Animation

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Animation

CARTOONS
3D STOP-MOTION ANIMATION
DIGITAL ANIMATION
ALTERNATIVE METHODS
FURTHER READING

Even in the contemporary era, when animation enjoys mainstream success and a diverse presence in everything from feature films to television sitcoms to festival shorts, and to Web and mobile delivery, the animation form is still very much understood in the popular imagination as "the cartoon"; its history, as ostensibly "American"; and its principal identity, as "Disney." This neglects an extraordinary body of work made with different techniques and by animators and studios worldwide. Animation may be broadly categorized under four key headings: the traditional cartoon; stop-motion three-dimensional (3D) animation, including puppet and clay animation, and work undertaken within the special-effects tradition; digital animation, incorporating computer-generated films, Web animation, motion capture and postproduction visual effects; and alternative animation, embracing experimental and avant garde forms and independent, developmental films that are essentially related to a fine-art discipline and context. Inevitably, these definitions overlap and combine in specific works, but they operate as convenient signposts by which to address different "histories" of animation, and animation as a consistently progressive form even as it has entered mainstream acceptance and popular culture.

CARTOONS

Despite all the innovations in the early years of US cinema that eventually led to the emergence of the "cartoon," it is Fantasmagorie (1908), by Emile Cohl (1857–1938) with its surreal stick-figure animation, that should be understood as the first two-dimensional cartoon film. Its bizarre narrative shows off the possibilities of the new form and signals "metamorphosis" as the core language of animated stories. Inevitably, though, it is the US tradition that defines the form in the public imagination, beginning with cartoon versions of comic strips and quickly embracing vaudeville and slapstick film comedy as the touchstone for its development as an indigenous American art. The pioneering work of Winsor McCay (1871–1934), including Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), arguably the first "personality" animation, was hugely influential on the aspirational Walt Disney (1901–1966), who became the key figure in creating an animation industry and ultimately in determining a critical view of animation as a film art. Disney's entrepreneurial and editorial skills drove his company and created a small-scale studio that could compete with the major players in the Hollywood system. The Silly Symphonies, made throughout the 1920s and 1930s and arguably some of the studio's greatest works, preceded the groundbreaking Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first full-length, sound-synchronized Technicolor cartoon. Though challenged by the innovations of the Fleischer and Warner Bros. studios, Disney's masterpieces, Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1941), and Bambi (1941), consolidated the studio's hyperrealist "fullanimation" aesthetic, and defined animation as a form.

Once Disney prioritized its feature-length works, Warner Bros. and MGM successfully advanced the cartoon short. Warner Bros., with key figures such as Tex Avery (1908–1980), Chuck Jones (1912–2002), and Bob Clampett (1913–1984), modernized the cartoon by making it more urbane and adult and more self-consciously "cartoonal" by foregrounding the very mechanisms by which cartoon narrative and comedy was achieved. MGM enjoyed success with the Tom and Jerry series, becoming endlessly inventive in character humor and chase scenarios, a formula later aped by Chuck Jones in his Roadrunner cartoons. Warner Bros. prospered throughout World War II, continuing to make innovative cartoons, but chiefly establishing Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig as household names. The postwar period, however, was the end of the "Golden Era," as a breakaway group from Disney formed United Productions of America (UPA), working in a minimalist, modern-art style, and on far more auteurist terms and conditions. John Hubley (1914–1977), and later his wife, Faith Hubley (1924–2001), and their family, developed the cartoon form with an aesthetic that sometimes embraced non-Western art forms; spiritual aspiration in relation to philosophical or quasi-religious topics; and the direct engagement with personal subject matter.

As the postwar world changed, the cartoon adapted, but its production costs and declining popularity led to the closure of many of the major studios' theatrical cartoon units and to a watershed for Disney, which failed to produce the classics of old. Chuck Jones had made masterpieces for cinema screens in the last throes of theatrical exhibition (What's Opera, Doc?, 1957), but the television era had begun in earnest, with Hanna-Barbera making more economically viable cartoons using a minimalist "reduced" style with simple and repeated movement cycles, and prioritizing witty scripts and characterful vocal performances. Ruff and Reddy debuted in 1957, and Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear soon became popular favorites, but it was The Flintstones (1960), the first prime-time animated sitcom, that vindicated the company's cost-effective methods. Though the 1960s proved to be a time in which animation was arguably at its lowest ebb in the United States, the shifting political climate encouraged more independent work, and by the early 1970s, with the work of Ralph Bakshi (b. 1938), the cartoon fully embraced the counterculture and its value as an "adult" language of expression.

Fritz the Cat (1972), Heavy Traffic (1973), and Coonskin (1975) engaged with the sexual, racial, and political mores of an America embroiled in the Vietnam War and coming to terms with the implications of Watergate. Though not entirely successful, Bakshi's work was nevertheless a last hurrah for traditional animation, as it became clear that the rejuvenation of the form in the mainstream arena would be determined by the recovery of Disney classicism and the rapid development of the new computer-generated aesthetic. The former only came in the late 1980s with the work of Ron Clements (b. 1953) and John Musker, who with The Little Mermaid (1989), and later, Aladdin (1992) and Hercules (1997), revived Disney's fortunes, ironically by using a more self-conscious, Warner Bros. style. In the midst of their achievements, Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the phenomenally successful The Lion King (1994) also resurrected Disney's classical animation aesthetic in the guise of the romantic musical. Interestingly, though, it was the computer-generated sequences in these films—the ballroom scene and the charge of the wildebeest, respectively—that signalled fully how computer-generated animation would eventually overtake traditional cel animation as the signature look of the animated feature. With the closure of the 2D animation department at Disney in 2003 came the tacit admission that 3D computer-generated imagery (CGI) was the new language of animation. Ironically, for all of that, the work of Hayao Miyazaki (b. 1941), with the Oscar^® -winning Spirited Away (2001); Bill Plympton (b. 1946) with Mutant Aliens (2001) and Hair High (2004); and Tim Burton (b. 1958), Henry Selick (b. 1952), and the Aardman Studios working in 3D stop-motion proved that "tradition" was never very far away.

3D STOP-MOTION ANIMATION

Three-dimensional stop-motion animation has two distinct histories. The first is the largely European tradition of short stop-motion films made by individual artists and stop-motion series made principally for children's television. The second, predominantly Hollywood tradition, is the "invisible" history of stop-motion animation as a branch of special effects for feature-length films. This is complicated further by the fact that 3D stop-motion animation also has two principal approaches, using either puppets or clay models, but also includes films made with objects and artifacts.

Though J. Stuart Blackton (1875–1941) and Albert E. Smith (1875–1958), Britons working in the United States, have been credited with making the first puppet film, The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1908), the British filmmaker Arthur Melbourne Cooper (1874–1961) made the first 3D advertisement ("Matches: An Appeal," featuring animated matches) perhaps as early as 1899. Cooper's "toys come to life" stories, including Dreams of Toyland (1908) and The Toymaker's Dream (1913), became a staple of early British animated film. Similar preoccupations informed The War and the Dreams of Momi (Giovanni Pastrone, 1913) and, later, The New Gulliver (Alexander Ptushko, 1935); but it was another Russian, Ladislaw Starewich (1882–1965), who first developed an extraordinary technique, following his interest in entomology, in animating three-dimensional insect characters. The Cameraman's Revenge (1911) is a melodramatic love triangle, and highly self-conscious in its reflexive tale of cinema about cinema. His later films Town Rat, Country Rat (1926) and Tale of the Fox (1930, released 1938) are masterpieces of the stopmotion form, drawing upon a darker, more amoral tradition of the folktale, yet they remained singularly unsung until recent years.

This neglect is a signal that animation made outside the US cartoonal tradition, in the long shadow of Disney, has been often marginalized in animation histories. This does more than negate important, aesthetically different work; it dismisses significant indigenous works that reflect national cultures and alternative perspectives on human experience. It is also true to say that the US tradition, particularly in its formative years, is largely a comic tradition. Other countries have aspired to different kinds of storytelling and have different thematic and artistic preoccupations. Indeed, even the comic work inevitably reflects different traditions of humor. The recovery of this work is paramount to a full understanding of the place of animation in international film culture.

Back in the United States, though, it was the pioneer Willis O'Brien (1886–1962) who inspired generations of what came to be called "effects artists." Amused by his brother, who playfully changed some of the postures of clay figures created for the exhibits in the San Francisco World's Fair of 1915, O'Brien experimented with his first stop-motion film, of a boxing match, soon to be followed by a prehistoric comedy, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915). In 1925 he made The Lost World, based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, assisted by the gifted model maker Marcel Delgado (1901–1976), who constructed 18-inch models influenced by Charles Knight's acclaimed dinosaur paintings in the American Museum of Natural History. RKO then employed O'Brien on the groundbreaking King Kong (1933), which changed the status of special-effects work, fully deploying O'Brien's "rear-projection" system, which combined background live action with foreground miniature animation, first seen in O'Brien's aborted project, The Creation (1930). King Kong has generated a high degree of critical attention, playing out considerations of its sexual and racial subtexts, and the complex implications of its bestial and imperialist agendas. These issues were revisited in the 2005 remake by Peter Jackson (b. 1961), which uses the same combination of motion-captured performance, 3D puppet animation, and 3D computer animation so successfully deployed in the creation of the character Gollum for Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003).

O'Brien later became mentor to the most famous of all stop-motion animation artists, Ray Harryhausen (b. 1920), who, inspired by King Kong, sought to ape the technique in his own short films. After working with the renowned George Pal (1908–1980) on his Puppetoons, Harryhausen made his own short educational films, the first of which was the Mother Goose Stories, then joined O'Brien in making Mighty Joe Young in 1949. This was the beginning of a long and distinguished career in which Harryhausen created many fantastical and mythical creatures in films such as The Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms (1953), The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Jason and the Argonauts (1963), and Clash of the Titans (1981). The effects tradition essentially defined by Harryhausen has the inherent contradiction that an effect must operate as something that draws attention to itself as "spectacle," but at the same time remains invisible as an "effect." Harryhausen's painstaking efficiency in the frame-by-frame compositing of increasingly complex miniature figures and creatures with live-action characters and environments represents a major achievement in cinema practice. As such, he is cited as a major influence by contemporary animators and artists from Phil Tippett (b. 1951) to James Cameron (b. 1954) and is referenced in animated films from Nightmare Before Christmas (Henry Selick, 1993), in which skeletons battle underwater, echoing Jason's fight with six skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, to PIXAR's Monsters, Inc. (2001), in which a top-class restaurant is called Harryhausen's.

Harryhausen's legacy is great, but George Pal, his one-time employer, also produced fine work. His "replacement" technique was slightly different from Harryhausen's method: whereas Harryhausen manipulated his models by small increments and recorded them frame by frame, Pal created replacement pieces of his models—faces, arms, legs, and so on—which progressed the cycle of movement he was creating, and which he inserted and changed, once more recording the incremental progression frame by frame. Though a more cumbersome technique, it survives into the modern era, particularly in clay animation, and has been used in films by Aardman Animation in England. After making early films in Germany, Pal moved to Holland, fleeing the rise of Nazism, and established the biggest puppet studio in Europe, principally making striking advertisements for sponsors such as Phillips and Unilever. His Puppetoons, made in Hollywood, included Jasper and the Beanstalk (1945), Henry and the Inky Poo (1946), and Tubby the Tuba (1947). They were highly successful, though sometimes they fell afoul of what might be termed "cultural difference" in regard to the representation of race issues and the interpretation of Western humor. These films nevertheless secured Pal a reputation that enabled him to produce and direct feature-length science-fiction and fantasy films such as The War of the Worlds (1953), Tom Thumb (1958), The Time Machine (1960), and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1963). These films all included tourde-force sequences of puppet animation—"the yawning man" from Tom Thumb being one of the most remembered. The quality of the animation by Harryhausen and Pal overshadowed similar efforts in the field such as, for example, Jack the Giant Killer (1961) by Tim Barr (1912–1977), one of a number of variations on The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) that sought to cash in on its popularity. Barr later joined up with Gene Warren (1916–1997) and Wah Chang (1917–2003) to work on visual effects for Pal and on their own work in Projects Unlimited.

Pal's legacy in Europe has been sustained, consolidated, and advanced by two major figures of Czechoslovakian origin. Influenced by indigenous marionette and theatrical traditions, Jirí Trnka (1912–1969) and Jan Svankmajer (b. 1934) produced a range of extraordinary films pushing the boundaries of stop-motion and other techniques as well. Trnka's politicized if romantic vision inspired masterpieces such as Staré povesti ceské (Old Czech Legends, 1953), Sen noci svatojanske (A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1955), and Ruka (The Hand, 1965), while Svankmajer's more subversive and challenging view, genuinely taboo-breaking in its daring, appears in such features as Alice (1988) and Otesánek (Little Otik, 2000). This altogether darker work inspired the Quay Brothers working in England, Kihachiro Kawamoto (b. 1925) in Japan, and Tim Burton and Henry Selick in the United States. Svankmajer's work is an important example of the ways in which the principles of modernist thought and political insight may be accommodated in experimental film. His "agit-prop" (strident critique of authoritarian regimes and political repression) and "agit-scare" (use of surreal images drawn from the unconscious to prompt moments of fear and revelation in his audience) are conceptual applications to the medium and should be understood as a methodology in the creation of distinctive imagery and alternative narratives. Svankmajer's masterpiece, Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982), is a tripartite meditation on the breakdown of communication, illustrating the brutal and destructive tendencies inherent in human exchange. The film is a complex metaphor and a challenging comment on humankind's inability to resolve its differences.

The contemporary era has seen the emergence of the Will Vinton studios in the United States and Aardman Animation in England as masters of clay animation. The two styles vary, but both studios value the "clay" aesthetic as something visually distinctive and engaging. Nick Park (b. 1958), Aardman's most famous son, created Wallace, the eccentric inventor, and his altogether smarter dog, Gromit, a now globally famous partnership, who have featured in Park's shorts A Grand Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A Close Shave (1995). Park's work, though speaking to a wider tradition of English wit and whimsy, nevertheless has clear affiliations with the stop-motion animation made for children's television in England by Gordon Murray (b. 1921) and Bura and Hardwick (Camberwick Green, 1966, and Trumpton, 1967); Oliver Postgate (b. 1925) and Peter Firman (b. 1928) (The Clangers, 1969, and Bagpuss, 1974); and Ivor Wood (1932–2004) at Filmfair (The Wombles, 1973, and Postman Pat, 1981). The high quality of 3D animation for children in England has been sustained by Cosgrove Hall, S4C, and BBC Animation, and has been only echoed in the United States by the early 1960s work of Jules Bass (b. 1935) (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, 1964, and Mad Monster Party, 1968) and by Art Clokey's (b. 1921) simple clay figure, Gumby (1955 onward). Inevitably, Will Vinton's (b. 1948) Martin the Cobbler (1976), The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985), and the 1990s' advertisements for the California Raisin Advisory Board, featuring raisins singing popular songs, have in their various ways created a high-water mark in clay animation in the United States, which has always had to compete with the Disney tradition, but also in recent years with the now dominant CGI aesthetic.

Stop-motion and clay animators have always championed the "materiality" and "textural" aspects of their work as the distinctive appeal of 3D stop-motion, but one of the most significant aspects remains the necessarily artisanal approach to the work, which is reliant not on off-the-shelf software but on the ability to make and build things, as well as to respond to the miniature demands of theatrical practice and live-action filmmaking techniques on a small scale. The fundamental belief in the sheer "difference" and visual appeal of stopmotion animation has also prompted the emergence of important individual artists, from Serge Danot (The Magic Roundabout, 1965) to Joan Gratz (Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase, 1992) to Barry Purves (Gilbert and Sullivan, 1999), each bringing a specific vision to the materials, as well as a sense of theatrical space and the fluid timing of their narratives. Peter Lord (b. 1953) and David Sproxton's (b. 1954) Animated Conversations (1978) and Conversation Pieces (1982–1983) were also groundbreaking in their combination of animation and "documentary" soundtrack. Chicken Run (2000), an Aardman feature, proved hugely successful, and crucially represented the maintenance of 3D work in a physical and material context. The persuasiveness of 3D CGI has proved a serious threat to such work, but the sheer tactility, texture, and presence of 3D stop-motion work with puppets or clay has endured and has maintained its own aesthetic distinctiveness. Tim Burton's Corpse Bride (2005) and Aardman's feature Wallace and Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) are testaments to the style's achievement and future.

DIGITAL ANIMATION

The history of digitally produced animation, and animation produced through the use of a computer, begins outside the sphere of the entertainment industry, emerging out of the work of military and industrial research teams seeking to use computer graphics for simulation and technical instruction. The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC), created by the US army at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946, was the world's first electronic programmable computer; although it was a vast contraption, it had little processing power. With the first silicon transistors, made in 1954, and integrated circuits in 1958, computers became more powerful, and their uses more various but still largely untouched by creative endeavors.

JAN SVANKMAJER
b. Prague, Czechoslovakia, 4 September 1934

Jan Svankmajer studied sculpture, painting, engraving, and the writings of the surrealist artists at the College of Applied Arts in Prague in the early 1950s, eventually entering the famed Prague Academy of Performing Arts in 1954 to study puppetry and filmmaking. These multidisciplinary skills earned Svankmajer a place as director and designer at the Czech State Puppet Theatre in 1958 and secured him work with the Semafor Mask Theatre in 1960. His first films—Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara (The Last Trick, 1964), Hra s kameny (A Game with Stones, 1965), and Rakvickarna (Punch and Judy, 1966)—demonstrate Svankmajer's trademark synthesis of the arts and the particular relationship between animated puppets and objects, human actors, and automata within performance contexts and "psychological" spaces.

The most significant influence on Svankmajer is the authoritarian context in which he worked. Following the Prague Spring of 1968 and his implicit critique of communism in Leonarduv denik (Leonardo's Diary, 1972), Svankmajer was banned from making animated films for seven years. When permitted to return to filmmaking, he agreed to make approved literary adaptations. His interpretations of Hugh Walpole's Castle of Otranto (Otrantský zámek, 1977) and Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (Zánik domu Usheru, 1981), are nevertheless thematically similar to his later Poe adaptation, Kyvadlo, jáma a nadeje (The Pendulum, the Pit and Hope, 1983) and his Lewis Carroll pieces, Zvahlav aneb Saticky Slameného Huberta (Jabberwocky, 1971) and the full-length feature Neco z Alenky (Alice, 1988). All are strident surrealist critiques of authoritarian regimes and political repression using irrational images drawn from the unconscious.

Svankmajer's bleak masterpiece, Moznosti dialogu (Dimensions of Dialogue, 1982), was banned in Czechoslovakia but enjoyed international success as a rich metaphor about the failure of personal and political communication. Do pivnice (Down to the Cellar, 1983) was an autobiographical interrogation of Svankmajer's childhood, depicting the terrors of unknown and mutable objects in a dark cellar. Many saw a similarly frightening engagement with childhood in Svankmajer's Alice, which sees Carroll's Wonderland recast as a nightmare world of disturbing images suggesting death, decay, and detritus, propelled by unconscious and complex desires.

The eventual downfall of communism produced Tma/Svetlo/Tma (Darkness/Light/Darkness, 1989), an absurdist fable about human endurance in the light of repression, and a short history of postwar Czechoslovakia, The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia (1990), which retains a chilling scepticism about oppression even in the newly democratic state. Svankmajer'ssubsequent features, Faust (1994), Spiklenci slasti (Conspirators of Pleasure, 1996), and Otesánek (Little Otik, 2000), combine live action and animation, yet continue his preoccupations with the "life" within found objects, the reconfiguration of "the body," and the surreal and subversive prompts of the unconscious.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Last Trick (1964), Leonardo's Diary (1972), Dimensions of Dialogue (1982), Alice (1988), Jídlo (Food, 1992), Otesánek (Little Otik, 2000)

John Whitney (1917–1995) was a pioneer in this respect, establishing Motion Graphics Inc. and making analog computer–generated light effects. He, in turn, inspired his son, John Whitney Jr., who was aware of the more commercially oriented innovation prompted by Ivan Sutherland's invention of the Sketchpad in 1962. This device enabled "drawing with light" into the computer, and underpinned the establishment of Evans and Sutherland as the first company to promote computer graphics as a creative technology. Whitney Jr. worked for the company for a short period before joining Information International, Inc. ("Triple I"), specializing in 3D computer-generated (CG) simulations. By 1964, when the first digital film recorder became available, John Stehura had made "Cibernetik 5.3" using only punch cards and tape, imagining his abstract, computer motion picture in his mind, and only seeing its outcome onscreen for the first time when using the recorder at General Dynamics in San Diego.

Having worked on an analog videographic system for his projects in the early 1970s, Ed Emshwiller (1926–1990) made the pioneering Sunstone (1979), a three-minute 3D computer graphic work using traditional frame-by-frame transitions and color in motion to create movement in static images that preceded the development of any software or hardware to facilitate such work. Another pioneer, Larry Cuba, made First Fig in 1974, and later worked with John Whitney Sr. on Arabesque (1975). Both of these were not merely experimental films, but also research into the relationship between geometry, mathematics, and graphics as they could be expressed through the computer.

One of the most crucial developments in the field in the 1970s was George Lucas's (b. 1944) creation of the initial teams that later became the nucleus of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and, later, PIXAR—a company created by Steve Jobs (b. 1955), the founder of Apple Computers, following the purchase of Lucasfilm's computer research and development division in 1985. Robert Abel (1937–2001), a pioneer in motion-control camera techniques, joined Lucas's team, and as well as doing development work on Star Wars (1977), effected research with Evans and Sutherland on applications of computer animation in the entertainment industries. It was not until 1982, however, that the first fully persuasive applications of computer-generated imagery emerged, first in Disney's Tron (1982), and then in the "Genesis" sequence of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).

It was clear, though, that the research and development undertaken by ILM aspired to move beyond using computer graphics as purely an effect, to prioritizing the technology as a new model for the filmmaking process per se, thus creating a postphotographic mode of cinema. John Whitney left Triple I to establish Digital Productions and was responsible for the next key development in CGI by creating over twenty-five minutes of material for The Last Starfighter (1984). In 1985 three works ensured that CGI would have a significant role to play in future production: John Lasseter's (b. 1957) ILM research project The Adventures of Andre and Wally Bee, which showed early signs of Lasseter's trademark combination of traditional cartoon-character animation with computer aesthetics; Daniel Langlois's (b. 1961) Tony de Peltrie, the first convincing CG character performance, here an aging pianist; and Robert Abel's Canned Food Information Council–sponsored commercial Brilliance, featuring a sexy robot employing some primitive but nevertheless effective motion capture. Though these works were in some senses primitive, they signalled the possibility of character-driven narratives in a new aesthetic context even while drawing upon filmic imagery from earlier cartoons made by Chuck Jones and Tex Avery. Tony de Peltrie used software, which would underpin the creation of Softimage, along with Alias-Waterfront, one of the major computer-animation software companies in the world.

Though initially the progress of CGI as a process was compromised by its cost, technical constraints, slowness of execution, and the lack of a standardized software package, James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) demonstrated that CGI could be used for effective storytelling and aesthetic ends and could work on a scale different from anything previously envisaged. With the increasing standardization of the requisite software, production facilities proliferated and CGI became an intrinsic tool of expression throughout the commercial and entertainment sector, in film, video games, and other multimedia applications.

Jurassic Park (1993) consolidated CGI as a crucial cinematic tool in the creation of its highly realistic dinosaurs, just as King Kong (1933) vindicated the importance of stop-motion animation as more than just a special effect in the creation of Kong, and Jackson's remake of King Kong progresses the field of visual effects once more in the contemporary era. The process of animated film practice itself also changed with the advent of computers, as much of the arduous work involved in cel animation (in-betweening, ink and paint) could now be done with a computer. Postproduction in most feature films was also revolutionized by the impact of computer applications and their intrinsic role as a special effect. Digital compositing and motion-controlled camera became a norm in feature production comparatively quickly, but it was the work of PIXAR that prioritized research and development in the service of creating a fully computer-animated feature—a model echoing Disney's desire to use the Silly Symphonies during the late 1920s and early 1930s as prototypes for the eventual creation of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Each year PIXAR made a short film—Luxo Jnr (1986), Red's Dream (1987), Tin Toy (1989), and Knick Knack (1990)—in anticipation of Toy Story (1995), the groundbreaking CGI feature featuring the now iconic Woody and Buzz.

Less heralded but also important is Reboot (1993), the first fully computer-generated television animation. Produced by Ian Pearson, Gavin Blair, and Phil Mitchell, it self-reflexively used the computer as its narrative subject, depicting the city of Main Frame where Bob, Enzo, and their friend, Dot Matrix, battle two viruses, Megabyte and Hexadecimal. Also, Chris Wedge (b. 1958), who worked initially for Magi, a company run by a group of nuclear particle scientists literally creating images from the data, went on to make the digital effects for Tron. Wedge and some Magi colleagues then formed their own company, Blue Sky, in 1987, making MTV logos, dancing cockroaches in Joe's Apartment (1996), swimming aliens in Alien Resurrection (1997), and Bunny (1998), which won an Oscar^® for the best animated short film. Blue Sky also wrote their own proprietary software for tracing light rays, which has enabled the company to achieve its own signature aesthetic in Ice Age (2002) and Robots (2004), and to work within the remit of Fox in a fashion similar to PIXAR's relationship to Disney.

Inevitably, with the success of CGI on the big and small screens, investment in the technology increased, and computer-generated images became the dominant aesthetic of animated features and children's programming. Equally inevitably, a variety of approaches to using computer animation have characterized the post–Toy Story era. While Dreamworks's SKG has emerged as a serious contender to PIXAR with films such as Shrek (2001), PIXAR has continued to innovate in features such as Finding Nemo (2002) and The Incredibles (2004), creating software to extend the range of the visual palette, incorporating underwater visualization and more cartoon-like aesthetics. With each new feature has come another innovation—even the holy grail of realistic-looking human hair in The Incredibles. Companies such as Rhythm and Hues specialize in animated visual effects for live-action animals in films such as Cats and Dogs (2001); Sony Pictures Imageworks advanced the complexity of special effects in films such as Spiderman 2 (2004); CORE Digital Pictures in Toronto, Canada, created a range of persuasive children's television with Angela Anaconda, The Savums, and Franny's Feet; and individual artists such as Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William Latham, Ruth Lingford, James Paterson, Amit Pitaru, Tomika Satoshi, Johnny Hardstaff, Marc Craste, and Run Wrake have challenged the dominant look and styles using the available range of computer software packages to create what might be described as the avant garde or experimental end of the CG form. It is clear that as different software packages become more affordable and user-friendly, and the use of the computer as a creative tool becomes both a domestic and industrial orthodoxy, the same degree of breadth and variety that has characterized all other approaches and techniques to animation will characterize computer-generated imagery. In many senses, in the same way as the term "new media" now seems redundant, it is possible that "CGI" will also become part of an assumed lexicon of creative practice in animation.

ALTERNATIVE METHODS

The term "alternative methods" merely begs the question—alternative to what? Within the context of animation, the methods discussed below essentially operate as alternatives to the trends in industrial production contexts, largely resisting the dominant aesthetics of contemporary CGI in feature work, traditional puppet and model animation, and orthodox cel or drawn material. There is also a resistance to the "Disney style," both visually and thematically, and inevitably a more personal or auteurist approach to the work, which often customizes a technique to achieve a highly individualized look.

Previously, these kinds of films might have been termed experimental animation, and to a certain extent this does embrace the auteurist sensibility present in such work, and the strong links it often has with an avant garde approach or the personal approach of fine art. "Experimental animation" as a term has become more associated with nonobjective, nonlinear work—which some claim is the purest form of animation—but in other ways this misrepresents a whole range of work that is not necessarily highly progressive in its "experimentation," but merely of a different order from "classical" or traditional 2D cartoons or 3D animation. It is essentially "developmental" animation in the sense that it is often a response to, and a resistance of, orthodox techniques, in a spirit of creating a personal statement or vision not possible in a big-studio context, or within the field of popular entertainment.

The abstract films of Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941), Viking Eggeling (1880–1925), and Hans Richter (1888–1976) in the early 1920s are commonly understood as a benchmark for some of the formative ways in which animation was used in the service of a modernist approach to filmmaking. Richter's Rhythmus 21 (1921), made with Eggeling, sought to use the movement of shape and form as an expression of thought and emotion in its own right. Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Léger, 1924), featuring full animation, painting directly on film, and Méliès-style effects, as well as live action, demonstrated a wholly self-conscious use of technique as a model of creative resistance to modernist machine cultures and consumerism. The kinetic combination of abstract form and sound to create a kind of "visual music" was pioneered by Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967) during the 1930s in experimental works such as Composition in Blue (1935). Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981) successfully combined abstract work with a visual narrative more accessible to wider audiences using the technique of cut-out, silhouette animation, most particularly in her full-length work The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926). She collaborated with Berthold Bartosch (1893–1968), who later made The Idea (1932), a thirty-minute poetic narrative of high technical innovation and achievement.

As the industrial model of animation production emerged at the Disney Studio and elsewhere between 1928 and 1941, experimental work continued. Mary Ellen Bute (1906–1983) and Leon Thurmin worked with the idea of drawing with electronically determined codes in The Perimeters of Light and Sound and Their Possible Synchronisation (1932), while Alexander Alexeieff (1901–1982) and Clare Parker created the "pin screen," where raised pins were lit to create particular images in Night on Bald Mountain (1934). Particularly influential were Len Lye (1901–1980) and Norman McLaren (1914–1987), whose work for the GPO Film Unit, under the auspices of John Grierson, significantly advanced experimental forms. Lye's Colour Box (1935) was painted directly on film, while his Trade Tattoo (1937) used stencilling on documentary footage. McLaren, who continued to work with Grierson at the National Film Board of Canada, experimented with many techniques, including direct "under-the-camera" animation, pixellation, cut-out and collage animation, and shifting pastel chalk, making many influential films including Begone Dull Care (1949), Neighbours (1952), and Pas de Deux (1968). Lye and McLaren essentially recognized that animation was a cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary medium, and they exploited its affinities with dance, performance, painting, sculpture, and engraving.

This period of high experimentation in the 1930s was arguably the purest expression of what animation could achieve beyond the American cartoon and European 3D stop-motion puppet traditions, demonstrating that animation had credibility as a "fine art." Cartoon animation still remained unrecognized as an art form despite the critical and cultural attention enjoyed by the Disney Studio with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio (1940). Disney responded with Fantasia (1941), which aspired to combine classical music with lyrical animation in the same spirit as the abstract artists. The mixed reception to Fantasia helped to establish the sense of separatism between different kinds of animation, a trend that has continued into the contemporary era. Yet all animation is arguably "experimental" by virtue of its aesthetic, technical, and cultural difference, even as it finds continuing currency in mainstream culture. The late Jules Engel (1909–2003), though ostensibly an experimental filmmaker, worked on Disney features, developed the characters of Gerald McBoing Boing and Mr. Magoo at UPA, and worked on individual projects, rejecting the false boundaries within the field.

NORMAN McLAREN
b. Stirling, Scotland, 11 April 1914, d. 27 January 1987

Norman McLaren was one of the most innovative and influential figures in animation. Throughout his life McLaren worked in any number of techniques, including painting, drawing, and scratching directly onto film; pixellation (the frame-by-frame animation of staged live-action movement); stop-motion chalk drawing; multiple compositing; hand-drawn soundtracks; cut-outs; and 3D object animation. Beyond the implicit influence of his work, he also nurtured other artists, and maintained a pacifist, left-wing, humanitarian agenda in his creative practice, evidenced early in his student film, Hell UnLtd (1936).

Educated at the Glasgow School of Art in 1933, he made his first experimental "cameraless" film in 1934, and entered two films, Camera Makes Whoopee and Colour Cocktail in the Glasgow Film Festival of 1936. Though he believed the former to be his "calling card" to the creative industries, it was the latter that impressed the documentary filmmaker John Grierson, who invited McLaren to work at the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit. Initially undertaking camerawork for Defence of Madrid (1936), and later, encouraged by the new studio head, Alberto Cavalcanti, he made Love on the Wing (1938) and Many a Pickle (1938); the former was banned by the postmaster for its use of phallic imagery. McLaren was then invited by the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, later the Guggenheim, in New York, to make a range of abstract loops, including Allegro (1939) and Dots (1940), though he managed also to make two other personal films—Stars and Stripes (1939), which used the US flag as its background, and an experimental electronic work with Mary Ellen Bute, Spook Sport (1939).

By this time Grierson had moved on to establish the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and McLaren joined him, becoming head of the newly formed animation unit in 1943. Embracing the creative freedom offered by the NFB, McLaren embarked on a career that sought to advance animation as an art form, most notably by drawing upon its relationship to dance in such films as Blinkity Blank (1954) and Pas de Deux (1968), but also by the imaginative use of sound—for example, in Begone Dull Care (1949) and Synchromy (1971). McLaren's desire to transcend national and ethnic boundaries in his work, and to ensure aesthetic, technical, and creative innovation, meant that he used little dialogue, and employed multilingual credits. Neighbours (1952), his famous antiwar parable, not only redefined the cartoon, the principles of live-action performance, and the use of animation as a peacetime propaganda tool, but also embodies the philosophic, imaginative, and humanitarian heart of Norman McLaren's vision.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Love on the Wing (1938), Hen Hop (1942), La Poulette Grise (1947), Begone Dull Care (1949), A Phantasy (1952), Neighbours (1952), Blinkity Blank (1954), The Crow (1958), Pas de Deux (1968)