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.
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.
In class, I was very fascinated with a French illusionist whose works were shown in class; his name was Georges Melies.
Melies used camera tricks to wow the audience and his films were produced in the late 1800s. I did not even think to realize that people had the idea of making films with illusions so early in the animation and film industry! His influence of today’s films is seen everywhere. A current illusionist is Zach King who creates vines and YouTube videos with obvious “magic” tricks. Also, the baby’s face on the sun in the children’s TV show “Teletubbies” reminds me of how Melies used human faces on the sun and moon in his films!
My favorite George Melies film was the Nightmare. Melies had a great sense of humor. It’s crazy to think that he spent so much time trying to create illusions when there are apps you can download on your phone to do the same thing in minutes today! He paved a large concrete path in the film industry for illusionists to thrive.
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) .
Ocelot with cutouts from ‘Princes et Princesses‘ .
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. .
Promotional poster for Azur & Asmar (2006) .
A good work of Ocelot’s to compare to Reiniger’s Adventures of PrinceAchmed (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.
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. .
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.
In class 7, we watched many cartoons which is made by Warner Brother and Hans Fisherkoesen. I believe that Warner Brother’s cartoons are the part of the childhood memory for everyone. We never get bored of watching those characters’s fun interactions and crazy twist and turn even we are adult now.
My favorite character of Warner Brother’s cartoon is Bugs Bunny. I really love watching the interaction of him and his friends Daffy Duck. Although the story of each epsiso are very similar .The character A is always pick on character B ,and they are trying kill each other with and scene design and visual style are always the same. However, their exaggerated action and expression of the character make everything different with other episode.
When I was doing some research of Warner Brother’ cartoons, I found many cartoons and movies that were favorite when I was a kid and I almost forget them. They reminds me the good old days and hope I can watch them again after mid-term.
Received
a book just now by post pack (no idea who mailed it to me, sounds weird :0).
Therefore,
in this post, I will kind of introduce what this book is about. This book is
named Animated Cartoons, a book about how animations are made, their origin and
development. It was from E.G. Lutz, a man who inspired Walt Disney to animate. It
was first published in 1920, contains many shortcuts to the process of film animation.
In the first chapter, he introduced me a motion picture projector, teaching me how
to move one picture to another seamlessly, that the mechanism moves so rapidly which
the blur period or darkened screen is not perceptible. I can also see some
familiar devices I have seen in Class one or two, such as the thaumatrope, the
zootrope and the optical theatre in the first chapter.
Actually,
I just flipped the book for a few times and read the first chapter, but I already
feel so interested to read more. I may further introduce the book after I
finished reading it J. (what a coincidence to receive this book now
HAHA)
In class 6, we talked a lot about the history of Walt Disney, how he started his studio and become one of the best and well-known animation studio in the world. It is amazing that he created the very first animation which has sound and music —Steamboat Willie(1928) and many famous animations that people still recognize these days .
Walt Disney Studio always create high quality animation that people really enjoy to watching it. Especially, the film of the very first Disney’s princess Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937 film) , even though this movie is made in 1937 , the visual style ,storyboard and the character design are still the best example for us to learn.
My favorite early animation of Walt Disney Studio is the serie of Silly Symphony (1929 to 1939). I love how the team exaggerated the movement of the character and the dreamy and vintage use of color. It is one of the old visual style I love and I would like to develop for my own drawing style.
In class 5, we watched many animation created by different shape and line in class. They are very abstract and hard to understand. However, compare to the animation we watched in previous classes , they have sound and music. The movement of the shape and line were following the rhythm and the beat of the background music , it feels like the creator show the music and what we can hear into visual art. It is very different from the general animation and cartoon we watch.
Those animations opened my eyes, it shows that animation can be more than just storytelling. The simple movement of the shapes and line with different color use can express emotion and something invisible. Additionally, it also remain us the basic of visual elements colors, line, pattern and shape are already the best and simple things to express our idea in visual way.
At the beginning, I have no idea why those creator would make those nonsense shape animations and started wondering that it is because I am not born in that age so i didn’t understand those animations. However, after I keep watching those animation, I realised that actually those animations are very similar to the motion graphic these days, and they are widely used in many music video and advertisement. It make everything more vivid and interesting.
During class 4, we watched a couple of animation which used cut-out technique to create all the the movements . Most of the story and the visual style are exotic, each of them show different story from different regions.
Especially the animation Lotte Reiniger and Prince Achmed (1926) it is full of Middle East style, it depicted several famous folk tales of Middle East country and all of the characters and props are performed by silhouette. it reminds me Chinese shadow play which is an old way of storytelling and entertainment. It is good to know how people use different form of storytelling in past . Cutout is a really simple way to create animation and telling story.Watching old animation always reminds us (especially animation students) the importance of “less is more” this concept. In Lotte Reiniger and Prince Achmed (1926) , the audience can only see the silhouette of the characters, without seeing their facial expression and many colour to decorate the scene, we still can understand the emotion of the characters and the changes of the environments.
In class 3, we watched Felix the Cat and many cartoons from the early years. Although all the animations are simple and some of them don’t even have sound ,the contents are very funny and engaging as the cartoons these days. My favorite animation I watched in class 3 is Dancing On The Moon(1935). I love the way they combined music and the animation together. Plus, I love the visual style in this cartoon. The designs of characters are very simple ,however you won’t get bored as their body language and facial expression are exaggerated. I really like the idea that although the story dosen’t have a hugh background setting, you can start watch in from any episode. It was very fun to watch animations from early years and understanding how people create animation back in the day.They are full of Academic value for us to learning the animation history.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 