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.
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.
LeAnn and I have revised our creature concept. We thought that the original concept would be easy to manipulate and pose, however, we underestimated the size of the paper binders (pegs) that we used. Because of the size of the pegs, this limited the maximum movement of the puppet. The pegs would collide and it would cause it to get stuck together. As well as lack of resources we couldn’t gather because of unforeseen occurrences. So that it would be easier to animate, we revised the design.
So for the final design of our character, we chose to have it to be worm-like. It would be easier to rig and would have enough space for each peg to move – thus it will have a more fluid movement. This creature haunts and roams the depths of the ocean. The creature’s purpose is unknown but we have yet to see what’s to come.
Aside from the creature, we also have foreground and background elements that will move throughout the animation. We’re currently still working on the animation. Here is a behind the scenes look at LeAnn creating more elements for the animation.
At one point, animation was an even more time consuming and tedious job than it appears to be now. Early animations required each frame to be painted and drawn by hand individually and for new backgrounds to painstakingly made with hyper realistic details and lighting. This mean that animations required a lot of time and money to be produced. As a result of increasing budget cuts and even greater time constraints this old way was abandoned and replaced with a new method, limited animation. Limited animation implements techniques like animation cycles, mirrored-images, symmetrical drawings, and still characters.
Many early commercials utilized these techniques. The earliest shows to implement them were Warner Brother cartoons. Specifically, Dover Boys and Merrier Melodies.
Due to the financial benefit of limited animations, many shows have used it over the years. One famous studio famous for it would be Hanna-Barbera Productions. Linked below is a clip from Scooby Doo, one of the studios most famous shows, and in it you can see the use of cycled running, reused backgrounds, and sparse character actions.
In the first two weeks of class we covered the early years, from animation toys, to the creation of full films with sound and the pioneering of many important animation processes. It’s a lot, though we haven’t even looked at anything Disney yet.
What it made me realize was that animation history was less of a line than a zig-zag: the back and forth process of invention and industrialization, as well as the cross-pollination of animation techniques between Europe and America. All were important factors in the development of the animation as an art form and as an industry.
Early inventions in what we now think of as animation mostly came from Europe. Frenchman Émile Reynaud created the first film projection animations or Théätre Optique in 1888, expanding from earlier toys such as the phenakistocope and zoetrope, attributed to Joseph Plateau (Belgium) and William G. Horner (UK) respectively. As early as the zoetrope however, Americans tapped into industry and manufacturing; American William Ensign Lincoln licensed his version of the zoetrope to the board game company Milton Bradley and Co. in 1865-66.
Of course what interests us is the techniques that have become standard. John Randolph Bray (US) and Raoul Barré (Canada/US) were important in creating both technical processes, such as celluloid [cels] and the hole and peg system, and production processes, i.e. the industrial animation pipeline; all three are still in use in some form or another today, speaking to how influential their inventions were. Interestingly, Barré, with Bill Nolan, was also the first to make animated adverts, and created the first 100% animation focused studio.
Different peg bar systems, from article on the history of the peg bar
The first character driven animation, or perhaps ‘animated cartoon’, was Emile Cohl’s (France/US) Fantoche the Clown in 1908; American cartoons included Krazy Kat (1916), Felix the Cat (Pat Sullivan and Otto Messmer 1919), and Fleischer studios’ iconic characters (1920s-30s). And of course later on we’ll meet Mickey Mouse, most iconic of all animated cartoons.
American Winsor McCay is an interesting case; the naturalistic draftsmanship he used from his illustration background elevated animation to a new level. He also pioneered technical animation methods such as inbetweening and cycles/loops as shown in Gertie the Dinosaur (1913), for which John Randolph Bray tried to sue him after patenting those methods. Gertie also carries the legacy of animation as performance and showmanship like with early pioneers Georges Méliès (France) and James Stuart Blackton (US).
A frame from Gertie the Dinosaur – notice the ‘stop here’ instruction, presumably for the assistant (source)
Animation was exclusively in short film form, until the first European feature-length animation films. They include El Apostol (1917) and Peludopolis (1930) by Italian-Argentinian Quirino Cristiani, the second of which was the first with sound, and The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926) by German Lotte Reiniger and her team. Achmed in particular seems important to me, as its use of the multiplane glass technique allowed for many-layered backgrounds that further pushed animation towards a truly cinematic look, and was an early version of the multiplane camera, which was used in Disney’s first feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), and allowed it great compositional depth.
We always think of Disney when we think of animation history. In a way, Disney’s Golden Age is kind of an ‘Italian Renaissance’ of animation, because it married both industrial efficiency and artistic height. But without seeing the historical context before and at the time of Disney’s birth, we could easily forget the early origins and all the other milestones that allowed Disney to flourish.
ANIM223 - HISTORY OF ANIMATION - FALL 2019 
