MP7 | Music in animation: visual music, score and song | Part 2

Posted on by Claude Lau

Taking a sharp left turn away from fine art, I want to discuss how mainstream animation uses music. While experimental film explored the intrinsic qualities of music in abstract ways, mainstream film and animation would use music to the end of creating objective scenery and narrative. The Disney method/style capitalizes on the intrinsic influence music has on an audience, whether it be a musical score or songs with vocals and lyrics. And as a de facto pioneer of all aspects of animation film, Disney’s use of music has become a model for animated films even today.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf (Sing Along Songs) - YouTube

Though not the first cartoon to feature music, Steamboat Willie in 1928, was the first Disney cartoon with synchronized sound. Walt Disney then produced the Silly Symphonies series, exploring both visual techniques and exercising the use of animation to music: Skeleton Dance (1929) made use of a musical score, Three Little Pigs (1932) was a musical in which the story was told in song. The Old Mill (1937) was also set to a score, and showed Disney studio’s impressive use of the multiplane camera in immersive scenery coupled with atmospheric music.

But I think the culmination of Walt Disney’s personal conviction of music’s importance to film and animation, was the anthology film Fantasia (1940), a 126 minute behemoth with a concert-like program of 8 musical acts or segments. It was built around a longer Silly Symphony, starring Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and using the symphonic poem 1897 by French composer Paul Dukas, based on the German poem by Goethe.

It was a very daring production, for reasons ranging from its departure of traditional narrative based fairytale features like Snow White, to the production costs that were difficult to make back as Europe had plunged into World War II. For the music in Fantasia, the studio developed the stereo sound system to reproduce the most immersive audio experience, which they aptly named ‘Fantasound’. This makes Fantasia the first commercial film with stereo sound to ever be shown.

screencaps by the blog quixotando
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The first segment, set to an orchestral arrangement of Fugue in D Minor by Bach, changes from live action footage of a strongly lit musical ensemble into abstract scenes of patterns and shapes moving across the screen, highly reminiscent of the abstract visual music filmmakers usually associated with fine art more so than commercial animation. In fact, Walt Disney was inspired by Len Lye, a New Zealand experimental filmmaker, to create this segment, and hired Oskar Fischinger to work on the special effects with one of Disney’s top FX men, the Chinese-American Cy Young. However, Disney rejected Fischinger’s contributions, finding them too abstract. Although no doubt drawing from abstract animation, the segment is visibly more objective; the bows of string instruments, undulating waves, mountains and cathedral windows can be seen. The overall concept remains intact, and some of the visual vocabulary is similar to the works of ‘true’ visual music animators like Fischinger’s Studies. Watch this section of Disney’s homage to visual music below:

As my parents said to me when they showed me this film as a child, ‘Disney was teaching kids how to listen to music’. I think they were right, and, at least in teaching me, Disney succeeded.

References:

Major Post 5: Norman McLaren #2 (Pas de Deux)

Posted on by Sydney McPherson

I believe I have a new favorite animation or visual effects video to add to my list after watching Pas de Deux by Norman McLaren from 1968. I have a background in dance through ballet and other genres, and so seeing the title interested me; its means “dance for two” in French and I often watched other students in my dance classes performing Pas de Deux.

The music choice for the film works well, as it allows the dancer to gradually increase the intensity of her movements. As the film begins, the ‘onion skin’ effect isn’t used immediately, it is not revealed until a kind of exposition could be put in place. The film allows us to become acclimated with the music, dancer, and tone of the overall film before it begins to experiment with its visuals. The dancer then begins to create bigger movements and use more of the space around her.

Regarding the visuals, the film being in black and white is successful. The stark contrast created by the light source they used makes the dancers look graphic, as if they’ve been drawn. It’s clear that Norman McLaren made choices about which moments he would use the ‘onion skin’ effect on and which moments would remain untouched.  This is a work I am considering as a topic for my research paper, as I’m fascinated by it and want to study it more.

Side Note: When I first saw this film I immediately thought about a music video by a band called OK Go. It’s called “WTF?” and uses the same ‘onion skin’ effect with plenty of vibrant colors and patterns to create a unique and jumbled visual.

Sydney McPherson

MP6 | Music in animation: visual music, score and song | Part 1

Posted on by Claude Lau

In Class 5 we delved into the strain of animation known as ‘visual music’, which made me begin to think about music’s relationship with animation. To do that, it turns out we must first look at music’s relationship with art in general.

A handful of visual artists and designers were the visual and conceptual forefathers (foreparents?) of the group of animators working in visual music. French painter Leopold Survage was the first to suggest the idea of merging cinema and abstract imagery, and his series Rythmes colorés (1913) was concieved with the intention of being animated. Sadly, he did not have the funding to put this project into action, and so did not become the first pioneer of visual music. That privilege perhaps goes to Swiss Dadaist Viking Eggeling, who sought to create a vocabulary of shapes and symbol to be usd in visual abstraction as with the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, which he demonstrates in works like the 1924 film Diagonal-Symphonie. The term ‘visual music’ was in fact used to describe Kandinsky’s paintings. Kandinsky began as a figurative painter but rejected depicting objective visual “reality” and became a staple of the abstract painting tradition. Thus the rejection of figurative forms in animation was the abstract, or ‘absolute’ animation. Another important influence of the visual music aesthetic was the Bauhaus school of design in Germany, which saw modernist design and concepts like color theory consolidated under a systematic method.

Called the ‘Father of Visual Music’, Oskar Fischinger’s filmography explores the ways of creating moving design around music. Though a narrow niche it may seem, he explored many techniques to achieve his artistic goal throughout his prolific career: progressive cross sections of wax/clay building on Ruttman’s wax slicing method as in Wax Experiments (1922), drawn/painted animations like in his commercially successful series The Studies in the late 20’s and 30’s, documenting the gradual progress of a semi-abstract painting in Motion Painting (1947) and even stop motion as in Composition in Blue (1935) and the Muratti Privat commercial in 1935.

Another visual music artist whose works were discussed in another class but are undoubtedly the continuation of the visual music tradition, is the inimitable Scottish-Canandian filmmaker Norman McLaren. His works done with the method of drawing directly on film, such as Boogie Doodie (1940) or Hen Hop (1942) have a charming simplicity and rawness that matches the rhythm of the music very well. McLaren’s styles of work are very highly varied, also including stop motion (La Merle, 1958), progress of chalk drawings like a sort of Motion Painting, and using the ‘pixilation’ method, or animation using the body, such as in the Oscar-winning short Neighbors (1952).

Visual music continues to be an active art form in the 21st Century, though undoubtedly somewhat overshadowed by mainstream ‘visualization’ of music with music videos, let alone animation. I was very much captured by the 2008 short AANAATT, created by Hong Kong based new media artist Max Hattler. He describes it on his page as ‘the ever-shifting shape of Analogue Futurism’, which seems quite apt. While similar to Fischinger’s Composition in Blue, in that it is abstract stop motion animation set to tone-defining music, the resulting visuals are highly different. Where Composition is whimsical and pure, AANAAT seems alien and otherworldly.

References

Major Post 6: Golden Age

Posted on by Sammy Liu

The Golden Age of Animation loosely began after the release of Steamboat Willie (1928) by Disney. It was also the beginning of many animators experimenting with easier or more time-efficient ways of creating moving pictures.
Other ambitious animators rose, like Harman and Ising, who tried creating their own studio because of Disney’s perseverance. Many great animators gathered together during this time and encouraged each other to continue to build their curiosity and talent towards different animation and cinematography styles.

Many memorable characters emerged from this period, including Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Popeye, Betty Boop, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, Mr. Magoo, Tom and Jerry, Droopy and a popular adaptation of Superman, among many others that haven’t survived along the way. Feature length animation also began during this period, most notably with Walt Disney‘s first films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi.
Source:https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheGoldenAgeOfAnimation

One of the highlights for me during screening in class, was Red Hot Riding Hood (1943) by Tex Avery, who demonstrated unique choices in voice and performance when directing Red Hot Riding Hood (1943). He was apparently one of the first animator to use smear – dry brush motion for a blurred effect. Reason for use is to portray extremely fast movement, a technique they’d explored to draw more exciting, stylized in-betweens.

Hans Fischerkoesen, who was employed by Hitler was forced to make cartoons to compete against Disney, eventually earning the nickname “Germany’s Walt Disney”. It demonstrates how Hitler was determined to use even the entertainment industry to gain favour among his country. I feel like passive power gain like that are still happening in the form of, what we now call, “Soft Power”. An example of this soft power is seen in J-pop, anime, and in the more recent years K-Pop, where one country’s culture can earn particular favour within other countries.

Class Notes:
Ub Iwerks – Pat Power Studios, worked on most of the works for Disney so ppl highly valued him. Thought Disney would fail. BUT didn’t?!?!?! infact, Ub iwerks didn’t really work out/gain audience attention.
Jack Frost – Techicolour?
Trolley Troubles – Oswald the lucky Rabbit (1927)
Style developed by Harman Ising (who tried to open their own studio, but was fired)
Chuck Jones: Duck Amuck – often breaking fourth wall and explores interaction with the animator.
Bosko: HughHarman – Black Caricature
Contract wuth MGM for developing new series for Bosko

Sammy Liu


Major Post 8: Ok Go!

Posted on by LeAnn Schmitt

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.

LeAnn Schmitt

 

 

MP5 | Lotte Reiniger’s successor: Michel Ocelot and the updated fairytale silhouette

Posted on by Claude Lau
Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)

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)
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Carte blanche à Michel Ocelot - Toutes les rencontres ...
Ocelot with cutouts from ‘Princes et Princesses‘
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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.
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31 Great French Movies for All Ages: Christmas Edition
Promotional poster for Azur & Asmar (2006)
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A good work of Ocelot’s to compare to Reiniger’s Adventures of Prince Achmed (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.

Rotten Tomatoes’ selection of Azur et Asmar screenshots
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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.
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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.

Referenced from:

Claudia Lau

Major Post 05- Cutout Animation

Posted on by Jiawen Tan

Cutout animation uses paper-cut to represent the plot. Use paper to cut or carve objects and background props, paint colors and assemble joints. When shooting, according to the needs of the plot, the activities of the characters and scenery are decomposed into several different postures step by step, which are placed on the glass, manipulated by the human, and then the joints are pulled in turn. The movable images are taken by the method of progressive photography, and are formed by continuous projection.

Chinese paper cutting is an ancient art form passed on from generation to generation. Therefore, Chinese paper cutting animation combines traditional paper-cut skills to create exquisite scenes.

The Fox and the Hunter (1978) is a Chinese cutout animation. The film tells the story of a cunning fox who uses legends to disguise himself as a monster to scare young hunters into losing their guns and fleeing for their lives. Old hunters see through the fox’s tricks and kill them. At the beginning of the creation, the designer failed many times when he designed the fox, because he loved the fox very much, so that the fox that was supposed to be cunning and treacherous became more and more lovely. The director said he wanted to hug it. So the designer drew more than twenty pictures before they passed. But the wolf’s shape is a success, because the designer hates the wolf deeply. This worries me a lot about the cutout animation project we are going to do. I think Janelle will certainly be unable to make up her mind about the final design of animal characters.

Major Post 04- French Animation

Posted on by Jiawen Tan

French animation has its own style, unlike the animation in the United States, Japan and other regions (mostly commercial), French animation usually has connotative storyline, and philosophical thinking. French animation has always been dominated by short films with fresh or profound connotations. Its unique character style, color style and overall sense of artistic form can leave a deep impression on the audience.

Unlike Disney animation, French animation is stylized, which reflects the individual style of artists combined with local traditional culture.

In French animation, there are more absurd plots, more exaggeration in the style, artistic form and expression techniques of the picture, and more exaggeration in the character modeling. The overall style of the film uses a large area of white, black, monochrome or homochrome, usually using color psychology to foil the development of events.

Skizein (2008) shown in class is a typical French animated short film.

For animated short films, simple and contradictory stories are particularly important. In just a few minutes, we need not only simple and easy to understand, but also a strong explosive point. Proper design of some turning point, suspense, or trigger some resonance, will succeed in attracting the attention of the audience.

Major Post 03- The Idea

Posted on by Jiawen Tan

The movie The Idea (1932), which lasted for nearly half an hour, was hard to understand when it first watched. The film is made up of multi-layer transparent films, and the effects of halo and smoke are produced by the use of soap bubbles and glass panels. Although the picture is slightly blurred, it retains the graphic style of the printmaking while bringing special effects of light and shadow to the film. In addition, the short film is considered to be the earliest use of electronic instruments in the history of film. The music, Arthur Honegger, uses Ondes Martenot, invented in 1928, the earliest electronic organ.

A beautiful and naked woman was created in the starlight. She symbolizes a new thought. The creator sent her to the public. But feudal thought could not accept such purity and nature, and tried to judge and disguise the woman. The woman who fled the trial met a bosom man and she gradually has many supporters. Because of that, the man was sentenced to death. However, women were soon publicized, and high-ranking people used the army in the face of increasingly taller and bigger woman, under the ineffectiveness of coercion and lure. In the sound of gunfire, many supporters were killed. Among the sad crowd, women are transformed into light, shining above the stars.

The production of the film refers to the Die Abenteur des Prinzen Achmed created by German silhouette artists in 1926.

Major Post 02- Stop Motion

Posted on by Jiawen Tan

We saw many examples of stop motion animation in class. The one that shocked me most was the one made on the wall of the building. After class, I found a lot of interesting stop-motion movies to watch.

It’s really interesting to use stop-motion animation to make cooking videos, especially when different materials are conceptually substituted for ordinary food used in everyday life. In Julia’s blog post, the producer of stop-motion animation treats the grenade as avocado and the note paper as butter. The ingenious combination of special sound effects and scenes makes people feel like “nothing’s wrong with this” and “these things look delicious”

It’s a video of sushi making with stop motion. The producer even cut the iPhone. I’m really curious about how it can be neatly cut into several segments! It also has a funny plot design, which I really think is a successful stop-motion work.