Lost in the Plot

Establishing a Romantic perspective on computer animation requires a deep and critical understanding of its basic principles and origins, as well as a framework of its artistic history and culture. Romanticism can in many ways be understood as a response to creative and cultural circumstances, and becomes logical only after fully understanding the historical and theoretical context that foregrounds the contemporary practice. In order to make an assessment of computer animation and the problems it faces today, it is helpful and perhaps even necessary to place the technique inside its broader artistic history; the ‘traditional’ animated film, and the overall medium of ‘hand-made’ motion on film. While computer animation is a unique medium in many ways, and has its own artistic challenges and potential, it is still a form of animation. Just as Lev Manovich has argued that it is “unproductive to theorise new emerging forms of computer art without considering their uneasy connections to contemporary image industries” (Manovich 259), so does this research argue that connections to previous image industries must also be considered. As such, discussion of the culture and character of contemporary computer animation is inextricably linked to older styles of animation, and the extent to which contemporary and historical animation share a common creative and conceptual legacy is made clear by examining how the medium originally grew and was first popularised.

One major factor that early traditional animation has in common with early computer animation is a perceived ability to deliver revolutionary new aesthetic experiences. In their first few years of development, both techniques were embraced as true breaks with previous cinematic and visual art forms. With the first animated films in the early 20th Century, many artists and filmmakers heralded the medium as the dawn of a new age of aesthetic and representational possibilities and challenges. Early animations utilised stop-motion techniques to depict inanimate objects and furniture moving of their own accord, “signifying kineticism…yet denying its source and possible intention” (Wells 15). This effect, where the very presence of animated motion was consciously combined with subjects that would not normally be expected to move (objects, drawings etc) represented a possible challenge to audiences and an opportunity for new exploration of representational language. It was a conscious and literal approach to animation, where the invisible kineticism of motion was contrasted against normally motionless objects, drawing direct attention to the mysterious power of the medium. The more contemporary Czech animator Jan Svankmajer explains the power of this effect, commenting of his own work, “everyday contact with things which people are used to acquires a new dimension and in this way casts a doubt over reality. In other words, I use animation as a means of subversion” (qtd. in Wells 11). This powerful ability to imbue unique, mysterious and deep meaning to seemingly simple subject matter was for a short time the major promise of the animation medium, and remains one of the primary qualities connecting it with Romantic philosophy and art.

This potentially revolutionary new language for representation, however, was short lived as the defining feature of the animation medium, and in both traditional and computer animation, the innovative and frequently mysterious effects were quickly overshadowed. Safer and well established, popular visual styles rapidly came to typify the animated film, and decades later computer animation would follow in its footsteps. Emile Cohl’s film, En Route (1910), described by Paul Wells as lines falling “randomly into the frame” to subsequently “converge into a character or event”, illustrates the challenging visual techniques that would fast be abandoned. Wells writes of the power of this animation and its “implied, more significant level of relatedness in the imagery”, observing how “such metamorphoses operate as the mechanism which foregrounds this new relatedness by literally revealing construction and deconstruction, stasis and evolution, mutability and convergence” (15). This obscuration and personalisation of meaning, and playfulness with representational imagery, was in stark contrast to much of the work of realist animators like Winsor McCay who “prioritised narrative clarity” (15) above all else. His style of animation, like that of the commercial animation pioneers Raoul Barre and Walt Disney, was concerned with character, storytelling, as well as entertaining an audience and sustaining their interest and understanding. These objectives went hand in hand with the growing push towards industrialised animation, because they made the creative direction of team-based studio production easier, and because they allowed animation to stay within the established and commercially successful bounds of popular entertainment forms like syndicated comics and live-action cinema. From a Romantic perspective, these early years crystallised a commercial approach that would become one of mainstream animation’s defining limitations, and began a shift in the medium from personal expression and experimentation to mass culture and profitable product.

By the time Walt Disney released his first feature-length animated film in 1937, this shift away from personal and challenging animation was virtually complete, and a pattern of aesthetic imitation had begun. The narrative structure of most short animation was heavily borrowed from the newspaper comic strip format, with sequential frames or ideas playing out a story in sequence. Subsequently, animated shorts were primarily focused on gags and visual humour, and modelled on the typical content of comics. Characters’ facial expressions, body language and even the use of playful graphic effects were all firmly rooted in print-based visual storytelling techniques. Technological developments like the pencil test and the multi-plane camera, however, along with movie-length feature films, pushed Disney’s animation sideways from the traditions of the drawn image and into the realm of cinematic realism. This naturalistic approach to animation, “away from the plasmatic flexibility of many of the early Silly Symphonies… [into] a neo-realist practice” (23), allowed the clear separation of reality and fantasy, shifting the imagery away from unsettling manipulation of meaning and representation, and resting firmly in the realm of blunt classical narratives and crowd-pleasing legibility. As Donald Crafton observed of American cartoons, “the demarcation between fact and fantasy was usually heeded scrupulously” (qtd. in Wells 21). Ultimately, audiences were comfortable with this demarcation, and the commercial success of Disney’s animation led to it becoming synonymous with the popular definition of the medium; the narrative-based, realist style became the dominant style, varying only to return to the comic-strip form with its entertaining gags and print-styled mannerisms. By aligning itself first with print comics, and then with long-form cinematic naturalism, Disney and mainstream animation managed, for the most part, to largely avoid the fertile middle ground where the medium could theoretically thrive. Between the still image and film, animation represented a fusion of drawing and cinema, with time-based motion and life, but with the unique and personal perspectives of an artists vision.

When the first animated films were shown to the public, though, they understandably seemed impressive and miraculous, their imagery and effects quite different from anything previously thought possible. But this novelty factor was not strictly the result of new aesthetic experiences on uninitiated audiences. It was also actively cultivated by animators and producers who saw that the very ‘newness’ of the medium could be its major selling point. In 1907, Stuart Blackton released his animated film The Haunted Hotel, accompanied by advertising and promotion that intentionally obscured the animation techniques used to create it (14). The film was in effect marketed as a gimmick that would surprise and puzzle audiences, both by virtue of the fact that animation was genuinely a new and impressive technique, but also simply to differentiate the film in a competitive market and turn a profit for its producers. It might be pertinent to question whether Blackton was really an artist or a businessman, but in any case, the success of his approach has resulted in its widespread adoption by the contemporary animation industry.

A similar development is evident in the first few decades of commercial computer animation, where the medium was promoted and sold on the basis of its eye-catching, miraculous visuals. Effects sequences, commercials and shorts were made that, while still offering aesthetic and creative content, were primarily noted for their formal novelty and ‘newness’. The medium sounded exciting and advanced, its inner workings far beyond the general public’s comprehension, and arguably this factor was still at work in the nineties fuelling much of the interest in the first computer animated features like Pixar’s Toy Story (1995) and DreamWorks’ Antz (1998). Cathryn Vasseleu comments in her essay on virtual light that Chris Wedge’s computer animated short Bunny (1998) was proudly promoted and explained to audiences as an impressive experiment in realistic light simulation, “to make reference to the allure of the illusion itself” (Vasseleu 2). Admittedly, films like these are also concerned with having an involving narrative and entertaining audiences, and while well received by critics for their quality stories, they still serve as examples of the hype and technological novelty that frequently has been used to validate and promote the existence of computer animated films. Just as the earliest live-action cinema did, computer animation “directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure through exciting spectacle” (Thorburn 4), and as a result arguably fails to meaningfully respond to the qualities of the medium most worthy of attention.

The continuing excitement over computer animation’s novelty is not necessarily indicative, therefore, of truly new artistic experiences or visual languages, and just as traditional animation quickly became an imitation of comic strips and then cinema, so has computer animation quickly modelled itself after established media. However, the early years of computer graphics were certainly accompanied by optimism about the new technique, with artists embracing the computer as a vehicle for new aesthetic experiences and revolutionary creative works. In much the same way as early animators saw their new medium as an opportunity to explore new visual territory, so early computer animators believed in “the new aesthetics it was bringing about; the new disciplines it was thought to be spawning; the profound effects it would have on society” (Hayward 46). Charles Csuri’s computer animated short Hummingbird (1967) featured a line drawing of the bird repeatedly exploding into hundreds of separate strokes and then reforming, and while the film was to some extent a technical experiment, it’s visual content and execution also fit with the High-Modernist ambitions of a challenging new style of art. The film is an uncanny echo of Cohl’s 1910 animation En Route, also featuring freeform lines coalescing into representational imagery, though Csuri’s computer- generated visuals boast “over 30,000 images comprising some 25 motion sequences” (Langberg), a level of complexity beyond Cohl’s reach. This massive leap in visual density indicates some of the potential that computer animation offers, with Csuri’s work testimony to a complex aesthetic not thought possible with earlier animation techniques. Just as Walt Disney’s widely popular works overshadowed Cohl’s experimental visions, so a wave of popular and commercial computer animation obscured the creative importance of Csuri’s work.

While in a broad cultural sense the development of computer graphics represented the beginning of significant changes to media and visual culture, any hopes of a revolutionary aesthetic experience were for computer animators as short lived as those of their animation counterparts some fifty years earlier. Their focus on the “High Modernist visual aesthetic” and the “utilisation of technology for the production of purely formal novelty” (Hayward 46) quickly met the same fate as early traditional animation: integration with established entertainment culture, and dilution of potential originality into profitable cinema conventions. Furthermore, the birth of computer animation was influenced by the established traditional animation business. It was a creative and commercial model from which much was absorbed, including the ingrained conceptual and aesthetic limitations cemented decades earlier. As Andy Darley outlines in his essay From Abstraction to Simulation, computer graphics saw a rapid shift from “a High Modernist aesthetic” with its “abstraction and formal considerations”, to a “mass cultural ethos” in the 1980’s of “systematised, applied and commercially oriented development in all spheres, including and especially the cultural” (Hayward 56-57).

This shift can be seen as a direct parallel to the trajectory of animation over its first three decades, and in much the same way as Disney’s narrative- based, realist animation came to dominate and typify the medium, so have John Lasseter’s Pixar films inherited those same qualities and come to exemplify computer animation as the ‘Walt Disney’ of the computer animation era. The visual impressiveness of films like Red’s Dream (1987) and Toy Story (1995), along with their straightforward storylines and conformity to animation conventions, has seen Pixar enjoy popular and commercial success, overshadowing the more experimental computer animation that preceded it.

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This is part two of my exploration of Romanticism and Computer Animation. If you missed part one, or you’d like to skip ahead and see it all, read my complete Honours Thesis. You can also browse the works cited and extended bibliography.