, a simple line drawing with two characters, there is no complicated design or background but you still know what sort of characters they are and get a feel of depth.
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