Lost in the Plot

In the decade since Toy Story (1995), Pixar’s work has continued to dominate the computer animation medium, and the studio is often given credit for leading the industry with its creative and technical output. Other major studios like DreamWorks, Blue Sky and Sony Pictures ImageWorks have adopted near identical production approaches, a similar focus on narrative-based, realistic styles, and the same Disney-like commercialism. A comparison of Toy Story (1995) with Blue Sky’s Robots (2005), despite their separation by a decade of computer animation advances (and creative growth in the medium, some would argue), reveals two very similar films; the same approach to visual representation, the same conceptual parameters, and the same technological and commercial impetus. Even with rapidly evolving animation technologies, and massive growth in the computer animation industry, studio films continue to be made with a monotonous familiarity, varying little from film to film, and rooted firmly in the traditions of Disney’s feature work. Perhaps commercial studio animation will always conform to such conventions, and experimental animation will inevitably remain low profile by comparison. The collective output of the studios is, however, by far the most visible expression of computer animation today, and the creative priorities that underscore these films have become the major, pervasive determinants of the medium.

In his 1998 discussion of what he terms “orthodox animation” (Wells 36-39), Paul Wells characterises the then-dominant form of animation (twodimensional, hand-drawn cel-based) with observations that could easily be applied to the computer animation of 2006. Point by point, every defining element that constitutes Well’s “orthodox animation” is evident in the bulk of computer animation today, the most notable aspects being a reliance on the narrative form (a unified style consistent with cinematic conventions), and content as the primary feature of the work (an absence of artist, rending the work’s aesthetic features and formal construction largely invisible to the audience).

This reduction in the visibility of the individual artist’s aesthetic and formal style is one of the most critical consequences of production models inherited by computer animation houses from Walt Disney and early studio-animation pioneers like Raoul Barre. In The Art of 3D Computer Animation And Effects, Isaac V. Kerlow, once Director of Digital Production for the Walt Disney Company, outlines how the production of Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (1998) was broken down into well over one hundred distinct creative and technical roles. Large parts of the process were additionally broken down into departments made up of teams of artists- 61 in Animation, 40 in Lighting, 31 in Modelling, 26 in Art and 19 in Layout (Kerlow 54). Since 1998, computer animation production at the major studios has by all accounts only increased in complexity, especially in technical areas like research and development of software systems and simulation. This fragmentation of the process into discrete roles requires each artist’s creative input to be indistinguishable from that of other team members, all following a centralised creative concept that can be quickly understood and easily standardised.

The significance of this system and its artistic consequences lies in the highly influential role the studio films play in the computer animation medium. Even in animation that is not produced within such a complex, fragmented studio structure, the aesthetics of the ‘animation-factory’ frequently permeate. In much the same way as the Disney aesthetic came to define 2D animation and set implicit boundaries of acceptable content and style (mildly experimental works like Fantasia (1940) perceived as high-brow and challenging) so has the Pixar aesthetic become the apparent desirable
benchmark for 3D animation.

The homogeneity of today’s computer animation is not limited to broad concepts or production similarities, however, with the very visible trend towards photographic realism and simulation frequently prevalent in many artists’ work. Parallel to the shift towards realism that occurred in traditional animation, computer animation has been since the 70s increasingly concerned with “the goal of generating images that mimic the effect of a traditional photographic camera” (Strothotte 1). Darley explains this growing interest as a preoccupation with “simulation” and “the representational copying or modelling of phenomenal reality on [a] two dimensional screen” (Hayward 51), an interest that quickly became one of the central concerns for filmmakers working with computer animation.

On a broad level, the common three-dimensional form of computer animated imagery introduces a level of photographic realism that precludes artistic exploration of the dimensionality of depicted spaces. Just as Walt Disney’s innovative multi-plane camera aligned the traditional animation medium more closely with live-action cinema, three-dimensional computer animation similarly removes questions of perspectival representation from the artist’s control. Both facilitate an automatic systematisation of simulating realistic depth and space, and Wells description of the multi18 plane camera having “aligned animation with aspects of photographic realism, and misrepresented the form’s more distinctive characteristics” (Wells 24) could well be applied to the realistic perspectives of 3D computer animation.

So it can be argued that there is a strong inheritance from traditional animation in terms of process, visual language, conceptual content, and commercially driven, studio-based production that still dominates computer animation today. And those established mechanisms and ideologies of hand-drawn animation, and of the Disney era, have come to represent a kind of classical approach to the medium of animation. Computer animators who seek to legitimise their work frequently attempt to ground their creative approach in the context of the ‘traditional’ methods of animation, referencing Disney and two-dimensional animation as a kind of benchmark. This effectively connects the dominant traditional animation and the dominant computer animation together into a singular dominant expression of the medium, with the change in techniques effectively altering very little about most animation and its creative culture. As a result, computer animation frequently falls short of its true potential because many artists approach it in a restrictively narrow manner, almost as if it were a genre to work within, rather than an open-ended medium capable of unique personal expressions.

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This is part three of my exploration of Romanticism and Computer Animation. If you missed part one or two, 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.