Heather L. Holian - Art, Animation and the Collaborative Process

Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 Heather L. Holian - Art, Animation and the Collaborative Process Date : 09-06-2013 Imagine for a moment, the city of Rome in 1510. Here, the Renaissance painter Raphael is in the process of carrying out the most important commission of his career, and consequently, one of the most famous projects in the history of Western art—the fresco decoration of the Pope’s private apartments in the Vatican. If we could catch a glimpse of the work in progress we would no doubt find scaffolding on the walls, dozens of large preparatory drawings and detailed sketches lying at the ready, and a young, but already successful Raphael overseeing a studio workforce of variously skilled young men at different stages of their artistic education. According to their strengths, Raphael assigns them each to paint secondary and tertiary portions of the composition using his designs, while Raphael himself takes the most prominent areas of the frescoes. As such, we can quickly recognize Raphael’s directorial role in the execution of his artistic vision. Raphael’s design and style not only run through the entire painted decoration, despite the work of several hands, but the final project will ultimately bear his single name. Such an arrangement is typical of artistic collaboration in the Renaissance, and in periods of Western fine art both long before and just after Raphael’s career. Notably the Renaissance method of making also bears some striking similarities to the production system of many an early twentieth century American animation studio. This traditional and hierarchical mode of art production enabled technically challenging, physically large and generally ambitious works to be executed, while providing the next generation of artists with necessary training and experience. Both the younger apprentices and the trusted assistants followed the design and style of the master artist in order to create a stylistic whole that was visually coherent. To be sure, these individuals provided many much- needed pairs of hands, but probably little in the way of true creative collaboration with the master artist. Another view through history, this time from New York City in 1910, provides an interesting contrast, four hundred years after Raphael. Here, the enormously popular vaudeville entertainer and hard-working cartoonist, Winsor McCay, uses his meager spare time to single-handedly produce the first American animated cartoon. The well-known result is McCay’s landmark four-minute short, Little Nemo (1911). Although McCay’s task of drawing approximately four thousand pen and ink images on small pieces of rice paper certainly falls under the rubric of “ambitious work,” he prefers to execute them all on his own without assistance—a task that requires months of tedious work by McCay (Canemaker 2005, p.160). McCay’s solo execution of Little Nemo is akin to the working procedures of most modern fine artists, and although he would later hire his young neighbor and art student, John A. Fitzsimmons to painstakingly retrace the backgrounds for his third film, Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) (Canemaker, 2005, p.169), one cannot help but feel that McCay’s own vision for this new medium dictated his process. In 1927, at a banquet given in his honor by New Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 York City animators, McCay gave a speech and then concluded by chiding his hosts, “Animation should be an art. That is how I conceived it. But as I see, what you fellows have done with it, is making it into a trade. Not an art, but a trade. Bad luck!” (cited by Canemaker 2005, p.199). McCay was not the only one turned off by the industrialized production of animated shorts. The fine art world, to which McCay had hoped animation would some day belong, was, and unfortunately still is, in the passionate throes of a four hundred year old love affair with the notion of the single, individual artist-genius. Unfortunately, the direct effect of this artistic “romance” is the exclusion from art’s canonical history of many large scale collaborative works, which cannot be attributed to a single artist, including studio animation. What or who sparked such lasting ideological devotion? The answer resides in Raphael’s Rome of 1510. Here, working not more than sixty feet away from Raphael, in another part of the Vatican, is the thirty-five year old artist, Michelangelo Buonarotti, and his project at the moment is the Sistine Ceiling. Although he was well on his way, this project catapulted Michelangelo to stardom and a contemporary international reputation, which only increased throughout his long career. The height his reputation reached, is testified by an important collection of published artists’ biographies from 1568, in which the aging Michelangelo is famously described as “rather divine than human,” with his creative powers likened to those of God (Vasari 1568/1996, p.642). More importantly, the same biography also denied that Michelangelo collaborated with assistants in his Sistine work, although the frescoes themselves suggest otherwise. In this seemingly innocent, but in fact consciously- aggrandizing biography, the cult of the artist is securely established in the West, and over the succeeding centuries more and more emphasis would be placed on the single, individual, artist-genius. The legacy of this Western cultural preference for the solo, heroic creator is still felt today in museums, classrooms and art historical studies (see Hobbs 1984, p.64). For example, several canonical twentieth century artists relied on collaborators, such as Andy Warhol, draftsman Sol LeWitt, or more recently, sculptor and filmmaker Matthew Barney; and yet their works are identified with a single creative agent—the artist. Indeed, it appears Walt Disney intuitively understood this cultural bias as well, when in 1925 he changed the name of his fledgling studio from the Disney Brothers Studio, to Walt Disney Studios. This decision was not simply good business. The renaming reflects an understanding of the Western preference for crediting a single, creative individual. As an autonomous, independent art form with its own unique visual language, animation meanwhile incorporates many traditional fine art media within its pre-production and production processes. So many in fact, that studio animation has a legitimate claim to fine art status, wherein individual films are further evaluated on their own merits. From drawing, to painting to sculpting and even collage, animation can and does employ them all. And yet, as I have discussed elsewhere, I believe studio animation is excluded from discussions of modern and contemporary fine art for a variety of reasons, including the large, complex collaborative process it requires, despite Raphael, Matthew Barney, and hundreds of other collaborative, canonical fine artists.[i] This particular paradox is perhaps best explained by the impossibility of crediting a single artist with the final film of an animation studio. However, as the following study will demonstrate, the animation studio provides clear evidence for dependence upon strong, individual artistic personalities embedded within a collective artistic unit. Are these “embedded artists” any less worthy of Animation Journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License. Animation Studies The Peer-reviewed Open Access Online Journal for Animation History and Theory - ISSN 1930-1928 art historical consideration? Are their final collaborative works? Indeed, studio animation arguably employs and relies more heavily upon the individual creative voices of its many contributors than accepted collaborative canonical art forms, like Renaissance fresco painting or The Factory printmaking of Andy Warhol. Ultimately, what is at stake for animation is more than the academic exercise of defining or exploding the boundaries of fine art and instead, is nothing less than the total exclusion of the medium from fine art’s written history, criticism and museums, and with it, a proper understanding of or appreciation for the artistic relevance of twentieth century studio animation, and I would argue, a complete history of twentieth century American art. While the notion that animation is a fine art form is tantamount to cultural sacrilege in some corners of the fine art world today, the belief was widely held by a diverse and vocal group of American art critics, historians and museum curators during the late twenties, thirties and early forties, following the great successes of the Walt Disney Studios.[ii] However, once this enthusiasm cooled in the early forties, many of the qualities intrinsic to studio animation and its production proved to be significant obstacles to the medium’s permanent embrace by, and acceptance into, the fine art world. One of these impediments is the collaborative process of production. Collaboration is a complex phenomenon among individuals, which can vary widely in nature. When applied to the fine arts the term can describe a diverse set of creative interactions between two or more people. However, the most common and traditional use of the word within art history refers to the example provided by Raphael and his shop, where several skilled laborers or other artists execute an established design dictated by a master artist. These collaborators are essentially hired hands, not necessarily true creative or intellectual contributors to the project. As such, they are comparable to the assistant animator, the in-betweener, the inker or the painter, while the master artist is akin to the modern director. Indeed, this traditional method of fine art making is reminiscent of American animation studios from the teens and early twenties when efficient execution was not only typical, but necessary, due to the time constraints imposed by economic factors.

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