The cyclical nature of animation

I spent the day sourcing old/early animations for a History of Animation course I am teaching and it got me thinking about the evolution of animation and how it has come almost full circle, particularly as Disney goes back to its roots with ‘The Princess and the Frog’.

 The invention of toys that gave the illusion of movement, from the zoetrope to the praxinoscope, were essentially the starting point for animation. Then along came vaudeville acts and comic strip artists such as Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay and animation was developed. ‘Humorous Phases of Funny Faces’ by James Stuart Blackton in 1906 is often credited as the first animated film. A film showing the actual process of chalk drawing, taken straight out of the vaudeville acts of the time, then the hand disappears and we see the drawings come to life and change on their own. It is beautifully simple and elements such as the 2 heads facing each other can be viewed as precursors to Svankmajer’s work such as ‘Dimensions of Dialogue’ (1983). Blackton’s film was all about the illusion, the technology and the spectacle. Two years later Cohl produced ‘Fantasmagorie’ which employed a similar method to Blackton but was the first properly animated film using the traditional hand-drawn animation technique and featured transformations and metamorphosis, which were to become key themes within the developing medium. Cohl used rounded, aesthetically pleasing shapes that were easy for metamorphosis and these rounded shapes can be seen in later animations by McCay and in an even later creation by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, Mickey Mouse.

 McCay took Blackton and Cohl’s ideas a step further and developed the first proper cartoon character in ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ (1914). It was self-reflexive, having McCay literally in the film talking to Gertie and developed the theme of anthropomorphism in animation. The film still had vaudevillian elements and the simple black lines on a simple white background emphasised Gertie’s round shape reminiscent of Cohl’s shapes in ‘Fantasmagorie’. Gertie was playful and mischievous and was appealing to audiences. Around the same time Russian stop-motion animator Ladislaw Starewicz was creating films using real insects as the main characters, he would use wire to move the legs and position them correctly. His film ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’ (1912) told the story of the infidelity of two beetles and is so realistic, one really believes that the beetles are alive. They are beautiful puppet films with elements of the carnivalesque and the uncanny and the colourisation Starewicz employs helps to both determine a different scene and to give it a modern feel. The title of the film also reveals the self-referential nature of his films and comments on the new medium of cinema.  

Otto Messmer was responsible for the invention of the breakthough character Felix the Cat in the 1920s. Messmer took his inspiration from Chaplin, particularly the Tramp character, and, living in New York, Messmer incorporated urban elements and the Depression into his cartoon. Felix was an unemployed everyman that people could identify with and so the cartoon was appealing to both adults and children. He was the first character to be created specifically for the screen and a lot of profit was made from Felix through mass merchandising such as toys and cups, the industry of animation was developed. Up to this point most animations featured animals as their main characters, probably due to the fact that most cultures have some form of animal in their folktales and so there is universality and also animals could be drawn in a simple rounded way that was aesthetically pleasing and easy for the animator to reproduce again and again. Felix set the standards for all future cartoon characters, he was easy to draw and therefore economical and his rounded qualities meant there were more possibilities for transformations, still a key theme in animation.

One cannot discuss the evolution of animation without mentioning one particular figure, Walt Disney. The Disney studio developed a mouse character that can be viewed as a progression from Felix and debuted in ‘Plane Crazy’ in 1928. Mickey mouse was developed but was only a character to introduce other characters around that time. Disney’s Silly Symphonies series developed their animation style and ‘Flowers and Trees’ (1932) was the first animation to use three-strip Technicolor and won an Academy Award for Best animation that year. Disney would become famous for their high level of realism and strong personalities as seen in ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ in 1937 which was the very first full length, cel animated feature film in colour and was a critical and commercial success.   

The Golden Age of American Animation is perhaps my favourite period due to Warner Brothers' extreme reaction to Disney resulting in some of the best animation ever made. The simplistic, strong graphic backgrounds of Chuck Jones' Road Runner cartoons combined with extreme violence and knowing characters are refreshing even today. This anarchic irony can be found in the characters of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck and the self-reflexive qualities give the animations a modern edge. The sense of urban America contrasted greatly with Disney’s twee rural locations and highly detailed realism. Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies offered a fast-paced hysterical alternative to Disney’s Silly Symphonies and the timing, rhythm and editing style of Warner’s cartoons were key formal differences to Disney. Tex Avery’s ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ (1943) for MGM is a delightful alternative to Disney and is parodied again and again, my favourite homage being ‘The Mask’ (1994) where we see Jim Carrey's character literally morph into the wolf and whistle his approval at Diaz’s sultry club singer.

The 50s and 60s saw animation reach people’s homes as television was born and studios such as Hanna-Barbera produced many successful animated series for TV such as ‘The Flintstones’, ‘Top Cat’, ‘Yogi Bear’ and of course ‘Tom and Jerry’. They retained the graphic simplicity of Warner Bros. and MGM but had a signature Hanna-Barbera ‘look’ and the violence of Looney Tunes can be seen in the ongoing battle of cat and mouse in ‘Tom and Jerry’. With the Golden Age of American Animation well and truly over in the late 60s it is difficult to imagine how animation would progress, but progress it did, particularly in Eastern Europe. Jiri Trnka and Jan Svankmajer produced incredible puppet animations that utilised traditional folktales and heritage puppets. Svankmajer’s animations play with the idea of the grotesque and also the uncanny, his inanimate objects are brought to life with stop-motion animation in a beautifully surreal way. He continues to work today and has moved into feature films that are not solely animation. Ray Harryhausen took puppet animation a step further by incorporating stop-motion animation into live action films, one of his greatest achievements being the skeleton fight sequence in ‘Jason and the Argonauts’ (1963). Harryhausen seamlessly blurred the line between fantasy and reality and special effects became the new spectacle in film.

 In 1979 Yuri Norstein created the masterpiece that is ‘Tale of Tales’; a film about memory, history and childhood with political undertones. The film features different styles of animation and drawing interspersed with each other and the whole structure of the film is dreamlike. For me this film really shows the true potential animation has to be a powerful and beautiful art form that can depict things that live action simply cannot. ‘Tale Of Tales’ was voted best animated film of all time by animators and critics at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival and continues to be credited with this title on lists today.

‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’ (1988) reignited an interest in the Golden Age of American Animation and demonstrated the future of animation, live-action and animation interacting, and also made way for the Disney Renaissance of the late 80s and early 90s. Perhaps the largest development in animation, and arguably not even animation, is CGI or computer generated imagery. Industrial Light & Magic (founded in 1975 by George Lucas) changed the face of special effects in movies and films such as ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993) employed traditional puppet animation techniques in the form of animatronics and combined it with CGI in a way that was invisible to the audiences. ‘Terminator 2’ (1991) epitomised this new technology with clearly visible effects and used this obvious animation to its advantage.  
‘Wallace and Gromit’ brought traditional stop-motion animation into the spotlight again at a time when CGI had become the norm in the 90s and 00s. As companies strive for the most realistic computer generated animation and films such as ‘Toy Story 3’ (2010) become contenders for the Best Motion Picture of the Year Academy Award it seems animation is well and truly here to stay. But what about traditional animation?  ‘The Princess and the Frog’ (2009) saw Disney return to traditionally hand-drawn animation but only, ironically, because of Pixar’s John Lasseter, the man behind Toy Story (1995) which was the first feature length completely CGI film.  

The concept of modernity and the modern has always been a theme in animation and as technology advances so does the ability to demonstrate this in animation. But is this really necessary? In a period of endless possibilities has the medium of animation lost its way and become a platform for showing off what can be done technologically? I loved ‘Toy Story 3’ due to its amazing storytelling and loveable characters not because of the technological advances it has employed. It seems a shame that often when people think of animation today they immediately think about computer-animated film, which is a marvellous achievement but has dominated animation for too long.  Aardman’s stop-motion animation has offered a refreshing nostalgic alternative to computer-animated film but its quaint ‘Britishness’ feels like a rare novelty rather than a medium changing formula. World cinema seems to be embracing traditional animation with Hayao Miyazaki making beautiful anime feature films to critical acclaim and Sylvain Chomet directing traditionally animated Oscar-nominated features. Will Pixar and other such studios ever create a totally ‘realistic’ animation, they seem to strive for that level of perfection, but surely the whole point of animation is the spectacle and the fantasy, not realism? Let’s hope animation has truly come full circle and we will embrace this medium for what it is truly good at, the fantastical.