Animation, Animated Films, and Animated Cartoons

I

Introduction

Animation, Animated Films, and Animated Cartoons, variety of motion pictures that produces the illusion of movement in hand-drawn pictures or stationary objects by photographing them on a single frame of film, then substituting the next drawing or object in the series, which shows the subject in a slightly different position, then photographing that on the next frame, and so on.

II

Silent Animation

The basis of film animation pre-dates the first live-action motion pictures, for it was used in optical toys such as the Zoetrope and Reynaud's Praxinoscope. Several years after standard live action motion pictures were possible, the first frame-by-frame animation of objects on film was done by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison company. In 1905 he made How Jones Lost His Roll and The Whole Dam Family and the Dam Dog, in which the inter-titles are formed by cut-out letters that move randomly about the screen until they get into line in the right order to spell out the required message. This technique required an adaptation of the ordinary motion-picture camera so that it only exposed one frame of film, and then stopped with the shutter closed, rather than the usual continuous running at 16 frames per second. The idea was first applied to make a series of filmed drawings move by James Stuart Blackton of the Vitagraph company, in Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (1906). In the same year, Blackton produced another film, A Midwinter Night's Dream, in which toy dolls were made to appear to move by shifting their limbs slightly between the filming of each frame of film. This was the first example of “puppet animation” (see later). Blackton extended this type of animation in The Haunted Hotel (1907), making objects sculpted in modelling clay appear to gradually transform into other things by slightly deforming their shape between the exposure of each frame of the film. Subsequently, these techniques were taken up by European film-makers, such as Segundo de Chomon and Émile Cohl. Cohl produced the first regular series of animated cartoons, featuring line drawings of simplified human figures that jumped about and underwent astonishing transformations. In the United States, the celebrated comic-strip artist Winsor McCay took up film animation, and produced the first animated cartoons that were fully detailed and had smooth natural movement in his 1911 Vitagraph film, Winsor McCay Draws Little Nemo. No one else rivalled the quality of McCay's animation until the 1930s.

The basic devices used in hand-drawn animation to reduce the large amount of redrawing of the stationary background for every frame were developed in 1914. Moving figures were drawn on separate sheets of celluloid laid over a fixed background, drawn on paper. The technique was patented by John Bray and Earl Hurd. It was essential to ensure positional registration between successive drawings, and this was done by having holes punched in the drawings that fitted on to pins fixed to the animation table under the camera, an idea patented by Raoul Barré. All these men were leading animators of the time: Bray began the first American cartoon series in 1913 with Colonel Heeza Liar; Hurd produced the Bobby Bumps series, which was considered to have the best-constructed stories so far; and Barré directed an animated version of Bud Fisher's popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff. Each of these animated cartoons was drawn in rather crude black and white, with somewhat creaky movement, but in the 1920s animation gradually improved. Figures such as the immensely popular Felix the Cat, animated by Otto Messmer, still had rather rubbery movement, but Max and Dave Fleischer introduced new levels of weird fantasy and complexity into their Out of the Inkwell series. The Fleischers also invented the Rotoscope, a device for projecting live-action film on to paper frame by frame, so that the outline of the moving human figure could be traced to provide a guide for the animation drawings. Their films also developed the technique of cartoon figures interacting with human actors in live action filmed in the real world.

This idea of combining cartoon and live action was taken up by Walt Disney, after he moved to Hollywood in 1923, with his Alice in Cartoonland series, which featured a small girl moving around in an animated cartoon world. The work of the Disney team, led by Walt as story editor, and Ub Iwerks as chief animator, rapidly improved, and in 1928 they had a big success with the first Mickey Mouse films. After their innovation of adding sound to cartoons in 1928 with Steamboat Willie, the Disney studios moved into the leading position both artistically and commercially. Some other countries, particularly Britain and France, also had animation studios, but there was not a great deal worth noting outside the United States, apart from the elaborate puppet animation of the Polish director Wladyslaw Starewicz (for example, The Cameraman's Revenge, 1912) and the animation of abstract shapes developed by Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttman, Hans Richter, and Oskar Fischinger in Germany throughout the 1920s. Also in Germany, Lotte Reiniger produced the first feature-length animation, with The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), using the technique of jointed silhouette figures that she had been developing since 1916.

III

The Animation Process

In the 1930s, Disney introduced a fully systematized production process for animated films, which quickly became standard. After the script of the cartoon is worked out by a specialized team of writers and artists, including the director, using rough sketches of the shots, the soundtrack is recorded, and then “timed”. This means that the specific frame when all important movements start and finish is written down on a specialized chart (“bar sheet”), which also has the precise point at which each significant sound starts and finishes. This is used by the animators, who make exact drawings of the position of the figures at points when they are briefly stationary (the “key poses” or “extremes”). The intermediate drawings that will provide the actual movement of the figures on the screen between these poses are then drawn on paper by “in-betweeners”, and the whole action is filmed frame by frame to give the “pencil test”. After this has been projected to check the smoothness of the animation, and the drawings have been corrected, they are traced on to celluloid sheets (“cels”) by tracers. At this point, other artists fill in the colour areas within the outlines on the cel by painting on the back of the cel. Meanwhile, the backgrounds for the scenes will have been painted on to paper by yet other artists. Finally, the layers of cels for each frame are assembled on the table of a rostrum camera over the background in the right position using the registration pegs on the table, and photographed.

IV

Animation in the Sound Period

The trend in the 1930s was to fill the frame with more and more independent movement of both the figures and the background, until the whole picture was alive, as in Disney's The Old Mill (1937) and the feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Not only did these films reach new levels in the depiction of the movement of nature through animation, but they also introduced the breakdown of scenes into shots taken from different angles, as had long been standard in ordinary films. The technical achievement of the Disney studios in this period from 1935 to 1945 has never been surpassed. Classics such as Fantasia (1940) and Pinocchio (1940) are testament to this. Rapidly rising labour costs in the following years meant that even Disney had to scale down the complexity of their work, although their commercial success continued. The other animation studios in Hollywood followed behind Disney, but there was little of distinction in their output, except for further extremely bizarre ideas in the Fleischers' Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor series, and the even wilder jokes from Tex Avery at Warner Bros. In the late 1940s a new, more modern stylized graphic approach was developed at a new cartoon studio, UPA, by John Hubley and others, and this style eventually became common.

With labour costs continuing to rise, full animation in the Disney style became too expensive, and most studios gradually returned to the kind of “limited animation” characteristic of the early period, in which only one character moved at a time, and the movements were rather jerky. To balance this decline in visual interest, more weight was placed on the soundtrack, which was ever more densely packed with dialogue and noises. The introduction of xerographic copying machines simplified the production process by eliminating tracing, thus helping to offset increasing costs to some extent. This gave rise to a new look in films, seen in One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961). In the 1980s and 1990s the decline in the quality of animation has been halted, with a number of people such as Don Bluth (An American Tail, 1986), and the Disney studio itself, trying to revive the excellence of the great days of the 1930s and 1940s, though with only partial success. The best recent examples of this, which have well-deserved commercial rewards, are the combination of live action and animation in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and the Disney studios' Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Toy Story (1995). The latter, created by the animation studio Pixar is the first feature-length film to be composed entirely of computer-generated images. Its immense success at the worldwide box office led to the release of a number of later computer-generated feature-length cartoons featuring the voices of major Hollywood stars: Antz and A Bug's Life (both 1998), Monsters, Inc. and Shrek (both 2001), Finding Nemo (2003), Shrek 2, Shark Tale, and The Incredibles (all 2004), and Robots (2005). (See also Pixar, DreamWorks SKG.)

In the sound period there have been more artistic innovations from independent animators, such as Len Lye, who painted directly on to the film strip in Britain in the 1930s. This idea, and others, were developed much further by Norman McLaren, who worked for the National Film Board of Canada during and after World War II. The Canadian National Film Board has since sponsored a number of younger artists working on new techniques and styles, many of whom are not Canadian. Prominent among these are the award-winning American animator Caroline Leaf, known particularly for her method of working directly on glass or film in pieces such as The Street (1976), based on the tale by Mordechai Richler; Jacques Drouin, admired creator of Mindscape (1976); and Richard Condie and Cordell Baker, who produced The Big Snit (1985) and The Cat Came Back (1988). East European animation has produced a number of major animators, such as Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk in Poland, working in very individual styles since the 1950s. Lenica developed the animation of cut-outs taken from old engravings to tell bizarre stories, and Borowczyk the use of deliberately crude simplification to present macabre and grotesque relations between people. More recently, the works of the Russian Juri Norstein and the Czech Jan vankmajer have created an international impression.