Author: Eunhae Mary Park

Documentary animation is a genre of animation that is seamlessly part of the film industry. Documentary animation defies the more commonly known form of documentaries that usually consist of live people being filmed and interviewed. It is different from both the conventional documentary and narrative animation as animation is used as a tool to present the ideas of a documentary in an effective and more interesting way. Documentary animation opens new doors to present the ideas presented in a documentary in a new form that may even reflect the thoughts of the interviewees in a more accurate manner.

Using animation as a tool to convey the content of the animation can result in a more fluid, storytelling like film. This can be seen in the use of paint on glass animation in the documentary animation Truth has Fallen. The flow of the documentary is supported by the animation, and therefore the fluidity of the ideas are easier to process.

Eunhae Mary Park

The development of the Japanese animation industry is quite particular in that it started with the military. Although the first, developing animations were not influenced by the government, Japanese animators looked often at European and American animations. As Japan entered war with China in the 1930’s, however, and Japanese militarism grew to dominate politics, propaganda films were set to be more successful in the animation industry because they would be funded by the government.

However, after the war, unlike China with the cultural revolution, Japanese animators became free to create any creation they wanted leading to a generation of animators free to experiment with style and content.

Osamu Tezuka’s works were particularly crucial in bringing Japanese animation into a new age and larger commercial market as he marked a key point in producing the first Japanese animated television series, Tetsuwan Atom which aired from 1952 to 1968. Tetsuwan Atom was the beginning of the Japanese television animation industry which maintains international popularity to this day.

Eunhae Mary Park

During the guest speaker talks on October 29^th, we were able to see works of animators using animation as a contemporary art form. Instead of creating narrative films that have a story, like the general view of what animation is, they use animation as a method to show their thoughts, feelings, emotion and even their subconscious manifested through dreams in non-narrative films. Both artists, in the process of creating animation art works use music to enhance the piece and the experience of viewing the piece.  

Zhong Su uses sound that supports the distinct aesthetic of his works. Several of his works are set in a rundown, abandoned city (seen often to be set in Hong Kong), and the audience is led through the city via a camera. The sounds that play during the films strongly support the setting of the world as a creepy and dystopia-like.

Cao Shu uses sounds that push further his films that replicate his dreams. The sounds of the surrounding environment, such as the waves near the ocean, keep the audience aware of the setting. But the sounds that really push the dreams is the narration. Instead of simply voicing the narration, Cao Shu has the narration whispered. The whispers combined with the secondary sounds allow the audience to more fully experience the work as a dream.

Eunhae Mary Park

In China, we can see how the relationship between art and the government can either drive or bring a stop to the growth of art as an industry. There are both positive and negative aspects of this type of relationship. When observing this relationship, we can see that the value of animation in China grew exponentially while supported and funded by the government. Animators are able to create worlds and animation styles because they are funded and don’t have to worry about their budget, while “traditional” aesthetic are more valued for its patriotic or propagandist nature to emphasize importance of traditional values.

But there is clear limitation in government having a close relationship with a whole artistic industry. When government stopped funding the arts during the cultural revolution in 1966, animation also came to a halt. Even after the cultural revolution, industries became too reliant on the government as limitations on what artists can create exist. Although there has been a growth of original works by Chinese animation studios in more recent years, we cannot deny that the setback in the industry in the past blocked what could have been a larger part of animation history.

Eunhae Mary Park

Puppet animation, in the Czech Republic in particular, presents an interesting use of puppet animation to convey a message and theme, particularly on social issues. Animators used the interaction of puppet and real-life actors for metaphors and representations on what is and what can be.

These ideas are especially prevalent in Jan Svankmajer’s Dimensions of Dialogue (1982). He presented in his work a representation of bad, negative communication using unique visuals of puppet and stop motion animation that leaves the audience feeling unwell and even unhappy. The visuals largely reflect the message of exploitation in the interaction of people.

Svankmajer presents the message of how societal systems allow for people in power to exploit people without power. These people without power are unknowingly played into the system and are taken advantage of. In certain ways, a cycle of self-destruction.

I was interested in Svankmajer’s world building. Instead of a more generic plotline with a resolution, he sets up world and specific set of laws in the world – common in Dimensions of Dialogue – laws which include a repeated pattern such as faces eating each other, the cycle of labor, or the cycle of exploitation of the poor. The audience observes those laws taking place in that world and see the effects of those laws revealing the true nature of the society presented. And in those effects and true nature is the meaning of the work.

Eunhae Mary Park

While the commercial market for narrative animation developed largely, especially with cartoons, abstract animation has always been a constant over time. Abstract drawing animation allows for animators to tell stories while expanding possibilities of 2-D animation. They do this by creating different mediums of 2-D animation or push existing materials to new level or use those materials in a new method.

Pinscreen animation, a newly introduced form of 2-D animation, pushed animation to create a new highly realistic black and white, chiaroscuro aesthetic. Sand animation was also a new form of animation to push how animation could be created. Paint on glass animation already existed for special effects on animation that used a multi-plane. Animators used this method for a specific aesthetic and used it in largely abstract methods. With these new animation techniques, animators also reimagined rotoscoping techniques to use not only to copy people’s movements, but also use to copy dynamic camera movements and make rotoscope animation more interesting to watch.

These new types of animation have similarities: straight-ahead animation. While pose-to-pose animation requires the animator to be able to revisit frames that have been established and even revise them to be able to draw in-betweens. But, straight-ahead animation means that actions are more fluid allowing for a smoother transition of thoughts as often seen in abstract animation.

Eunhae Mary Park

The use of experimental animation techniques such as pinscreen and paint on glass are reminiscent of the first 2-dimensional animations created such as the works of Emile Cohl or Winsor McCay in fluidity of the animation in that there are not a lot of cuts and the shots blend into each other. However, you can see that Alexandre Alexeieff, Caroline Lead and William Kentridge’s animated works are more modern in the experimental qualities of using more dynamic camera movements and interesting compositions. However, animation from both times use straight ahead animation that allows for the fluidity and easy to change aspect of the movement of the characters.

Other narrative based experimental animation produced during this time have the same distinct aspect fluidity in movement to them. This results in, I think, a specific type of storytelling that can only be seen in short films as they are difficult to present as a feature film. This animation allows for fluidity in story as shots are blended together and even the music and sounds feel like they overlap.

Eunhae Mary Park

The role of animation is relevant in a lot more industries than commonly perceived. The application of animation in the film industry was reimagined after the use of trick animation in works such as The Haunted Hotel by James Stuart Blackton. The idea went from inanimate objects moving by themselves into characters that otherwise wouldn’t move moving within the frame.

The technique of animation, after being introduced, split at crossroads. The first direction was into drawing animation and making characters move by changing the drawings of their movements little by little. The other direction was in 3-dimensional puppet animation. The application of puppet animation split into even further roads of completely puppeted fantastical elements and characters in a world built from scratch as opposed to using puppet animation in live-action films to bring fantasy into the real world. The division in the use of stop-motion animation as a technique can be clearly seen in the difference between, Ladislaw Starewicz’s The Battle of the Stag Beetles and Willis O’Brien’s work in King Kong (1933).

It’s interesting to see how the development in the use of certain animation techniques have evolved today. While stop-motion animation in cinematic animation is still relevant today with the work of Laika studios, stop motion animation in effects evolved dramatically into computer graphics and visual effects all done digitally.

Eunhae Mary Park

The experimental films of Mary Ellen Bute, Len Lye, and Norman McLaren in the 1930s can be seen to be the direct successor of visual music in the 1920s. However, instead of one form of abstract animation ending and another ending, both forms, by different artists continue hand in hand, as seen from both Oskar Fischinger and Norman McLaren’s continuous work through the 1930s and into the 1940s. The genre of visual music on a different medium shows how there are still several other ways to display music in a non-conventional matter.

Norman McLaren takes visual music a step further by creating a story in the visuals, changing his work from pure visual music, to a narrative pushed by music. His fast paced editing, which can especially be seen in his work Hen Hop (1942), and continuous jump cuts as seen in Blinky Blink (1955) are editing styles that can be seen in today’s editing techniques. Personally, it is a technique that I enjoy not only watching, but would also like to try using in my own work.

Eunhae Mary Park