Animation: Genre and Authorship – Paul Wells
This reading chapter covers 4 main areas
History of animation/Forms and approaches
‘Historians have … insisted upon the recognition of other more experimental traditions as the true measure of the potential, variety and freedom of animation as a form.’ (Pg 3)
This refers to both the many forms and techniques that animation genre blankets, emphasising ‘the ‘openness’ of the form’ (pg 5), as well as the development of the genre through different ages of technology and the impacts these changes have had on the process.
‘it is important to stress that the impact of new digital technologies has profoundly altered the nature of this process.’ (Pg 4)
2. Distinctive vocabulary and ‘modernity’
Animation: ‘the process of drawing and configuration and photographing a character – a person, an animal, or an inanimate object – in successive positions to create lifelike movements.’ Pg 3-4. As defined by Preston Blair
The animator must ensure that technical aesthetic and conceptual continuity is achieved frame-by-frame.’ Pg 7
Norman McLaren: ‘How it moves is more important than what moves’ - Directs the animator to think about the act of movement and what it aims to express.
Against broadening of animation genre
‘many films now have such a degree of animated effects that it may be difficult to prevent certain ostensibly ‘live action’ films lobbying for an Animation Oscar’ pg 2
For broadening of animation genre
‘however, the Oscar category may also offer independent animators who do work to full-length…an opportunity to gain recognition in a way that their films never would in the main category.’ Pg 2
‘recognition of the number of roles that combine in the creation of a certain type of animated film, each in a sense claim to a mode of ‘authorship’.
Example 1: Synchromie (1971) - Norman McLaren
The ‘depiction of ‘visual music’’ … ‘The soundtrack is perpetually present as the dominant visual image without a changing colour scheme, and an increasing complexity of bars’ (pg 12)
‘one aspect of the materiality of the form’ (pg 12)
This is an early example of how sound and music is necessary in animation as it diegetic sound cannot be recorded and so it has to be created and fit in with the visuals.
Example 2: Manipulation (1992) - Daniel Greaves
Self-reflexive animated short of an animator who experiments with his creation that breaks free.
‘This whole sequence is a testament to the graphic freedoms of the form using all of the space to demonstrate the tension between configuration and abstraction.’ Pg 10
Centrality of self-reflexiveness:
‘this is the key aspect of the ‘unpredictable articulations of the cartoon’ and discuss how animation facilitates the self-conscious enunciation of character as a phenomenological encounter’ pg 11 (Terry Lindvall and Matthew Melton)