The art of metaphor and the animations that was shown during that class was very interesting. Aside from the intriguing storylines, it is accompanied by really beautiful animations that help convey the story a lot more. Although the styles may be different, this kind of reminded me of the musician Jack Stauber.
Jack Stauber is an American Avant-Pop musician and visual artist. His works feature animation, live action, and makes use of obsolete media. He does most of the vocals and voice acting for all of his media. His most notable albums include Pop Food (2017), HiLo (2018), and Micropop (2019). He also goes by Jack Stauber’s Micropop.
He creates shorts and music videos and he has an iconic style of design for characters and its overall feel. He specializes in 2D & 3D animation and claymation. His main medium for 2D animation is MS Paint. He would feature all of these techniques into his music videos. Each video feels like a distortion of reality. Everything feels experimental. There is no concrete message from these works, it really is how you interprate it.
It was cool seeing another unique technique to create animation. I was really interested in the Pinscreen and the films that were created using it. This was invented by Alexandre Alexeieff. It is a small metal frame that holds thousands of movable pins in small tubes. Each pin that sticks out casts a shadow. When these pins are placed strategically, it creates an image.
This technique is not used that much nowadays, but I would guess that the modern equivalent to it would be pixel animation. Here is a music video for the song “White Flag” by Delta Heavy. I noticed it had a very similar motion comparing it to the works of alexander Alexeieff. Though they are different in style, the thought and execution is simalar. Especially with everything feeling “dotted” or “linear.”
This style was popularized by the rise of video games from the 80s. The earliest video games would be pixelated due to the processor only being able to output a limited number of colors at once. Nowadays we are now able to process a lot of colors due to the advancement in technology. Which allows current pixellated video games and animations like the music video above to be created.
It was great to see the small beginnings of stop-motion animation using puppets. Earliest forms of it realeased around 1899 and it continued to developed even further as time passed. Not only was it used purely for animation, this technique would also be featured in live action films as well. Most notable films that made use of this was The Lost World (1925) and King Kong (1933). Nowadays, there are companies who specialize in this type of animation production. Two of the more popular studios are Aardman Animations and Laika Animation Studios.
Aardman Animations was founded in 1972 and is most well-known for their animated shorts featuring the adventures of Wallace and Gromit. Some of their most notable films are Chicken Run (2000), Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), and Flushed Away (2006). They are also known for the children’s cartoon series Shaun the Sheep (2007). During their earlier years they formed a partnership with Dreamworks Animation. They helped them create the films listed above, however, after the box-office reception of Flushed Away Dreamwork’s decided to end their partnership. This was despite the film receiving a nomination for the BAFTA award for Best Animated Film.
Laika Studios was founded back in 2005 and they specialize in feature films, commercial content for all media, music videos, and short films. Their most notable films include Coraline (2009), Paranorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014), Kubo and the Two Strings (2016), and Missing Link (2019). Their films have received nominations and awards from different ceremonies. They’re known to show their meticulous process to the public. Seeing their process and then the final outcome must be very fulfilling for them.
It’s great to see the development of this technique throughout the years and I hope that it continues on and evolves even further.
In class 12, we focused on some animations that were created
using inventive techniques. One film was The Street created by Caroline
Leaf in 1976. It’s an adaptation of a short story by Mordecai Richler that he wrote
sometime around 1969. The story tells of a little boy whose grandmother was
sick. He was promised to receive her bedroom once she passed away, yet almost
three years went by before she died.
On Caroline Leaf’s website she talks about her setup for
creating films like The Street. The film was animated using paint on
glass. She worked in a dark room that had top-down lighting, using gouache and
watercolors as her paints. She added glycerin to her paints so that they wouldn’t
dry, giving her more working time. Leaf painted her drawings on the glass
surface and used a wet cloth to wipe away the old drawings and continued until
the film was complete.
This technique reminded me of a film we watched in class one,
called “The Bigger Picture” by Daisy Jacobs. I wonder if Jacobs was inspired by
artists like Caroline Leaf, as Jacobs film was created by painting and
repainting drawings on the walls of the film set. Both films feature dynamic
camera movement as transitions between scenes. In The Street, drawings
will swirl together and unfurl into the next image. In one scene, the mother is
stirring something in a bowl and the bowl transforms into the son’s face, revealing
the mother’s spoon is now a brush that she is using on the son’s hair.
I really enjoy the use of the paint as a storytelling technique and that Caroline Leaf worked with the messy aspect of paint and used it to her advantage in this film.
Pinscreen animation uses a screen filled with movable pins, which can be moved in or out of the screen by pressing an object. From the side, the screen is lit so the pinscast shadows.
This method can create a wide range of different textures. In class, we had
watched some pinscreen animations like “The Nose”(1963) and “A Night on
Bald Mountain”. Although the story is kind of boring and creepy to me, I was very impressed by
the sense of 3D in these films. It is no doubt that the artistry of the
pinscreen animation is amazing. But you can also imagine that the making progress
is tough and time consuming! It looks cool but also really hard to achieve. That’s
why pinscreen animation is no longer a common way for animation in the industry.
Maybe today we can use 3D printing to simplify the making progress, but there
are so many digital methods which is a lot more convenient than making a pinscreen.
Previously, we talked about a film called “Felix in Exile” that was created by William Kentridge. I was interested in knowing more about the context of the film. It was created in 1993 and is the 5th film in a series called Drawings for Protection which Kentridge started in 1989.
The film is about a time in South Africa called “The Apartheid” which meant “apartness” in Afrikaans. It was a time of segregation and discrimination against the Black South Africans. It began as early as 1709 when “pass laws” were enacted, meaning Blacks were required to carry around a type of passport in order to move around South Africa or they’d face consequences. Things escalated in 1948 when the segregation began due to the National Party ruling South Africa in favor of white supremacy.
Later, the African National Congress (ANC) started the Defiance Campaign organizing boycotts of white owned businesses, strikes, and non-violent protests. In 1960, which was the same year as the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, the police killed 69 of the peaceful protesters. In the same year, Nelson Mandela organized a smaller group within the ANC that would feature protesters armed with weapons. A year later in 1961, Mandela was arrested for treason and sentenced to life in prison.
By the end of the 1980s, White South Africans were not happy at the resistance they were facing, and the government was being pushed to bring an end to the Apartheid’s discrimination. In 1989, P.W. Botha stepped down as president of South Africa and the ban over the ANC and other groups was dissolved. F.W. de Klerk became the new president in 1990 and had Nelson Mandela released from prison. Later Mandela became president of South Africa in 1997 and enacted a new constitution that did not include discrimination.
Felix in Exile, features an “alter ego” of William Kentridge who is named Felix Teitlebaum (“Felix In Exile”). Felix is exiled in a hotel room where he is studying the maps of a Black woman named Nandi. She created maps of the landscape of the East Rand, a town near Johannesburg. Felix stays locked away in his room while the violence occurs outside in South Africa. The more Felix watches the violence, the more the pieces of paper cover up the fallen bodies.
The Guggenheim.org had an interesting view of this saying, the “figures and structures are subsumed into the landscape… [are] allegories for how the land can bear the scars of crimes against humanity” (“Felix In Exile”). I related this to a poem I read by Carl Sandburg called The Grass. This poem speaks of wars and bodies falling, and how the grass “cover[s] all” of our violent mistakes. The grass grows over everything and in a few years, we say, “what place is this?”, forgetting the terrible things that happened there (Sandburg).
I appreciate a film like Felix in Exile for representing those Black South Africans who suffered and for bringing my attention to an event that I had never even heard of. Time really does cause us to forget important things such as the Apartheid, and it’s crucial that we continue to create and remember works that help remind us of the past so that we don’t repeat it.
This class we continued to learn about the history of Japanese animation and the origins of some of the common tropes of the genre. One man I wanted to focus on is Tezuka Osamu, who is often referred to as the Father, God, and Emperor of both manga and anime. Outside of his groundbreaking works such as Tetsuwan ATOM (Astro Boy) Hi no Tori (Phoenix), and my personal favorite Black Jack. I will link the Black Jack movie below since it is a very interesting premise with very unique characters.
However, outside of the fact his work literally leads to the creation of the world of anime we know today he was a very fascinating man. He decided to purse a medical degree after almost losing both of his arms to an infection as a teenager. He was admitted to the medical school of Osaka University at the age of 17 due to the shortage of doctors in Japan at the time. Despite being qualified to practice medicine and successfully defended his doctoral thesis in 1961, Tezuka was more inclined to the art work.
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.
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.
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.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 