Author: Eunhae Mary Park

As the animation production grew and the techniques to develop animation came to a plateau, I believe that the production of animation developed from how animation can be produced technically in the production process into what animation can produce in more stylized manner. The United Production of America was the forefront of this a method for animators to make animation in a simpler and quicker manner caused a highly stylized aesthetic. The creators of this aesthetic include more than several artists, but I think that these artists were only able to create animation because they were provided a platform by a distributor.

Today, those platforms and distributors still exist, but often in different, separated ways. Distributors like famous film companies often continuously support the same artists. However, platforms such as Youtube and Vimeo increasingly become ways for new artists to try and break through walls. And distributors find new talent on those platforms to recruit.

Eunhae Mary Park

Animation in the late 1920s and the 30s developed the cartoon aesthetic that remains iconic to this day. Production companies takes full advantage of the animation labor system that becomes most refined at this time. The specialization of jobs in animation this time becomes more developed. However, as the demand for animation rose the strain on the labor chain also grew because of the immensely heavy workload that is involved with cleaning up even one frame of animation, from keys, in-betweens, linework, colorists, backgrounds, to shooting.

However, these high labor productions were, I think, extremely successful in marking the peak of the ‘American cartoons’. This is because the foundations of the aesthetics of the cartoon were laid out and finalized by different animation studios and artists collectively, albeit with different characters. These aesthetics not only include visuals but also story and characters, as a commonly male character overcoming different obstacles with his small group of friends.

Eunhae Mary Park

Disney Studios’ main turning points in history can be seen to first be the creation of the Mickey Mouse cartoons, and second the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937). The Mickey Mouse cartoons became immensely popular for its portrayal of its hero as an imperfect mouse who has to face the humorous consequences of his actions. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves became iconic after being the first 2D (hand-drawn) animated feature film.

One of the reason both became turning points, I think, is because of the storytelling its interaction with music. For both works, the main character moves to the music and the music, in turn, changes with the characters actions and emotions. Mickey Mouse’s actions and movements move on beat and with a repeating rhythm to create coherence in the many back-to-back actions that occur across the screen. The soundtrack in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves becomes iconic in that the music is almost continuous throughout the whole film and changes with major plot points.

As these two works changed the industry standard at the time they were made, Disney Studios’ works and choices still mark significant changes in animation today. This can especially be seen with the swift change from 2-D to 3-D productions that occurred after Disney’s Toy Story 1 in 1995.

Eunhae Mary Park

Abstract animation shows how animation, known for stories and plot, like the fine arts, can be used to simply display and/or incited certain feelings and emotion. It is because artists and animators of the early 1900s wanted to properly have their feelings be reflected in the animation they create, that more dynamic techniques of animation were created especially in special effects. Animators found and created new methods to fill in for techniques in animation that had not been evolved enough to properly create the intended effect.

I also think that because visual music lacks the conventional means of a story, animators used design elements of line, shape and color to push, instead, the musical narrative. This led to the dynamic movements seen in Oskar Fischiger’s works. The push for a musical narrative in animation leads into animated stories and films that are heavily supported by continuous music, as they are in a lot of the films produced by Disney Studios.

Eunhae Mary Park

Lotte Reiniger and Berthold Bartosch are two of the most representative figures in cutout animation. The two, who were friends and colleagues, used cutout animation to present films with two very different themes and moods showing the diversity of ideas that cutout animation, and therefore animation by extension, can portray.

Reiniger’s film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), the first full length feature animation that remains intact in its full version, displays how expressive and elaborate cutout animation can be in portraying characters and their movements and emotions while maintaining a full narrative. By limiting dialogue to only the important interactions revealing information crucial to the story, the audience is able to focus more on the visual aspect of the film and the expressions of the characters that push the story forward.

On the other hand, Bartosch’s The Idea (1932) pushes the dialogue of metaphors and ideas set in motifs further. Bartosch uses his experience from working with visual effects on The Adventures of Prince Achmed to even further develop the different special effects used to portray smoke, fog, and light to reflect the intensity of the film in which Idea portrayed as a woman oppressed by capitalism in individuals and in society. Bartosch also uses a very specific aesthetic with blocky figures and diverse line weight to reflect the woodcut prints of the novel-without-words The Idea (1924) by Frans Masereel, on which the film was based upon.

Eunhae Mary Park

The techniques developed in the early 1900’s with the birth of the commercialization of cartoons puts into perspective how time and labor consuming the animation industry really was (and still is). The first ‘cartoons’, or performances, by animators (such as by Winsor McCay and even Max and Dave Fleischer’s Koko the Clown) can be seen to largely be drawn by one person as the content of the animation is not as much story as it is simply entertainment for the audience.

As the need for animation evolved, however, from performances to cartoon with more storylines and plots derived mainly from comics, the production line can also be seen to have evolved. The production line evolved from an individual to labor system to accommodate for the large and sudden demand for regular cartoons series and therefore a rise in need for more efficiency in the production process. This evolution, I think, is also because of the large technological advancements that occurred with color film and materials and technology used during production process itself such as rotographing.

Eunhae Mary Park

The view of animation as a medium for film took longer than one might expect. This was unexpected to me because animation can be seen to actually be the fundamentals of film; capturing movement, or giving an image the illusion of movement, by taking a series of photographs with the subject moving slightly between each photograph.

The transition of the use of animation in film from trick shots into moving drawings occurred, I believe, is because of appropriation. This is because no artist at the time simply came up with the concept of drawing a character and making it move, but often times copied other artists’ work and changed it to make it their own by incorporating their own ideas into an existing. This is the primary reason for more than one ‘Haunted House’ films (James Stuart Blackton’s film being built on top of other films of a similar story) and several performances of different artists interacting with their own moving pictures (such as Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay). Because these artists made constant changes to different animating techniques that already existed or was, for them, recently discovered, the form of animation evolved very quickly during the late 19th century up to World War I.

Eunhae Mary Park