MP6 | Music in animation: visual music, score and song | Part 1

Posted on by Claude Lau

In Class 5 we delved into the strain of animation known as ‘visual music’, which made me begin to think about music’s relationship with animation. To do that, it turns out we must first look at music’s relationship with art in general.

A handful of visual artists and designers were the visual and conceptual forefathers (foreparents?) of the group of animators working in visual music. French painter Leopold Survage was the first to suggest the idea of merging cinema and abstract imagery, and his series Rythmes colorés (1913) was concieved with the intention of being animated. Sadly, he did not have the funding to put this project into action, and so did not become the first pioneer of visual music. That privilege perhaps goes to Swiss Dadaist Viking Eggeling, who sought to create a vocabulary of shapes and symbol to be usd in visual abstraction as with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, which he demonstrates in works like the 1924 film Diagonal-Symphonie. The term ‘visual music’ was in fact used to describe Kandinsky’s paintings. Kandinsky began as a figurative painter but rejected depicting objective visual “reality” and became a staple of the abstract painting tradition. Thus the rejection of figurative forms in animation was the abstract, or ‘absolute’ animation. Another important influence of the visual music aesthetic was the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, which saw modernist design and concepts like color theory consolidated under a systematic method.

Called the ‘Father of Visual Music’, Oskar Fischinger’s filmography explores the ways of creating moving design around music. Though a narrow niche it may seem, he explored many techniques to achieve his artistic goal throughout his prolific career: progressive cross sections of wax/clay building on Ruttman’s wax slicing method as in Wax Experiments (1922), drawn/painted animations like in his commercially successful series The Studies in the late 20’s and 30’s, documenting the gradual progress of a semi-abstract painting in Motion Painting (1947) and even stop motion as in Composition in Blue (1935) and the Muratti Privat commercial in 1935.

Another visual music artist whose works were discussed in another class but are undoubtedly the continuation of the visual music tradition, is the inimitable Scottish-Canandian filmmaker Norman McLaren. His works done with the method of drawing directly on film, such as Boogie Doodie (1940) or Hen Hop (1942) have a charming simplicity and rawness that matches the rhythm of the music very well. McLaren’s styles of work are very highly varied, also including stop motion (La Merle, 1958), progress of chalk drawings like a sort of Motion Painting, and using the ‘pixilation’ method, or animation using the body, such as in the Oscar-winning short Neighbors (1952).

Visual music continues to be an active art form in the 21st Century, though undoubtedly somewhat overshadowed by mainstream ‘visualization’ of music with music videos, let alone animation. I was very much captured by the 2008 short AANAATT, created by Hong Kong based new media artist Max Hattler. He describes it on his page as ‘the ever-shifting shape of Analogue Futurism’, which seems quite apt. While similar to Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, in that it is abstract stop motion animation set to tone-defining music, the resulting visuals are highly different. Where Composition is whimsical and pure, AANAAT seems alien and otherworldly.

References

MP5 | Lotte Reiniger’s successor: Michel Ocelot and the updated fairytale silhouette

Posted on by Claude Lau
Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

As I wrote about in my posts on Lotte Reiniger, the homages to the influence of her work and her silhouette technique has been far reaching throughout animation history, even if sparse. But there is one contemporary spiritual disciple of Reiniger, whose work extensively uses both silhouette and themes of fairytale fantasy like the German pioneer, yet clearly has his own distinct style and a decidedly modern sensibility.

The French animator and director Michel Ocelot spent his childhood in then-French colony, Guinea, West Africa, then moved back to France in his adolescence. His most well-known works mainly use a fairytale format, with fantasy elements and a moral (more on that later). He has done a series of films around his African village boy hero Kirikou, but he has also used various different cultures as settings for his stories.

Princes et Princesses (2000)
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Carte blanche à Michel Ocelot - Toutes les rencontres ...
Ocelot with cutouts from ‘Princes et Princesses‘
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The best example is his series of televised fairytale fantasy shorts that he started in 1989 with Ciné Si; short fairytales from different cultures, some adaptations of existent folktales and some original concoctions, done exclusively in silhouette style. Ocelot combined cutout animation (a la Reiniger) with cel animation, which solved the problem of the analog cutout method being hard to control for precise movements. Dialog audio has become the standard for contemporary films, which was not the case for Reiniger when she made Achmed, which used intertitles for the characters’ words. By cutting in cel animations for closeup shots of his characters, Ocelot was able to achieve precise and very convincing lip sync animation.

Aside from improving upon the limitations of Reiniger’s technique, Ocelot’s enhancing treatment of the ‘fairytale’ is what truly sets him apart. Whether it be loose adaptations of existing folktales, or complete originals that he created from the ‘building blocks’ of these tales, he puts modern twists and trick endings in his stories. They clearly reflect his progressive societal views on gender, or otherwise postmodern influences, sometimes in direct response to the backwardness of traditional prince/princess tales to our modern eyes. To use his compilation film Princes et Princesses as an example: the episode ‘The Witch’ sees the male protagonist couple up with the witch he is supposed to battle, instead of the princess. In ‘The Fig Boy’, based on an Ancient Egyptian story, the Pharaoh is changed to a Pharaohess. In the tale ‘Prince and Princess’, the titular prince and princess magically switch bodies, and bicker about having to live in each other’s social role for the rest of their lives.

The whole film is available on Youtube! Turn on CC for English subtitles.
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31 Great French Movies for All Ages: Christmas Edition
Promotional poster for Azur & Asmar (2006)
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A good work of Ocelot’s to compare to Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is Ocelot’s feature Azur & Asmar (2006, released in some places with the subtitle The Princes’ Quest); both have the aesthetics and setting of Arabia, and both use motifs of Arabic fairytales.

However, the latter film is an original story by Ocelot, featuring a European protagonist and his adoptive Arabic brother. Thus Ocelot gives quite a realistic portrayal of cross-culture interactions between Europe and Arabic countries (colonialism, racism…) within a traditional fairytale story structure. It even touches on the question of cultural identity, which has been increasingly discussed throughout the 20th and 21st Centuries, and I posit that it is a reflection of Ocelot’s own multi-cultural upbringing, being French, yet being exposed to African culture in his time living in Guinea.

Rotten Tomatoes’ selection of Azur et Asmar screenshots
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Azur is also modern in the sense that it has embraced the digital age. Its animation is produced entirely in 3D, a relatively recent technical development in art and animation, which lends itself very well to the highly intricate, colorful, and decorative style of the film. Interestingly the characters are largely composed in side views, which is very much following the silhouette animation tradition.

Japanese DVD release poster, showing a sequence in which Azur uses 3D to emulate the silhouette style in his previous works.
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With the case studies of Princes and Azur I wanted to highlight Ocelot’s interesting position in the fabric of animation and wider art history. His work is a wonderful combination of folktale aesthetic, traditional tastes, and contemporary insight and modern technology. I knew about him largely because I grew up watching his films, so it made me really happy to be able to explore his historical inspiration in the early animation pioneer Lotte Reiniger in class. Although he has expressed chagrin at being so often compared to Reiniger (“I’d found Lotte Reiniger’s films rather archaic and not very attractive but I thought to myself, ‘It’ll be fine for children.“), the comparison I believe is warranted, precisely because he was able to develop upon what Reiniger had innovated.

I hope that sharing his work will lead more people outside of Europe to appreciate his ingenuity.

Referenced from:

Claudia Lau

MP4 | Bartosch’s “The Idea” – an adaptation

Posted on by Claude Lau

Bartosch’s 1932 film The Idea was based on a book of woodcuts, or a ‘wordless novel’, by Belgian artist Frans Masereel. It was initially conceived in 1930 to be a collaboration between the two artists, but Masereel soon left the project after realizing how tedious animation was.

Perhaps the original author’s departure was key in shaping the final film as we see it today; William Moritz’s article points out the narrative and tonal differences between the original woodcuts and Bartosch’s adaptation. Although war era socialist-pacifism united Masereel and Bartosch, their distinctness from each other is clear. Masereel came from the practice of political satirical woodcuts, while Bartosch was a filmmaker-animator who had worked for Lotte Reiniger on Prince Achmed, which I’ve discussed in previous posts.

The Idea’s conception in the novel, springing forward from the Thinker’s mind.
The Idea’s conception in the film, who appears before the contemplative Thinker seemingly from the starry cosmos.

Firstly the intrinsic difference between a static image format and a video one, meant Bartosch had to significantly shorten the story from Masereel’s 70-plus page epic novel; Bartosch only chooses select woodcuts to be animated into real time. In the original novel where the protagonist The Idea goes through many more hardships, and eventually returns to her creator, only to find that she has been replaced by a new Idea in the form of a blonde woman, which is subsequently sent out to the world, and the original Idea is crucified. Changes of scenario that Bartosch made turned the story of The Idea not one of sardonic tragedy, as in the original, but a tragic drama that still remains noble and hopeful, finally letting The Idea return to the starry cosmos that she had originally appeared from. Another important part of the film, is the role Arthur Honneger’s music, played on an early electronic instrument, which repeats certain leitmotifs for the Idea throughout the film, and maintains the dignity of the Idea as she goes through her tribulations. The multiplane glass method that Bartosch designed for Reiniger, and his use of soap to create soft haloes of light, contribute significantly to The Idea’s atmospheric look, as well as the overall visual motif of light, which was not present in Masereel’s original novel. Though the thick outlines and use of highly contrasting light and dark no doubt evoke Masereel’s woodcut quality, the overall resulting imagery is vastly different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT__PCFqd2M

Though the starting point of The Idea was Masereel’s work, the film took flight and became distinctly Bartosch’s — in form, visual style, theme and message. It is a shame that many Bartosch’s other works are lost; otherwise we would have a better picture of Bartosch’s entire oeuvre, and be able to better understand his artistry.

‘Bartosch’s The Idea‘ by William Moritz, in A Reader in Animation Studies, ed. Jayne Pilling
‘Frans Masereel’, GraphicWitness – visual arts & social commentary, https://www.graphicwitness.org/historic/masereel.htm#dieidee


Claudia Lau

MP2.5 | Miscellaneous Achmed-related thoughts

Posted on by Claude Lau

Because I had a lot of left over material from research for my last post on Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) and can’t stop stressing how great and important Lotte Reiniger is. Being the first feature animation is sure to make Achmed become a source for many of its successors.

By deduction I imagine it was a very early film produced in the Western world using ‘Arabia’ or Orientalism as its only visual and narrative theme. It was adapted from two stories of the ‘Middle Eastern’ fairytale collection Arabic One Thousand and One Nights, one of which is the now very familiar story of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, made popular by its circulation in book form and by Disney’s adaptation in 1992. There is actually a ‘Prince Achmed’ in at the very beginning of the film, and I’d like to think the name is a reference to Reiniger’s Achmed, even if it isn’t confirmed.

This Achmed is definitely not Aladdin’s friend.

The harem is a common Orientalist theme, and I think we were all not expecting that scene with Achmed and the servant/entertainer girls entertaining each other in a room. It is worth mentioning that European countries never had an equivalent of the systematic Hays Code that banned ‘immoral’ content. But it seems that Reiniger just has a penchant for racy or sexual more-than-undertones, as also seen from her later short film Papageno (1935). In the handout interview Reiniger admits as much when asked directly about that Achmed scene. What a lady.

Horniness aside, this is a very cool adaptation of Papageno’s story from Mozart’s The Magic Flute; in the original opera the character Papageno is more a sidekick than a main character.

Though I have not surveyed a list of the earliest films (including live action), Achmed might be the earliest feature with a wizard or magic duel sequence, and is most definitely the earliest example of a duel that shows the characters shapeshifting. According to the TVTropes page on ‘Shapeshifter Showdowns’ as it is titled, this is a theme that has existed in human myths and folklore even before the printing press was invented. I was reminded of the Disney film Sword in the Stone (1963) which also involves a witch and a wizard/sorcerer throwing down in magical animal transformer style. Something about turning into different creatures, especially because of our associations with certain animals being good/evil or more or less powerful than other animals, is very entertaining to watch. At least it was the case for child-me, who still re-emerges when to relive watching this sequence.

A duel for the ages (of animation).

It’s noteworthy that the animation technique for changing between animals in Achmed makes more use of morphing, perhaps because of the limitations that come with cutout/silhouette. In Sword in the Stone, and also in another Disney example of a shapeshifting sequence, The Emperor’s New Groove, there is more use of special effects like sparks and jump cuts to show a character has changed animal. Arguably it makes for more interesting pacing and varied rhythm, and as we saw in today’s class (Class 6), synchrony with music was established early on as a Disney trademark method. In the promised future post on Michel Ocelot, I could talk about how this lively rhythm/music accompaniment was brought back to silhouette morphing in Princes et Princesses, but it will be for another day.

Claudia Lau

MP2 | Lotte Reiniger – Achmed’s Legacy

Posted on by Claude Lau

The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) is considered the earliest surviving animation feature film, and was seminal in both production technique and artistic height.

As mentioned in my last post, Reiniger and her team developed the precursor to the multiplane camera while working on Achmed, which was major for later mainstream animation. But Achmed is also connected to fine art animation through its team: Berthold Bartosch, who worked on special effects and backgrounds for Reiniger’s production, later used similar multi-layered glass methods for his epic tragic short The Idea (1932). Walter Ruttman was also a background artist on Achmed and his later abstract short films using film tinting techniques placed him firmly within the avant-garde filmmaking tradition.

Screencap from Achmed.

The legacy of Reiniger’s silhouette style has also lived on in animation. The most evident and notable example is French Michel Ocelot’s silhouette works; most notably his television series Ciné Si (1989), perhaps better known in its collected form in the compilation film Princes et Princesses (2000), which are exclusively in the style of silhouette animation. These works and Ocelot’s oeuvre deserves its own analysis for another post.

Art from Michel Ocelot’s Princes et Princesses.

The cutout silhouette style has been imitated in cel animation format in the 1997 anime Revolutionary Girl Utena, which was in turn referenced by Cartoon Network show Steven Universe. Steven Universe creator and showrunner Rebecca Sugar has also named Reiniger as the specific inspiration for the episode ‘The Answer’.

Screencap from Steven Universe episode ‘The Answer’

As if Achmed being the directorial debut of then 26-year-old Reiniger and her husband was not impressive enough, it was a pioneering film in form and technique, and has been paid homage to as such up until the 21st Century. Here is a Gobelins Annecy 2015 short that pays tribute to Reiniger and Koch, and includes a subtle hint at the political adversity they faced in World War II Germany in parallel to their partnership in works of art.

Claudia Lau

MP1 | Inventions from both sides of the Atlantic

Posted on by Claude Lau

In the first two weeks of class we covered the early years, from animation toys, to the creation of full films with sound and the pioneering of many important animation processes. It’s a lot, though we haven’t even looked at anything Disney yet.

What it made me realize was that animation history was less of a line than a zig-zag: the back and forth process of invention and industrialization, as well as the cross-pollination of animation techniques between Europe and America. All were important factors in the development of the animation as an art form and as an industry.

The two sides of the Atlantic circa 1900 (source)

Early inventions in what we now think of as animation mostly came from Europe. Frenchman Émile Reynaud created the first film projection animations or Théätre Optique in 1888, expanding from earlier toys such as the phenakistocope and zoetrope, attributed to Joseph Plateau (Belgium) and William G. Horner (UK) respectively. As early as the zoetrope however, Americans tapped into industry and manufacturing; American William Ensign Lincoln licensed his version of the zoetrope to the board game company Milton Bradley and Co. in 1865-66.

Of course what interests us is the techniques that have become standard. John Randolph Bray (US) and Raoul Barré (Canada/US) were important in creating both technical processes, such as celluloid [cels] and the hole and peg system, and production processes, i.e. the industrial animation pipeline; all three are still in use in some form or another today, speaking to how influential their inventions were. Interestingly, Barré, with Bill Nolan, was also the first to make animated adverts, and created the first 100% animation focused studio.

Different peg bar systems, from article on the history of the peg bar

The first character driven animation, or perhaps ‘animated cartoon’, was Emile Cohl’s (France/US) Fantoche the Clown in 1908; American cartoons included Krazy Kat (1916), Felix the Cat (Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer 1919), and Fleischer studios’ iconic characters (1920s-30s). And of course later on we’ll meet Mickey Mouse, most iconic of all animated cartoons.

American Winsor McCay is an interesting case; the naturalistic draftsmanship he used from his illustration background elevated animation to a new level. He also pioneered technical animation methods such as inbetweening and cycles/loops as shown in Gertie the Dinosaur (1913), for which John Randolph Bray tried to sue him after patenting those methods. Gertie also carries the legacy of animation as performance and showmanship like with early pioneers Georges Méliès (France) and James Stuart Blackton (US).

A frame from Gertie the Dinosaur – notice the ‘stop here’ instruction, presumably for the assistant (source)

Animation was exclusively in short film form, until the first European feature-length animation films. They include El Apostol (1917) and Peludopolis (1930) by Italian-Argentinian Quirino Cristiani, the second of which was the first with sound, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) by German Lotte Reiniger and her team. Achmed in particular seems important to me, as its use of the multiplane glass technique allowed for many-layered backgrounds that further pushed animation towards a truly cinematic look, and was an early version of the multiplane camera, which was used in Disney’s first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and allowed it great compositional depth.

Lotte Reiniger and the early multiplane camera

We always think of Disney when we think of animation history. In a way, Disney’s Golden Age is kind of an ‘Italian Renaissance’ of animation, because it married both industrial efficiency and artistic height. But without seeing the historical context before and at the time of Disney’s birth, we could easily forget the early origins and all the other milestones that allowed Disney to flourish.

Claudia Lau

PQA – Alberto Mielgo

Posted on by Claude Lau

Alberto Mielgo is a Spanish animator, director, concept artist and painter. He came to my attention because of two recent major mainstream projects he was involved in: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse (2018), and the episode “The Witness” in the Netflix adult animation anthology Love Death + Robots (March 2019).

Mielgo started out as a 2D animator at 18, but turned to oil painting when he found studios wanted CGI/3D. His oils are mostly personal, erotic portraits; he also digitally paints graphic, vibrant environments. Thus he has a strong painting base, which shows in his style.

He is credited in Spider-verse as a Visual Consultant for his work in the visual development process, and was originally Production Designer / Art Director. He did explorations of the film’s iconic comic-book aesthetic, including integrating text (which he’d done in earlier work), and produced a tone/mood animation test. Though he was taken off the project, I think his contribution and influence can be clearly seen in the final film. More work he made for Spider-verse here.

spm02.jpg
There are many impact shots in Spider-verse that are similar to this one, where for a frame the background becomes flat colors and sound effect text.

I find his work very intriguing because of his strong design sense, and his ability to abstract shapes and light in highly descriptive, convincing ways. Which makes his style so fitting for animation. His animations draw from aesthetics and themes more used in fine art. In his own words, “I love animation over any art, because it has every art on it.” [Grammar mistake is his.]

His socials and websites:
https://www.instagram.com/albertomielgo/
http://www.albertomielgo.com
http://pinkman.tv (his brand/studio)

I hope you guys found something interesting in his work!