This essay was originally published in a somewhat different form in Animation Journal,Volume 13, 2005.
The relative scarcity of serious theoretical writing on animation in the early years of establishing film studies as a discipline has fundamentally influenced the nature of animation theory. In this essay I wish to highlight one such oversight: the dearth of writing on realism in animation.1 By this, I mean theory that looks at the way in which the animated depiction of reality resembles the actual physical world, and the implications that the similarities and differences between the representation of the cartoon and the actual experience of life in the real world have for the way in which cartoons are understood. This is an extremely wide area of study, and I cannot attempt to outline a realist theory of animation here. Rather, I want to briefly outline some contrasts between classical notions of film realism (developed with reference to live-action cinema), and the ways in which writers on animation have discussed the subject. Much writing on animation is structured around certain assumptions and arguments about animation’s relation to the real. With a few exceptions, however, these arguments tend to be made implicitly. I wish to make explicit some of the approaches to realism that occur in writing on animation, and to extend the existing work that has explicitly acknowledged the realism question. A single unifying theory of animated realism is, I believe, no more achievable or helpful than attempts to outline a realist theory of live-action cinema. However, the study of live-action cinema was given a robustness by the variety of early theorists who posed alternative competing theories about cinema’s relation to the real. I want to outline a vocabulary, and make some preliminary comments, to allow similar approaches to animation.
The work of such “classical” film theorists as Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, and André Bazin was heavily preoccupied with a shared central theme: the medium’s mechanical reproduction of reality. Generally taking as their subject the most typical forms of cinema (live action classical Hollywood cinema, or art cinema from the United States and Europe), these theorists left variants such as animation to be the subject of later study. Meanwhile, little serious writing on animation appeared until the 1970s, and most early works on the subject were either historical accounts, or Sarris-like auteurist studies.2 By the time more substantial work appeared in the 1990s, the debates about cinematic realism had long ago ceased to occupy centre stage in academic discussion. While the debates in film theory about realism might seem, in retrospect, to have been something of a red herring, the grounding of the discipline in a strong understanding of the ways in which film both reproduced and distorted reality was an important foundation for later study. Yet writing on animation largely bypassed this debate. This is despite the intriguing differences between the ways in which live-action and animated cinema relate to the real. Animation, after all, is cinema that belies the founding assumption of realist theory: it is not based upon photographic reproduction of the real world.
A number of different approaches to negotiating animation’s unique relation to reality can be identified in existing work on the subject. One might be called the “inversion” view of animated realism. Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film – a volume seemingly intent on making the definitive statement the role of realism in film – provides a good summary of this position. Kracauer bases his work on the assumption that “achievements within a particular medium are all the more satisfying aesthetically if they build from the specific properties of that medium.”3 Thus, Kracauer believes filmmakers should work with cinema’s “inherent affinities” and to do so is to take what he calls the “cinematic approach.” The photographic reproduction of the real is, for Kracauer, central to defining these affinities. Animation, however, is a form of cinema that does not depend on a photographic reproduction of the real. In animation, nothing on the screen exists in real life, except in the very literal sense that the camera photographically records a particular set of drawings placed in front of the lens.4 What I have called the “inversion” approach allows Kracauer to avoid this problem:
What holds true of the photographic film does of course not apply to animated cartoons. Unlike the former, they are called upon to picture the unreal – that which never happens. In the light of this assumption, Walt Disney’s increasing attempts to express fantasy in realistic terms are aesthetically questionable precisely because they comply with the cinematic approach… There is a growing tendency toward camera-reality in his later full length films. Peopled with the counterparts of real landscapes and real human beings, they are not so much “drawings brought to life” as life reproduced in drawings… In these cartoons false devotion to the cinematic approach inexorably stifles the draftsman’s imagination.5
For Kracauer animation is the film medium’s mirror world: the mere absence of photography reverses all his aesthetic arguments, and gives the animator the freedom – indeed, the obligation – to abandon reality that Kracauer is so reluctant to grant to live-action filmmakers who wish to pursue fantasy subjects.6
The inversion position recasts notions of medium specificity to portray animation as an inherently fantastic form of cinema: an inversion of classical film theorists’ arguments for realist positions in live-action film. While I have highlighted a form of this position that emerges explicitly from realist theory, subtler forms of this argument can be seen in work that makes no reference to such theory, but that adopts medium-specificity type arguments about what animation “should do.” Realism is not what animation is best at, such a position holds, and therefore works that show freer invention and fantasy are privileged. This assumption surfaces, for example, in work that privileges the “cartooniness” of films in the Tex Avery / Warner Bros tradition, as opposed to the Disney aesthetic, which is criticised for being too realistic.7 As Leonard Maltin put it in introducing his discussion of Tex Avery’s work at Warner Bros, “If an animated cartoon, with its unlimited potential for exaggeration and flights of fancy, couldn’t venture beyond the realm of a live action film, what was the point?”8 However, the over-simplicity of such an approach is borne out by a competing approach to realism that can, at times, be found in some of the same texts that espouse the inversion view. This might be thought of as the “quest for realism” approach: work that stresses the artistry involved in overcoming the obstacles to a realistic effect in animation. It would be almost impossible, for example, to recount the history of the Disney studio in the 1930s without detailing its striving towards a particular kind of realism in its cartoons, and indeed this is the principal narrative thread of the relevant sections Michael Barrier’s history of studio animation.9 Realism becomes central to this narrative because it is so difficult to achieve in animation, and arguably the Disney studio’s principle creative achievement was the extent to which the animators achieved this goal.
By suggesting that the “quest for realism” and “inversion” views of realism are often simultaneously implicit in histories of Hollywood animation, I am not implying that this is due to confusion or contradiction on behalf of these writers. On the contrary, this seems to me to reflect a legitimate tension found in Hollywood cartoons, and this is often acknowledged, even in early studies.10 However, a sophisticated reading of the issue of realism demands more careful attention to the question of what is considered “realistic” in an animated cartoon. The inherent artificiality of animation means that the slippery concept of “realism” becomes even more suspect than in the live-action context, and demands more interrogation than it has usually received. Only then can the tension between “realism” and other imperatives – be they a devotion to fantasy, comedy, character, music, or any other aesthetic goal – be described and studied with any precision.
One of the most sophisticated attempts to do this has been that of Paul Wells in his Understanding Animation (1998), who turns to the works of Umberto Eco to try to solve this problem.11 He notes that Eco uses the term “hyper-reality” to describe Disney theme parks, suggesting that theme parks offer a completely artificial environment as a representation of the real. For Wells, this concept of a realer-than-real environment can usefully be extended into animation. Like Disney’s theme parks, animation is a “completely fake” environment. Yet like the theme parks, cartoons seek to artificially create their own “world” which is represented as real. This idea applies to animation in general, says Wells, but he argues it is particularly true of Disney animation. He echoes Kracauer in suggesting that Disney films make a point of emulating live-action cinema “even when making films with fairytale narratives or using animals or caricatured humans as the main characters.”12 While he expresses misgivings about the concept of realism in film, he nevertheless suggests that:
… within animation it is useful to locate the “hyper-realism” of the Disney films as the yardstick by which other kinds of animation may be measured for its relative degree of “realism.” In other words, the animated film may be defined as non-realist or abstract the more it deviates from the model of “hyper-realism” located in the Disney film, and principally a full-length feature like Bambi (1942)…13
For Wells, realism makes a good starting point for the entry into a close analysis of any animated film. The greater the variation from the hyper-realist model, the more an animated film will “demonstrate different kinds of approach and purpose.”14
Wells’ view essentially paints a picture of a spectrum on which animated films can be arranged by their degree of realism, with Disney cartoons at one end, and totally abstract films at the other. Wells suggests several conventions that mark out the “hyper-realist” end of the spectrum:15
- The design, context and action within the hyper-realist film approximates with, and corresponds to the design, context and action within the live-action film’s representation of reality.
- The characters, objects and environment within the hyper-realist animated film are subject to the conventional physical laws of the “real” world.
- The “sound” deployed in the hyper-realist animated film will demonstrate diegetic appropriateness and correspond directly to the context from which it emerges (e.g. a person, object or place must be represented by the sound it actually makes at the moment of utterance, at the appropriate volume etc.).
- The construction, movement and behavioural tendencies of “the body” in the hyper-realist animated film will correspond to the orthodox physical aspects of human beings and creatures in the “real” world.
One difficulty with applying these criteria is that they challenge Wells’ suggestion that Disney cartoons might act as yardstick by which relative realism can be measured. Certainly, perusal of these criteria makes it clear that Disney films are not close to being the definitive “hyper-realist” films. There are actually two comparisons being made in the above list: with live-action film’s depiction of reality in the first criterion, and with the real world itself in the others. While Disney films might be said to correspond closely to the conventions of Classical Hollywood live-action cinema, they are a long way off being a faithful representation of reality. Wells’ third criteria, relating to diegetic sound, in particular seems to be describing a hypothetical animated neo-realist approach that bears little relationship to Disney’s films. Even limiting our examples to Disney’s first five features, it is clear that non-diegetic sound is ubiquitous. Yet sound is just one of the problems encountered in labelling these films as realist. They abound in magical acts (the Queen’s transformation in Snow White, boys turning into donkeys in Pinocchio), animation of usually inanimate objects (Pinocchio himself, and the living mountain, flowers and broomsticks in Fantasia), animals being able to speak (Dumbo and Bambi), and decidedly unreal bodies (an elephant that can fly with its ears in Dumbo). If Wells’ criteria are to be taken as a way of measuring realism in film, it seems we must abandon the idea that Disney films are at or close to one end of the extreme.
Yet the idea that Disney represents the pinnacle of some kind of realism in animation nevertheless holds an intuitive appeal. If Kracauer can condemn films featuring magic mirrors, dancing mushrooms, walking broomsticks, blue fairies, flying elephants and a talkative bunny named Thumper for betraying the animated medium’s potential for fantasy, there must be something else about Disney film that strongly begs description as realistic. One way of reconciling this idea with the apparent unreality of even Disney cartoons is that they represent the height not of reality, but of a particular type of reality. Wells’ term “hyper-reality” seems to capture the sense of what Disney animated films strive for more adequately than the definition he provides for the term does. That is, Disney films do not seem to strive for an exact duplication of either reality or of live-action filmmaking. Wells makes the point that in animation, the depiction of characters, objects and environments are “over-determined:” exaggerated so that they move into “a realism which is simultaneously realistic but beyond the orthodoxies of realism.”16 This slightly tortuous definition is perhaps better explained through example, and Wells cites the accepted Disney style for animating movement from around the start of the 1930s: “squash and stretch” animation. This style over-emphasises movement, and in particular highlights the way in which the body anticipates or reacts to movement. This is a good example of animation exaggerating reality in order to create a greater impression of realism. The term “hyper-realism” seems ideal to describe such an exaggerated realism, but since Wells defines that term slightly differently, I will instead use the term “ultra-realism” to describe this tendency towards a heightened or exaggerated depiction of the real.
Wells seems strangely reluctant to fully embrace the idea that Disney animation is aspiring to such a heightened realism, downplaying the idea by noting that “figures within the Disney canon correspond more directly to ‘realistic’ movement than work informed by other approaches.”17 This is of course true, but that other approaches are less realistic should not be surprising in a medium with almost unlimited potential for abstraction. That Disney animation is more realistic than abstract animation does not in itself suggest Disney animation is aspiring to literal depiction of reality. Of Bambi (1942), a showcase of classical Disney animation of animals, he notes that “[t]he realistic attempts of Bambi to stand up and walk are indeed over-determined, but the sequence only moves beyond realist orthodoxies through the anthropomorphised exchanges between the animals.”18 If, by this, Wells means that the only thing that is strictly impossible in the sequence is the animals talking and behaving in an anthropomorphised manner, then this is true enough. Yet the sequence “moves beyond” realist orthodoxies in other ways. The over-determination of movement is itself moving beyond realist orthodoxies in the sense that it does not aim to reproduce “the orthodox physical aspects of …creatures in the real world.” The variations from the manner in which a real deer actually moves may be subtle, but they are important in this context because they are deliberate. The movements of Bambi are over-exaggerated, even if only slightly, to heighten comic effect and better reveal character. Such imperatives drive the animation to pursue an agenda that is not strictly realistic.
The need for such approaches to realism may arise on a film by film basis, and certainly Disney films vary in the extent of departures from realism. Yet it is also possible that over time, such over-determined movements (and other such conventions of exaggerated reality) can shape expectations of the medium to the extent that they become a codified convention that is understood by audiences to connote reality, even while it is clearly not literally realistic. If we return to the idea of a “spectrum” of realism, Disney can indeed be placed at the realistic end of the spectrum, if only because the studio’s dominance of the form means that other traditions tend to be read in opposition to it. Yet the “realism” is not defined by the correlation between the animated world and the real world (or classical live-action cinema), as Well suggests, but instead by a set of conventions that serve as animation’s particular substitute for reality. Different films will treat reality in divergent ways, and it would be a mistake to treat such conventions as a set of unbreakable rules (just as it would be to assume the conventions of classical Hollywood filmmaking, or particular genres, are unbreakable). Yet a more detailed analysis of the conventions that generally define the notion of “realism” in animated cartoons is clearly necessary, and such a study needs to be sensitive to the different types of realism found in cartoons. Wells is right to say that the relative realism of an animated film makes a useful starting point for the close analysis of the film,19 but such a discussion will have little value – and most likely descend into confusion – if the different ways in which a film is realistic are not carefully thought through. Is Pinocchio (with its elaborate animation and backgrounds depicting a fantasy scenario) more or less realistic than an early episode of “The Simpsons” (which uses stylised animation to depict a relatively realistic domestic scenario)? While this question is deliberately facetious, I pose it here to highlight what must be the next step of analysis: constructing a framework that allows the differences between two such texts to be properly described and understood. Several types of realism might be identified, such as:
- Visual Realism: The extent to which the animated environment and characters are understood by the audience as looking like environments and characters from the actual physical world.
- Aural Realism: The extent to which the sounds of animated environment and characters are understood by the audience as resembling the sounds of environments and characters from the actual physical world.
- Realism of Motion: The extent to which characters move in a fashion that is understood by the audience as resembling the way characters move in the actual physical world.
- Narrative and Character Realism: The extent to which the fictitious events and characters of the animated film are constructed to make the audience believe they are viewing events and characters that actually exist.
- Social Realism: The extent to which the animated film is constructed to make the audience believe that the fictitious world in which the events take place is as complex and varied as the real world.
Several points need to be made before moving on to a more detailed description of these types of realism. Firstly, the first three definitions are deliberately made more tortuous through the insertion of the qualifier “understood by the audience.” This is because realism of motion – for example – is not necessarily constructed so as to resemble the actual real world. Instead, I will suggest that conventions exist in each type of realism that have become accepted as faithful animated depictions of the real, even when upon close examination, the resemblance to the real world is in some way highly qualified. Secondly, in any given film each of these modes of realism can serve to reinforce the other, or one type of realism might be prioritised over the other. Only through the careful description of the particular conventions understood as realistic in each type of realism, and the interrelations between the different types, can realism be understood within any particular tradition of animation. Finally, I make no claim that these “types” are the only types of realism that could be identified: the degree of overlap and reinforcement that occurs between even these types is indicative that notions of realism could be described in multiple ways. These types are suggested as a starting point for further discussion, without any suggestion that they amount to an all-encompassing framework.
A detailed study of realism that covered varying traditions of animation would be a project of enormous scope. Instead, here, I will attempt in the remainder of this paper to use the above model to give a brief example of how these types of realism can interrelate. I will take as my principal examples the first five features produced by the Disney studio, since it is the Disney features of this era that Wells suggests can be used as a “yardstick” of realism, and since these films have come to exert such a disproportionate influence not only over the popular perception of what a Disney film is like, but indeed of the practice of animation in general.20
Visual Realism
Essentially, what I will have called visual realism can be measured by the resemblance of any given shot – considered purely in terms of its appearance as a still image – to a still photograph of the real world. In considering the degree of visual realism found in a shot, it is important to note that it is usually not appropriate to consider all elements within the shot in the same way. Animation usually uses multiple drawings in each shot, and the degree of visual realism for different components varies. Those elements of a shot that move are treated differently to stationary elements, since the latter are drawn once for each shot while the former must be redrawn between frames.21 Generally, this distinction breaks down into backgrounds and characters, with the characters painted on transparent celluloid sheets – “cels” – overlaid on a painted background. (More recent animated features combine drawings within a computer, but the principle remains the same). Characters and backgrounds are therefore subject to quite different design imperatives, with the potential for realism differing for each. Visual realism is just one objective in character design, and arguably a minor one. Even if the intent is to present a fully photo-realistic character, circumstances of drafting skill, time, and budget tend to dictate that the appearance of a character will need to be simplified to facilitate redrawing. Background artwork, however, remains static, and need only be drawn once for each shot. This allows a greater degree of visual realism in the backgrounds. By comparison, prior to the use of cel animation, background art was redrawn every frame and subject to many of the same limitations as character drawings. Thus, in Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the background is drawn with roughly the same degree of detail – and by the same artist – as the central character.22
Once the character and backgrounds are separated, there is an almost unlimited possibility for visual realism in the backgrounds. For example, there is no real technical obstacle to using a photograph as a background. However, the contrast between the drawn character and the photographed background in such a scenario would self-consciously highlight the means of construction of the film. As such, the blending of drawings and photographs (or moving live-action footage) is usually used only in circumstances where the narrative foregrounds the juxtaposition, for example by fashioning a story of the real world colliding with the animated fantasy world.23 For much the same reasons, the use of model environments as a background occurs relatively rarely in Hollywood animation. The main proponent of this process was the Fleischer Studio, which used it for a number of shorts in the 1930s.24 Here the emphasis was placed on the resulting appearance of depth, rather than photo-realism: the background’s status as a model “set” was usually disguised to hide the manner in which the effect was created. While these model sets are an atypical process, the urge to hide the means of construction is illuminating about more standard practices in background design. While backgrounds must be considered a separate element, and will usually show a greater realism of detail than characters, there is a need to avoid an obviously discordant effect. Photos, live-action footage and models are not usually used because they highlight the artificiality of the animated characters. Backgrounds are also usually considered secondary in importance to the characters, and are designed to be visually recessive, without creating obvious disharmony.
For these reasons, backgrounds are usually provided as painted backdrops to match the painted cels to be placed upon them. Within the constraints on realism inherent to a painted environment, however, the norm for background design in the early Disney features is a literally realist approach. The visual realism of backgrounds could be analysed with regards to many components, but for my purposes we can consider two main aspects: detail and dimensionality. These concepts are largely self-explanatory, with detail describing the extent to which the background depicts complex particulars of the environment, and dimensionality referring to the extent that an illusion of depth is created. With regards to both measures, the typical approach in the early Disney features is to provide the greatest amount of realism possible within constraints of technology and budget. In the early scene of Snow White where the title character washes pavings on a stairwell and then sings into a wishing well, for example, the backgrounds show such details as the shadow cast by the balustrade, cracks and pockmarks on the stonework of the stair and well, and water stains on the side of the well. Dimensionality is achieved partly through drawings the backgrounds with realistic perspective, and also through separating the drawings into layers so that the “background” can include foreground details. As Snow White moves from the stairs to the well, for example, she walks behind the bough of a tree and is obscured. She is also slightly obscured by the frame of the well Such an effect can be achieved most simply by layering drawings on a conventional animation stand, but for complex movements involving shifting perspective, the Disney studio developed a multiplane camera that suspended drawings in separate sheets of glass. This allowed (simulated) camera movement while maintaining perspective, and is most conspicuous in Snow White as the title character moves through the forest.
This is not to say, however, that the general literalness is not modified on occasion to better serve the story. Minor changes to the background style to subtly enhance mood (the murky, ill-defined imagery in the dark wood early in Snow White, for example) are common. When used in a restrained manner that does not contradict a literal depiction of the story world, such design serves the same supportive function that atmospheric lighting, set design and cinematography do in Hollywood live-action cinema. However, more extreme examples do occasionally occur in these Disney features that rupture the literal depiction of the story world, and in these moments, the cartoons venture towards more expressionistic modes of filmmaking. Perhaps the most extreme such moment occurs in Fantasia when Mickey Mouse, in a frantic rage, cuts up an enchanted broomstick with an axe. As he does so the screen turns a deep crimson that is at odds with the established colours of Mickey’s environment, and in the aftermath of his rage the colour recedes into an equally incongruous monochromatic scheme. In the early Disney features, such instances occur only at moments of extreme narrative motivation: a story moment of sufficient intensity to justify the design and limit the audience’s awareness of the expressionist design. The maintenance of narrative and character realism, in effect, is motivating a limited departure from literal visual realism. This qualified, but generally applicable adherence to literalism of backgrounds can be contrasted with other traditions in Hollywood animation, such as the heavily stylised or even abstract backgrounds that occurred in Chuck Jones’ cartoons in the period around 1942 to 1943, and then later across the industry following the success of the UPA studio in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The widespread adoption of abstract and stylised backgrounds that followed the UPA breakthrough represented a fundamental shift in the conventions of visual realism, yet it gained widespread acceptance remarkably quickly (aided in no small part by pragmatic concerns: simpler backgrounds were cheaper to produce). Now that such approaches are familiar and accepted by audiences, even quite conventional animation productions now enjoy remarkable freedom in designing background artwork, with abstract backgrounds not perceived as a threat to the overall visual realism of the scene.25
The discussion of the realism of characters is complicated by factors related to the movement of the character. The “performance” of a character achieved in animation (realism of motion) is arguably the greatest determinant of the realism of that character, and as such the design of a character needs to facilitate this performance. The driving force in character design was therefore the gradually improving abilities of animators, and the consequent styles of motion they employed. Hence in the silent era until the mid 1930s, a period dominated by “rubber hose” animation, characters tend to a corresponding design style where the head, torso and other body features are kept to simple geometrical shapes, even when rules of logic and perspective might dictate otherwise (Mickey’s ears always remain circular, as if each was a perfect black sphere). Limbs are drawn as tubes that join these body parts. In the 1930s, as Disney led the charge towards “squash and stretch” animation, there was an accompanying sophistication in character design. The whole body became more obviously a single unit, with less reliance on geometric shapes, body parts that merged realistically with the torso, and more attention to details (facial features, clothing, etc). It is these designs that we see in the classic Disney features. Yet the arduousness of animating a character that was excessively detailed kept the character designs further from a literal realism than the backgrounds. Lines are kept relatively simple, and colours are usually flat and consistent, without shading.26 Thus while backgrounds could freely aspire to the realism of landscape painting, character artwork necessarily remained at the level of caricature rather than portraiture.27 While character design did shift marginally further toward caricature for limited animation such as late theatrical or television animation, if considered purely in terms of visual realism the essential conventions of character design have remained remarkably unchanged since the late 1930s. The amount of detail in a character from Snow White is not greatly different from that seen in an episode of “The Simpsons.” What has changed in the latter example is the greater stiffness of the poses and the limitation of movement.
Dimensionality of character design is a slightly more difficult issue to address. Animation drawings in 1940s animation tend to present depth in character drawings very faithfully: if Pinocchio moves his arm in an arc towards the screen, the animation drawings will accurately record the perspective shortening of the limb. In that sense dimensionality is very much a feature of the character’s visual realism. Yet the process of painting cels favours areas of colour that are even and flat. The lack of shading means that there is a “flatness” associated with cel-animated characters, since there is rarely any indication of the play of light across a three dimensional surface. The exceptions to this rule are illustrative. Firstly, there are sequences where the animator has included the animation of shadows in their animation drawings, abandoning the traditional approach of drawing characters as line drawings and animating texture and shape. The most famous example of such an approach is Vladimir (Bill) Tytla’s animation of the demon Chernobog in Fantasia. The effect in this sequence, with the demon strongly lit from above and below to emphasise the contours of his body, is startling for the feeling of reality it evokes: the sequence is still cited as arguably the most accomplished sequence of animation ever drawn.28 Yet Tytla’s bravura animation is famous precisely because the effect was so difficult to achieve, and such an exceptional display of artistry makes an impractical basis for standard practice. An easier method for achieving a shadow effect is “modelling,” where standard animation drawings are coloured to simulate the play of light from a single light source across a three dimensional form. This effect is used occasionally in the Disney features (as in the sequence where the Dwarfs discover Snow White in their house in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Such shadowing can be achieved by either modifying the colouring of the character when the cels are painted, or for more recent productions, through computerised shadowing effects. In either case, however, the animation drawings remain the same: the character remains essentially a line drawing, and the shadows are an effect applied subsequent to animation. Such an effect is generally only used in classic cartoons where circumstances of lighting would throw characters features into relief and the absence of shadows would therefore be particularly incongruous. It qualifies, but does not seriously challenge, the essential “flatness” of animated characters.
What this discussion highlights is the extent to which visual realism is dominated by convention, and the way in which these conventions evolve in opposite direction for th characters and backgrounds. Background artwork, relatively easy to make literally realistic, was conventionally highly literal from an early date, a convention which was then slowly relaxed. In the area of character design, by contrast, the necessary primitiveness of early character artwork meant that a graphical shorthand that emphasised caricature came to be widely accepted by audiences. As the skill of animators increased, visual realism was increased. However, most animated characters remain highly caricatured in design, since increased visual realism is secondary to other needs that are difficult to reconcile with highly intricate character design. Primary amongst these is realism of motion, which will be described further below.
Aural Realism
Paul Wells, as already mentioned, describes hyper-realistic sound in animation as sound that “will demonstrate diegetic appropriateness and correspond directly to the context from which it emerges.”29 Generally, classical models of live-action cinema follow a slightly less strict model, where sounds are generally diegetically appropriate, but certain types of non-diegetic sounds (such as a musical score, or voice-over narration) are accepted by convention. Much of the Disney studio’s animation follows a superficially similar model, especially if the films are compared with live-action musicals, where generic conventions allow a looser approach to the “appropriateness” of sound. However, the nature of the animated film complicates the relationship between sound and image, and leads to some subtle but important differences in notions of what is accepted as realistic.
Just as animation does not photographically reproduce any actual real-world location, neither does it record any actual location sound. In live-action cinema, production sound (sound recorded on set or location) is the starting point in building the soundtrack. While it is common for the production audio to be largely discarded and re-recorded (due to problems with the quality of the original audio), it will nevertheless guide the final sound mix, and any re-recording of diegetic sound will obscure its post-recorded nature. The soundtrack is therefore constructed either along with, or after, the image, and the main diegetic components of the sound will either be recordings of the “real” sound or carefully recorded facsimiles. In animation, by contrast, there can be no production sound as the image is constructed purely through drawings: when Snow White opens the door of the dwarf’s house, for example, there is no real hinge to creak. Furthermore, one of the most central aspects of the soundtrack – the dialogue – must be recorded in advance, with a disconnect occurring between the voice and its source. This disjunction allows for the use of extreme vocal styles that would not usually be appropriate when the sound is to remain wedded to a human performer, such as Clarence Nash’s voice for Donald Duck. It also allows certain types of audio processing that would be thwarted by a need to maintain synchronisation with the image, such as the speeding up of sound used for several of Mel Blanc’s vocal characterisations for Warner Bros. In both these examples, however, the unusual voices that result are still quite diegetically appropriate: if we accept the on-screen image of a talking duck, then both Blanc and Nash provide valid interpretations of what one might sound like. The departure from realism here is not due to a loosening of diegetic appropriateness, but instead is an example of the separation of image and sound allowing both visuals and audio to explore more extreme possibilities while remaining mutually appropriate. Such dialogue is therefore a reminder that notions of “diegetic appropriateness,” while useful, cannot be used as the only marker of aural realism.
The use of sound effects and music was shaped both by the means of producing animated soundtracks, along with the historical circumstances of sound’s introduction to the form. Synchronised sound was one of a number of technical innovations that the Disney studio used to distinguish its productions from those of competitors, resulting in an early tendency towards very close relationships between music and sound. In the studio’s first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie (1928), Walt Disney highlighted the technological advance by insisting on an extremely tight musical integration. In the earliest sound shorts this shows off the novelty of synchronised sound, but by the time of The Skeleton Dance (1929) the frame-by-frame construction of animation was being taken advantage of to achieve extremely tightly choreographed musical numbers. Such music-driven action is not universal in Disney cartoons: one of the principle points of difference between Disney’s “Mickey Mouse” and “Silly Symphony” series is the primacy of image or music in driving action, image dictating sound in the former and sound dictating image in the latter.30 However, it is prevalent enough that the term “mickey-mousing” is still used to describe instances where a score aurally “matches” visuals in a highly literal or descriptive manner.31 This trait would reach a climax at the Disney studio with the basing of Fantasia (1940) entirely around pre-existing musical pieces, and the studio’s dominance of the industry is such that other studios emulated this practice. For much of the 1930s, for example, Warner Bros.’ “Merrie Melodies” series was dominated by faux-Silly Symphonies. The result was that in this period Hollywood animation was disproportionately dominated by musical forms that were simply one amongst many genres seen in Classical live-action cinema in the same period. This has implications for the type of sound heard in the earliest of the features.
The early Disney features echo musicals in their use of musical numbers to convey ideas, introduce characters, or simply as set-pieces in themselves. Snow White, in particular, relies heavily on songs to carry the action: the introduction of the Prince, for example, is handled almost without dialogue. Rick Altman, writing about live-action Hollywood musicals, has used the term “supradiegetic” to describe the heightened, not strictly diegetically appropriate performative mode found in musicals. The supradiegetic sound creates “a utopian space in which all singers and dancers achieve a unity unimaginable in the now superseded world of temporal, psychological causality.”32 While the transgressions of diegetic appropriateness that occur in such scenes are readily accepted by audiences, this is not to say that they are accepted as realist: rather, they are accepted as a generically motivated piece of fantasy. In the later features shifts in and out of such modes are very fluid, but Snow White leads in to most of its songs by preceding them with short passages of rhyming dialogue. What is interesting in the context of realism, however, is how purely “musical” the sound outside of the song sequences is. While sound effects are not entirely absent, they tend to be discrete and are far less frequent than would normally be expected, with music usually covering the absence. For example, as Snow White looks down on the dwarfs’ cottage she bends back a branch and releases it: there is no swish or creak of wood. She then proceeds with a host of animals to the cottage door, but there are no animal or woodland noises to be heard, only the lush orchestral score. When she does knock on the door, there is an appropriate sound effect, but after each of her two knocks, the sound effect is echoed by the orchestra, effectively creating a dialogue between diegetic and non-diegetic sound. In such moments, the film is effectively operating in a musical mode, with characters exhibiting a harmony with the music that resembles the supradiegetic mode of a musical, but without the signposted “break” into a fantasy mode that accompanies the songs. It is doubtful whether the absence of many diegetically appropriate sound effects is noticed by most audiences.
The soundtrack of Snow White shows how much variation from diegetic appropriateness can be sustained in animation without creating a readily apparent unreal effect. This is allowed by the separation between image and sound inherent to the form, as well as audience familiarity with the very tight harmony of music and image that had featured in so many of the Disney shorts. It is notable, however, that the substitution of music for sound effects is much less apparent in Pinocchio, Dumbo, and other later Disney features, where the sound leans much closer to full diegetic appropriateness. The loosening of expectations of aural realism seen in the lush musical fairy tale of Snow White seems to have been less suited to the more elaborate and story-driven features that followed, which demanded a more conventional approach to aural realism.
Realism of Motion
Motion is central to the question of realism. When writers such as Kracauer condemn the “realism” of Disney cartoons, or conversely celebrate the “illusion of life” they create, it is seemingly the way things move rather than the fantastic stories that are being referred to. The movements of characters such as Bambi or the Dwarfs are accepted as more realistic than those of other animated traditions. But what exactly are the properties of motion that are accepted as realistic?
As a starting point, we can consider the simplest hypothesis: that motion in Disney cartoons is accepted as more realistic because it more closely resembles a literal depiction of how things actually move. This idea holds true to a certain point. We have already seen that the visual realism of characters gradually increased throughout the 1930s as animation styles changed, and superficially at least it appears that these changes in animation style were part of a realist drive. In 1932 Chouinard School of Art staff member Don Graham was employed to teach first life drawing, and then “action analysis” classes, with the intention of increasing the realism of animation.33 This meant the death of “rubber hose” animation, which favoured fluidity of movement over its realism. As Barrier puts it:
By the early thirties… many animators were relying on curving forms so heavily that they were sacrificing any sense of a body’s structure for the sake of smooth, flowing movement…. [S]uch “rubber hose” animation could not be reconciled with Disney’s emerging emphasis on telling coherent cartoon stories that would engage an audience.34
“Rubber hose” animation was therefore abandoned during this period because it did not meet Paul Wells’ final criteria of the hyper-realist film: the animated body did not “correspond to the orthodox physical aspects of human beings and creatures in the ‘real’ world.” Disney animators therefore studied live action film in great detail to discover the ways that bodies actually moved, in order to better reflect it in their animation. Sometimes this was simply an educational exercise; sometimes live footage would be used as reference for a particular sequence; and in some cases, this extended to the use of the “rotoscope,” whereby live action was actually traced as the basis for animation drawings. Heavily live action-based animation appears in a number of Disney features: the title character and (particularly) the Prince in Snow White; the Blue Fairy in Pinocchio; and most of the human characters in Cinderella (1950). Outside the Disney studio, the character of Gulliver in Gulliver’s Travels (Dave Fleischer, 1939) was rotoscoped, while the much later feature The Lord of the Rings (Ralph Bakshi, 1978) depended on the rotoscope extremely heavily.35
Such sequences highlight that while the movements in Disney cartoons do more closely resemble the actual motion of creatures and people than those in other traditions (such as the wild bodily distortions common in Rod Scribner’s animation for Bob Clampett, or limited animation seen in Hanna-Barbera television animation), it is not a strict literalism that is strived for. In Snow White, the live-action reference footage was heavily reworked, where possible, to disguise its rotoscoped appearance. While this can partly be explained by a desire to minimise the clash in style between Snow White and the dwarfs, it is also symptomatic of the failure of the traced drawings to achieve the desired result. The most heavily rotoscoped sequences (those involving Snow White and the Prince at the start and close of the film, which were prepared under extreme time pressure shortly before release) are generally regarded as the weakest in the film, and the Prince seems a far less vivid character than the non-rotoscoped Dwarfs.36 While the effect can sometimes be striking for the particular kind of literal realism it brings (Leonard Maltin notes that in Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver’s “every move, every gesture, and every wrinkle of his clothing are uncannily right”37), it has rarely been used for more than a few characters or scenes at a time. Ralph Bakshi’s heavily rotoscoped Lord of the Rings seems to vindicate this approach: while the realism of the animation would be hard to fault against hyper-realist criteria, the animation (and hence the characterisation) seems flat. What is of interest, then, is what kind of conventions are dictating the realism of Disney animation, if it is not the hyper-realism that can be achieved through use of the rotoscope. Even volumes written by animators that attempt to outline the principles of classical Disney animation have some difficulty in explicitly formulating what kind of realism is sought.38
Richard Williams, in his instructional manual for animators, attempts to explain the paradox that both brought Disney animators to ever closer study of human form and movement, but then required them to move beyond it:
Many cartoonists and animators say that the very reason they do cartoons is to get away from realism… into the free realms of the imagination. They’ll correctly point out that most cartoon animals don’t look like animals – they’re designs, mental constructs… But to make these designs work, the movements have to be believable – which leads back to realism and real actions, which leads back to studying the human or animal figure to understand its structure and movement. What we want to achieve isn’t realism, it’s believability.39
Here, by referring to “believability,” Williams seems to suggest a criterion that animation might aspire to, if it is not literal realism. The difficulty of this formulation is that it seems to leave us where we started. After all, why isn’t (hyper) realism believable? The answer might be found in considering what is lost in the animation (or rotoscoping) process. We have already seen that character design is simplified to facilitate redrawing, and this loss of details (for example, the subtleties of the construction of a human face) naturally limit the potential for performance in an animated character. In his own discussion of how to animate, veteran Disney and Fleischer animator Shamus Culhane puts it bluntly:
We have no Oliviers or Chaplins among our cartoon actors, so there would be no point in writing an animated film that places the burden of subtle acting on the animator. This goal may never be reached; in spite of the efforts of the staff at the Disney studio … very subtle acting may never be possible to attain in this medium… In my opinion, the best use of animation is when it caricatures, not imitates, real life.40
This can be seen as the key to Williams’ idea of believability: the inherent stylisation (at the level of visual realism) in animation forces a performance style that uses motions that are based upon, but exaggerate, the way that things actually move. This is the “over-determined” depiction of movement to which Paul Wells referred.41 We can define this as an ultra-realist, rather than hyper-realist, aesthetic.
The conventions of this style of movement can be compared to those arising from other artforms where meaning is communicated primarily through movement, due to the limitations inherent to the form: artforms such as dance, mime, and silent cinema. There seems great scope for instructive cross-disciplinary study that explores the links in performative styles between these forms. Certainly animators seem to be aware of the parallels: in his instructional manual for animators, Williams draws on the comments of Marcel Marceau and Charlie Chaplin to illustrate animation principles.42 In the current context it is possible only to note some of the most important conventions identified by Williams and other animators about how things (and particularly characters) move in classical cartoons:
- Anticipation and reaction are emphasised, with the poses before and after an action helping to communicate the action.
- Movement is further enhanced through overlapping action: that is, starting to move one part of the body first and having the rest of the body follow.
- The effect of movement and gravity on the body is emphasised through the use of compression and distention (“squash and stretch”).
- Maintenance of the overall volume of a body is more important than proportions, which can more freely be altered for effect (in reaction “takes,” for example, or during “squash and stretch.”)
- Walks, runs and other such incidental movement is exaggerated to communicate personality traits (a broad swagger for arrogant characters, timid steps for shy characters, etc).
- All parts of the body are manipulated to express emotion.
- Fluidity of motion can be increased through “breaking” of joints, particularly on fast motion: the movement of a joint in the wrong direction will not be perceived by the audience, and the overall movement will read correctly.
- The speed of action can be manipulated to better communicate emotion or mood.43
This is, by necessity, only a brief summary of a few key or representative principles: Williams spends 340 pages on the same material. However, they serve to illustrate the ways in which a loosening of reality is used to serve story and characterisation, and to overcome some of the limitations of the form. It should also be evident that these techniques tend to exaggerate reality rather than violate it directly (for example, the squashing and stretching of the body is based upon the actual distortions evident in live-action photography of human bodies). This is the kind of realism that I have already described as “ultra-realism,” as opposed to the more literal “hyper-realism” defined by Wells.
Narrative and Character Realism
We have seen that Kracauer viewed animation as an inverse form to live-action cinema, where fantasy reigned (or should reign) and real life was anathema. The problems of creating realistic motion that I have discussed certainly highlight the difficulties involved in achieving a basic believability of such a simple act as a character walking from one side of the screen to another (Richard Williams’ book of animation techniques, for example, spends 74 pages showing how to animate a walk).44 This makes complex narratives a challenge. While narrative is an artifice, in live-action cinema it is constructed from the building blocks of reality that Kracauer valued so much but which are unavailable to animation: real people, objects, and settings. Yet at all levels – production, distribution, exhibition – Golden Age animation was inextricably intertwined with Classical Hollywood live-action cinema, which was founded upon a particular narrative paradigm. Even when Hollywood productions turned to elaborate fantasy, the fantastic was structured around narratives driven by believable characters, causal plot structures, and a closed story world.45 The quest for realism in animation was driven by many imperatives, but the ability to sustain audience interest in a narrative was key amongst them. In Snow White, for example, Disney had to prove that audiences would respond to the narrative of a feature length cartoon – a possibility seriously doubted by many at the time – and this required a belief in and identification with the characters. It is this sense in the audience that characters really exist, and that narratives really occur, that I have described as narrative and character realism. This is a different level of realism to that that has already been discussed: narrative and character realism is an end in itself, where visual realism and realism of motion are means towards that end. A full discussion of the ways in which audiences identify with characters or events on the screen is not possible here: to attempt such a discussion would be to open one of the great Pandora’s boxes of film theory. What I wish to discuss here is the particular types of narrative and character reality that Disney animation seeks to create.
Early animated films tended to downplay any sense that the animated world was “real.” Particularly in earlier examples, animation is very much part of the “cinema of attractions” as described by Tom Gunning.46 The novelty of the form was integral to the appeal of much early silent animation, and this is highlighted and exploited through a number of devices. Predictably, gags and situations that are impossible to perform in live action are a key element, and the process of animation itself was often foregrounded. Donald Crafton has noted that the interjection (literally or metaphorically) of the figure of the “life-giving” animator is a key theme of early animation, from Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) to Max Fleischer’s “Out of the Inkwell” series.47 While the act of giving life is often shown as a magical rather than industrial process, such intervention nevertheless highlights that the animated world is not a closed, hermetic story world in the sense encouraged by classical Hollywood narratives. As animation became a familiar form, advancing technology continued to be an attraction, and the coming of sound brought its own changes. Hank Sartin has noted, for example, that Warner shorts of the early to mid 1930s often mimicked the aesthetics of vaudeville, even to the extent of having singing characters lined up as a chorus, as if on stage, with narratives driven by vaudevillean “bits.”48 Characterisation could be quite sophisticated, as characters could be developed across a series of films (the best example prior to Disney being Pat Sullivan’s Felix the Cat series).49 Even where this occurred, however, there was not the sustained interest or involvement in the lives or world of the characters that occurs in Classical Hollywood narratives. The overall effect of these conventions was that the story world of the animated cartoon existed as an anarchic space, with little narrative motivation for events and no attempt to create a closed story world.
This needs to be kept in mind when considering the contrasting emphasis on narrative and character reality that emerged in the Disney features. The shift in emphasis in Disney’s work in the 1930s was a result not simply of a creative urge, but also economic reality. Disney understood that no matter how good his shorts were, he could never charge a premium for them in theaters, since it was feature films that drew audiences and hence the highest rentals. By 1933, Disney had decided to produce a feature film,50 and his short subjects were from that point on subservient to that aim: through the mid 1930s they were used to experiment with techniques and refine the skills necessary for Snow White, and after that film’s success the studio’s best animators worked predominantly on features. The shift to the feature form increased the move away from the cinema of attractions or pseudo-vaudevillian approaches that had already commenced in Disney’s 1930s shorts. In approaching Snow White there was a need to at least ensure audience interest was maintained throughout the picture, and preferably make audiences grieve with the dwarfs at Snow White’s funeral. In accounts of the history of the production of the film, it is striking the level of fear that the thought of such a dramatic focus raised in the artists.51 Today, with the feature cartoon a familiar form, it is common for animated features to be highly self-reflexive even when emotional involvement is sought: The Lion King (1994), for example, switches gears quickly between an emotional death scene and a bird mocking the Disney theme park anthem “It’s a Small World.” In the early features, however, the artists tended not to highlight the means of construction of cartoons: the films utilise much the same conventions adopted in classical Hollywood cinema, and similarly aim to achieve an audience involvement in a closed story world.
The idea of closed narratives is familiar enough, but it is interesting to note the particular way that the Disney features reconciled such closed story worlds with the traditions (or, if you believe Kracauer, the “inherent affinities”) of the animated medium. If the appeal of animation had relied for so long upon the effortless realisation of the impossible and a flagrant celebration of the form’s artifice, how could this aspect be maintained without the sense of narrative and character realism being jeopardised? The answer, in the early features, was to carefully justify the types of magical display traditional to cartoons through plot construction, character psychology, and even thematic devices. The fairytale world in which the early features take place is itself a narrative ploy to situate magical acts within an accepted generic framework. Yet Disney further invests his simple fairytale narratives with a psychological intensity that transforms the visual trickery of animation from a source of humour to a form of expressionism. In Snow White, the title character does not simply flee through a dark forest: her distress is pushed to hysterical extremes to the point where the trees come alive and branches become grasping hands. Many other examples are more elaborate still. When Lampwick turns into a donkey in Pinocchio, it is after several minutes have been spent establishing the island as a place of dark magic, and the idea is further justified through dialogue (Lampwick’s question as his head turns into a donkey’s is “What do I look like, a jackass?”). Perhaps more importantly, though, the transformation is thematically justified (through the opposition between Jiminy Cricket and Lampwick as good and bad role models) as a lesson in the consequences of avoiding responsibility. Likewise, the Queen’s transformation to a crone in Snow White is motivated not only by exposition about a magic potion (and the generic acceptance of such devices in fairytales), but also by character psychology: it manifests the vanity and fear of ageing that appears to be at the root of her hatred of Snow White. Even the most foolproof method of explaining away an apparent breach of logic – the dream sequence – is additionally motivated by thematic material in the form of lessons to be learned: the dangers of alcohol in Dumbo, and the consequences of shirking chores in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” segment of Fantasia. Disney has his cake while eating it too: the “magical” or “anarchic” possibilities available to animation are deployed to reinforce, rather than rupture, the reality of narrative and character.
What is interesting about the instance of narrative and character realism is that the conventions construed as realist have been adopted wholesale from a tradition of live-action cinema. Faced with the uncertainty and challenges of producing an animated feature, there was an increased adherance to narrative conventions that, while certainly not unknown in animated shorts, had tended to be loosely applied. Interestingly, once the Disney feature was well established as an animated form, these conventions would be relaxed: more recent Disney features are much more willing to highlight the artifice of the form and readopt the distancing narrative strategies found in silent or other Hollywood animation (such as shorts in the Tex Avery / Warner Bros. style).52
Social Realism
The suggestion that encouraging audience belief in the existence of narrative and characters is a form of realism makes sense in a medium where artificiality is so readily apparent and so many early works foregrounded their ability to craft narratives of fantasy or anarchy. Yet it also serves as a reminder of the difference between animation and live action, since a strong emphasis on narrative – such as the causal narratives of classical Hollywood filmmaking – would not usually be considered a realist device in the live action context. Quite the opposite: since our everyday lives do not revolve around a single narrative thread, with all events somehow relating to that end, and working towards a neat resolution, the idealised narrative pattern of classical Hollywood is itself a form of fantasy. When filmmakers eschew such narrative and instead feature narrative devices such as “dead time,” narratively unmotivated or irrelevant actions, or unresolved conclusions, it can often be to create an effect that more closely resembles our everyday life. Complementary stylistic approaches include long takes, handheld camerawork, untreated on-location audio, improvised dialogue and filming with real locations or untrained actors. The choice of subject matter and thematics can also enhance the resemblance to real life, by focusing on “everyday” people and avoiding trite morals or themes. While all these artistic approaches are familiar from non-Hollywood filmmaking (and are not unknown even within Hollywood),53 in practice an uncomplicated use of these devices towards purely realist ends is not often seen, since these approaches tended to be complicated by other imperatives.54 When they are seen together, however, the realistic effect they create can be termed “social realism:” a cinema that strives toward a depiction of the complicated, messy, downbeat nature of everyday life.
In practice, one could “unpack” this definition into several further overlapping and interrelated types of realism, for example by separating narrative, stylistic and thematic approaches, but for my purposes here this definition will suffice. This is because I raise such cinema as reminder of just how little Disney practice ventures in the directions we might think of as realistic in live-action cinema. The Disney features take place in storybook worlds, with a classical Hollywood style and narrative structure. Their narratives might have a certain realism compared to, for example, The Skeleton Dance, in which character’s actions are not psychologically motivated and the limited plot is dominated by magical acts, but this is simply a relative position. A true-neo-realist animated cinema, or animated cinema-verite style documentary, is probably rendered impossible (or at least highly compromised) by the technological means by which animated films are produced. Yet by keeping in mind the idea of social realism we can avoid foreclosing other artistic options from the form before they are fully explored. In introducing this discussion of types of realism, I raised the rhetorical question of whether Pinocchio or an early episode of “The Simpsons” is more realistic: “The Simpsons” is much less realistic in terms of most aspects of realism that I have discussed, but shows greater social realism.55 An even greater degree of realism might be expected if full animation (in the Disney tradition or otherwise) were harnessed to more socially realistic subject matter: even with its rich layers of fantasy and caricature, there are the seeds of such an approach in the domestic scenes in Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville (2003). It may be that there is little point in harnessing a more socially realist view to Disney-style animation. It is arguable that more limited, less showy styles of animation are more suited to such subject matter, or that such a project would indeed stray too far from the “inherent affinities” of the medium. However, discussions of realism in animation should not presume that this is the case, nor fail to be aware of the distance between Disney’s realism and approaches to realism in other cinematic modes.
Conclusion
Understanding realism is vital to understanding animation, since one of the great struggles of the form has been to create realistic effects in a medium that is inherently artificial and created in a particularly laborious fashion. The Disney features have come to be accepted as the pinnacle of animated realism, yet the convention surrounding the “illusion of life” are too rarely examined. A number of different types of realism can be identified, and I have attempted a preliminary discussion of some of these types here. Yet even this brief exploration has shown some of the problems that can be uncovered when the concept of “realism” is questioned. For each type of realism identified, different relationships to the real can be sketched. Furthermore, one form of reality might be prioritised over another, or one type of realism might serve to reinforce another. For example, if the intent is to achieve audience interest and identification in the character’s personality and situation (narrative and character realism), having the character move and behave realistically (realism of motion) is more important than having the character look real (visual realism). Such interplay partially explains why cartoons can simultaneously combine outrageous exaggeration with a painstaking fidelity to reality, without the audience perceiving an incongruity. Just as the free-spirited nature of animated cartoons belies the arduous manner of their construction, the audience’s casual acceptance of an animated reality belies the complex underpinnings of the cartoon notion of the real.
Notes
[1] The use of the unqualified term “animation” should be read as a reference to cel animation, which is my primary focus here. I hope it will be evident that forms such as stop-motion and computer animation will show both parallels and interesting differences from the points I make about cel animation, but for simplicity I have ignored these unless the similarity or contrast is revealing about the instance of cel animation.
[2] In the former category I am counting such work as Maltin, L. 1987, Of Mice and Magic: A History of Amercian Animated Cartoons, New York: New American Library (Revised Edition) and Crafton, D. 1993, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928, Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, while in the latter I am thinking of Adamson, J. 1975, Tex Avery: King of Cartoons, New York: Da Capo Press or Lenburg, J. 1993 The Great Cartoon Directors, New York: Da Capo Press.
[3] Kracauer, S. 1960, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, London: Oxford University Press, 12. This idea itself has been sharply criticised. See, for example, Noël Carroll’s series of articles anthologised in his book Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll Carrol, N., 1984, “Medium Specificity Arguments and the Self Consciously Invented Arts: Film Video and Photography”, andn 1985, “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” in Carrol, N, 1996, Theorizing the Moving Image, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[4] I have chosen not to labor this point in the text, but it requires clarification. For simplicity I have interchanged the concepts of “photographic reproduction” and “indexical link to reality” somewhat. While adequate for my discussion, this is not strictly accurate. Photographic reproduction is of course not absent in animation: it is the mechanism by which hand-produced drawings are reproduced on the screen. What is absent is in fact the direct indexical link to the real that photography usually affords. In photography or live-action film, an object such as – for example – a chair, is represented on-screen by an image of an actual chair. In animation, we instead see on-screen an image of a drawing of a chair. In semiotic terms, it is the difference between an indexical and an iconic representation.
[5] Kracauer, 89-90. A similar discussion of animation in the realist context can be found in Armes R. 1974, Film and Reality, Harmondsworth: Penguin, chapters 16 and 25.
[6] Failure to utilise the “cinematic approach” is for Kracauer at best a defiance of the properties of the medium. The “drawings brought to life” of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1934), for example, are described as a “retrogression.” Kracaeur, chapter 5, and page 85 for the reference to the retrogression of Caligari. Kracauer, of course, made the psychological and social implications of Caligari’s aesthetics the subject of his From Caligari to Hitler.
[7] Schneider, S. 1988, That’s All Folks: The Art of Warner Bros. Animation, New York: Henry Holt & Company, 44: “Rather than creating ‘the illusion of life,’ the Warner animators began asking audiences to recognize that theirs was an art of pure illusion – but even so, go with it, folks; jump on for the rip-roaring ride.”
[8] Maltin, 229.
[9] Barrier, M. 1999, Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, See especially chapters 5 and 6.
[10] Joe Adamson’s extended study of Avery’s work, for example, could easily have lapsed into simple “Avery = fantasy = good, Disney = reality = bad” dichotomies, but instead notes that an element of realism was needed to give the fantastic elements a comic charge. Adamson, 40.
[11] Wells, P. 1998, Understanding Animation, London / New York: Routledge, 24-28.
[12] Wells, 25.
[13] Wells, 25
[14] Wells, 26.
[15] These dot points are direct quotes from Wells, 25-26.
[16] Wells, 27.
[17] Wells, 27.
[18] Wells, 28.
[19] Wells, 25.
[20] These being Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Dumbo (1941), and Bambi (1942). Disney animation – encompassing shorts and features from the early 1920s to the present day – represents an extremely wide range of practices. These five films, however, seem usefully to define the “definitive” or “classic” Disney practice: the mature Disney style, prior to production disruptions of the early 1940s, and with maximum involvement of Walt Disney himself.
[21] For details of the production methods of traditional animation studios, see Culhane, S. 1988, Animation: From Script to Screen, New York: St Martin’s Press and Gray, M., 1991, Cartoon Animation: Introduction to a Career, Northrdige: Lion’s Den Publications.
[22] For a detailed account of McCay’s career see Crafton, chapter 4. Each frame of Gertie can be considered as a single image, like the newspaper cartoons on which McCay started his career.
[23] The tradition of such live-action / cartoon hybrids is long and has a rich history starting in the silent era with such series as the Fleischer Brothers’ “Out of the Inkwell” films. Other notable examples from the sound era include Friz Freleng’s Warner Bros. short You Ought to Be in Pictures (1940), the “Jolly Holiday” sequence of Mary Poppins (1964), and the feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), to name just three of many.
[24] Maltin, 113-114.
[25] Fantasia 2000 (2000), shows the diversity of background art used. Segments such as “Pomp and Circumstance” and the “Firebird Suite” are broadly hyper-realist, yet “Rhapsody in Blue” and “Carnival of the Animals” are staged in front of flat areas of colour with only simple line drawings delineating objects. Even the more conventional The Emperor’s New Groove (2001) occasionally stages scenes in front of sparse, undetailed coloured backdrops.
[26] When “modelling” is used to shade characters and give them additional dimensionality, it is usually because circumstances of lighting would make the absence of such shadow effects incongruous: for example, when Snow White or the dwarfs are lit solely by lamps they carry.
[27] An interesting contrast is computer animation, which automates the replication of character detail and therefore provides equal freedom for detail in character and background design. While the form is still in its infancy, a split can already be seen between those filmmakers who choose designs closer to literal realism (such as the human characters in Shrek) and a more “cartoony” design that limits the realism of characters (as found in Pixar films such as Toy Story).
[28] See, for example, Grant, J. 2001, Masters of Animation, London: BT Batsford.
[29] Wells, 25.
[30] Curtis, S. 1992, “The Sound of Early Warner Bros. Cartoons,” in Altman, R. (ed.), 1992, Sound Theory Sound Practice, New York & London: Routlegde, 194.
[31] Furniss, M. 1998, Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics, Sydney: John Libbey, 94.
[32] Altman, R. 1987, The American Film Musical. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 69.
[33] Barrier, 84 & 144.
[34] Barrier, 74.
[35] Again, interesting contrasts can be drawn with computer animation, where the equivalent of rotoscoping is “motion capture,” filming people with computerised equipment that precisely translates their movements to the animated characters. See Furniss, M. 2000, “Motion Capture: An Overview,” in Animation Journal, 2000, 68-82, accessed online at http://www.animationjournal.com/abstracts/mocap.html. Interestingly, this is used much more heavily in a live-action context (such as Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace (1999)) than in fully computer animated films such as Toy Story (1996).
[36] Barrier, 228-233 & Maltin, 56.
[37] Maltin, 118.
[38] Perhaps the best such volume is Williams, R. 2001, The Animator’s Survival Kit, London: Faber & Faber, but see also Blair, P. 1990, How to Animate Film Cartoons, Tustin: Walter Foster, Culhane, S. 1988, Animation: From Script to Screen, New York: St Martin’s Press, and Gray, M. 1991, Cartoon Animation: Introduction to a Career, Northridge: Lion’s Den Publications.
[39] Williams, 34.
[40] Culhane, 43-44.
[41] Wells, 27.
[42] Williams, 273.
[43] This series of points attempts to summarise some of the key points made throughout Williams, but see in particular Williams’ own summary of his book on page 339. The points also draw on Culhane, particularly chapter 14, which also covers many of the same principles as Williams.
[44] Williams quotes Ken Harris, an animator for Chuck Jones, on this point: “… walks are about the toughest thing to do right.” Williams, 102.
[45] I am here referring to models of the Classical Hollywood cinema as a system such as found in Bordwell, D., Staiger, J. & Thompson, K. (1985), The Classical Hollywood Cinema, London: Routledge. This remains the definitive text on the narrative strategies of Classical Hollywood.
[46] Gunning, T. 1993, “Now You See it, Now You Don’t: The Temporality of the Cinema of Attractions,” The Velvet Light Trap, no. 32, Fall 1993
[47] Crafton,11-12.
[48] Sartin, H. “From Vaudeville to Hollywood, from Silence to Sound: Warner Bros. Cartoons of the Early Sound Era” in Sandler, K. (ed.), 1998, Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Brothers Animation, New Brunswick / New Jersey / London: Rutgers University Press.
[49] For an excellent discussion of the Felix shorts see Crafton, chapter 9 (esp. 321-346).
[50] Barrier, 124.
[51] Barrier, chapter 5 includes a detailed account of the production. See 225-228 for discussion of the funeral sequence and the acting challenges involved.
[52] An interesting contrast can be drawn between the tendency in the Disney features to insist upon the realism of the story world, and the tendency in the Avery / Warner Bros. tradition to expose the story as a put-on, but nevertheless insist that the characters have an existence – even if only as performers – outside the story space. Chuck Jones’ Duck Amuck (1953) is the most celebrated example of such a strategy.
[53] Robert Altman’s MASH (1970) features many of these traits, for example.
[54] I am thinking here of cinema such as the French New Wave, which championed many of these approaches, but towards aesthetic ends that were more complex than a purely “realist” intention. Italian Neo-Realism is probably the film movement that came closest to a full embodiment of such a realist approach, but even here only a limited number of films that exhibit close to all the approaches I have outlined.
[55] It should be noted that “The Simpsons” has steadily retreated from the restrained realism of its earliest shorts and the first series.