A lot of the experimental artists such as Marry Ellen Brute, Len Lye, and Norman Mclaren, created films that resembled music videos. Following the beat of the rhythm gave the abstract pieces of their films, a narrative story, just as the professor had stated at the beginning of the class. Although they were intended as abstract pieces, the audience is able to follow along with what is happening throughout the scene.
My favorite film shown in class, was Rainbow Dance (1936) by Len Lye. The music was very funky, and the animation matched it perfectly with the different dance moves, and colors flying across the screen. It is a big contrast from his first animated experimental black and white film, Tusalava (1929). Which had no color and only used abstract, germ-like figures. In all honestly, made me very uncomfortable to watch.
Class 09 went over the next project, Pixels. When first hearing about the project, I had assumed it was going to be creating works in pixel form, as in cube by cube. My first thought was of those artists who use post-its to create large pixel art. Watching Norman Mclaren’s Neighbors (1952), really confused me. It wasn’t till the end of the film, when I found out that it was a form of pixel animation. The video itself, made me dumbfounded with the ending, it was very unexpected. Seeing more examples of other projects, made me see that Pixel art, is no different from the other project assignments we had done in the past. The only difference is that people are apart of the animation.
Today in class we learned about pixelation animation. Initially, I thought pixelation would deal with pixel art or the incorporation of digital animation with real life acting (i.e. Who Framed Rodger Rabbit.) However, I was wrong in my assumption. Pixelation animation is actually a type of stop motion but instead of puppets or objects it is done with people.
The moment Professor Zhang mentioned many bands had incorporated this technique into their music videos one band instantly came to mind, Ok Go. They are a pop-rock band that originated out of Chicago Illinois. They are best known for having insanely complicated ymusic videos. Some examples of the wild things they have done for their videos include synchronized walking across treadmills, building warehouse sized Rube Goldberg Machines, and being subjected to zero gravity.
So of course, I wasn’t surprised to find out they have also done pixelation. One of their first videos using this technique is End Love. This video is about 9 years old and is rather rough but you can see in the way the band members slide around the screen without moving their feed and also pop in and out of existence that they are using the technique. This is the first video linked below.
A couple years after this video was released you see them use this technique once again for a small segment about Primary colors on Sesame Street and they have improved immensely.
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.
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.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 