Art 480T Animation Aesthetics Midterm

*Persistence of Vision Theory

- human eye and mind will blend sequential images in single motion if images are presented rapidly enough

- Peter Mark Roget

What makes up our taste?

Contextual, cultural, personal

What is animation?

- movements that are drawn

- what happens between each frame is more important

- can be abstract, stop motion, cgi, mocap

- everything manipulated/constructed from the start

"Dots"

- abstract

- Norman Mclean

"Neighbors"

- stop Motion

- Norman Mclean

Kircher-magic lantern

- Glass slides project image a wall

- earliest(?) animation

-maybe Roman times

Thaumatrope

- mixed two images together

- spun on string

- Paris

Kineograph

- fast images = motion

- Image flipping fast enough makes it look like its moving

- flipbook

"A Trip to the moon"

Georges Melies

- mixes animation with cinema

- stop motion photography split screen fast and slow motion

Muybridge

The Horse in Motion, capturing real life

- zoopraxiscope - looped animation machine, spinning light box

"Gertie the Dinosaur"

- Anthropomorphism

- Disney

"The Haunted Hotel"

- Stuart Blackmon

- stop motion, live action

- objects moving, the dream of the industrial age

"How a Mosquito Operates"

- Winsor Mckay

- narrative clarity over abstraction

narrative is more important than abstraction

- subversion

"Felix the Cat"

- more experimental than disney

- Jacques Kopfstein

Realism

- subjective definition

- what is recognizably an authentic representation

Surrealism

- augmenting what we see reveals a deeper truth - perhaps through abstraction

- EX. Rene Magritte - The Son of Man (apple head guy painting)

Hyper realism

- more than real - Umberto Eco

- Completely real --> completely fake

echoes realism of live action films, characters objects and environment within the hyperrealist animated film are subject to conventional physical laws of the real world, sound, construction, movement and behavioral tendency

- think of rotoscope?

Jean Baudrillard

Simulacra and Simulation- live in a world where there is more and more info and less and less meaning, the image of an object could be mistaken or even preferred over the object itself

"Some protection"

Marjut Rimmenen

documents deep anxiety of Josie Dwyer using her own troubled recollections of abuse, petty crime, and brutalities of imprisonment, shows the perception of reality as it is experienced by o Dwyer. May be viewed as a questionable credential in the pursuit of documentary truth

"Abductees"

Peter Vester

- animated documentary - about aliens

- so much imagery from the pulp sci-fi fictions

"Going equipped"

Peter lord

what might be more commonly held view of the realist agenda, using animation to emphasize the 'taken for granted' aspects of the fly on the wall

also operates as a perfect example of the art of acted performance,

"Sinking of the Lusitania"

Winsor McKay

ironically fits in McKay's fundamental working premise of animating subjects would could not possibly be filmed.

Powerful and emotionally affecting, but it is as much allied to autobiography and propaganda as it is to the realist mode required for documentary

"Cross country detours"

- Tex Avery (the animated Warner Bros Looney Tunes-ish one)

- documentary subverted

- male gaze

- sexy deer and lizard and such - anthropomorphism

Male Gaze

made to be viewed by straight men. usually depicts what the typical "Man" wants to see: sexy ladies, slapstick, etc.

True animation? Purist view

No animation film that is not nonobjective and or nonlinear can really qualify as true animation

"Particels in Space"

Len lye

- to put his mark on the world as he was dying

- lines and shapes etched onto film stock

- 3D transformation (of his name) on a 2D medium

"Boogie Doodle"

- Norman Mclaren

- riffing off of music

- abstract

"Composition in Blue"

Oskar Fischinger

worked on Fantasia, but wanted something more pure, no need to match with reality, the abstraction of sound

"Viking eggeling Symphonie diagonals"

- the one with the lines

Looking towards upcoming computer animation examples

"Rhythm 21"

Hans Richter

- experimental with sound

"Love on the wing"

- Publicity short for new air mail in britian

- really a surrealist film

- considered too sexual

- the one with the two lines that turn into shit together

"Lapis"

James Whitney

- beginning of computer animation

- the dot is being used to describe something more than its intrinsic dotness

"Calculated Movements"

Larry Cuba

- computer animator

- abstract expression within a particular spatial context, design in motion

- stresses the importance of the apparatus with which he is working. He says if you don't think about the process used in abstract animation it does become important that you are using computer

Orthodox Animation

- what we are seeing today

- stand: configuration, specific continuity, narrative form, evolution of context, unity of style, absence of artist, dynamics of dialouge,

configuration

Most cartoons featured identifiable 'figures' (people or animals) who corresponded to what audiences would understand as an orthodox human or creature

Specific continuity

Whether a cartoon was based on a specific and well known fairytale or story, or was based on a sequence of improvised sight gags, it had a logical continuity even within a madcap scenario

- basically sequential in a way we can follow

narrative form

- Idea of a story

- supported by the specific continuity of establishing a situation, problematizing it, creating comic events and finding a resolution

- mainly through the actions of the principal character that the audience had been encouraged to support and sympathise with throughtout

evolution of context

- includes absence of artist

- basically the existence/absence of the 4th wall in animation (where the artist doesn't draw the audience's attention to the construction/design of the cartoon)

- think about the bugs bunny/daffy duck cartoon where the background keeps being drawn different

Unity of Style

- consistency of the formal properties of animated cartoon

- EX. doesn't change from 2D to 3D like more experimental animation does

Dynamics of Dialouge

- character is often defined by key aspects of dialogue

(even though the action may be the appeal of the animation)

Abstraction

- resists configuration in way audience most often see it.

- tries to avoid depicting something with its corresponding representational image from reality

- more concerned with rhythm and movement in their own right, rather than the rhythm and movement of a character

"peripetics"

Zeitguised

- that weird computer animation that made everyone super uncomfortable and things morphed and stuff

- abstraction

Specific Non-Conformity

- rejection of logical and linear continuity

- prioritization of illogical, irrational, and sometimes multiple continuities

"Umbra"

Malcolm Sutherland

- that exstistential animation where that astronaut little guy jumped in his own shadow and it was a crazy loop

- specific non-conformity

interpretive form

- Resisting the depiction of conventional forms and the assumed 'objectivity' of the exterior world

- Experimental animation prioritizes abstract forms in motion, liberating the artist to concentrate on the vocabulary he/ she is using in itself without the imperative of giving it a specific function or meaning

"Going to the Store"

David Lewandowski

- that really funny one where the naked mannequin-lookin dude flapped around trying to go up the stairs and walk down the street

- interpretive form

evolution of materiality

- experimental film concentrates on its very materiality, forms in which it is being made

- features the presence of the artist

- the colors, shapes, and textures which are being used in the creation of the piece

"Felix in Exile"

William Kentridge

- smudgy looking

- evolution of materiality

- kind of depicts the artist's process

Multiple Styles

- multiple styles are often incorporated together in experimental animation

- often combines and mixes different modes of animation to facilitate the multiplicity of personal visions an artist may wish to incorporate in a film, to challenge and re-work orthodox conventions and create new effects.

"Deadsy"

David Anderson

- idk how to describe this one sry it's wack as hell

- multiple styles

"Ryan"

Chris Landreth

- that mocap one with the weird body abstractions. Interviewer talking to some dude in a place full of similarly abstracted people

- multiple styles

Dynamics of musicality

- heavily used in experimental animation

- suggested that if music could be visualized, it would look like colors and shapes moving through time with differing rhythms, movements and speed

"wide open"

Chemical Brothers Beck

- that mocap one with the woman dancing in a warehouse and her body, one limb at a time, is becoming a hollow structure with white laced-looking surface area

- dynamics of musicality?

"Walking City"

Universal Everything

- that white polygon dude just walking to music

- dynamics of musicality

Developmental animation

- harks back to traditional aspects of the animated film but also seeks to embellish or reform animation traditions with contemporary approaches

"Girls Night Out"

Joanna Quinn

female animation

view story through the lens of a feminine perspectives

- developmental animation

experimental Animation

abstraction, specific non continuity, interpretive form, evolution of materiality, multiple styles, presence of the artist, dynamics of musicality

Metamorphosis

-things turn into other things

-an animated transformation

the ability for an image to literally change into another completely different image. For example, through the evolution of the line, the shift in formations of clay, or the manipulation of objects or environments

"The Street"

Caroline Leaf,

- metamorphasis

- the smudgy beige and black one about the grandma dying and the kid wants her room

rememberance of grandmother's death almost as if it were a child drawing, style suggest the magical qualities which arise form remembering a certain occasion in a particular spirit or mood

"Betty Boop Snow White"

Dave Fleischer,

- metamorphasis

example of possiblitieis achieved in metamorphoses beyond the notion of narrative continuity and suggestion, take on a more surreal and often sinister purpose, disrupting the rationality of a scenario and challenging the very premises of a stable environment

Condensation

- narratively condensing material to fit in a watchable medium like a cartoon or a film

manages to compress high degree narratiional information into a limited period of time. include elliptical cut and comic elision. elliptical cut works in the same way as a live action film making in the sense that cuts are made between the depiction of events that signify the passage of length of time, fade out fade in the dissolve from one image to another, and wipe where one image appears to cover and replace another

"Jumping"

Osamu Tezuka,

- condensation???

those who jump are you, public, humanity... we humans have a tendency to go too far with what we do.

Synecdoche

a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa

"use instructions"

Guido Manuli,

- the butts one

extreemly direct indictment of the ills of contemporary life, sparing little in its brutal satire. simply the film uses a human bottom as its synecdoche and central metaphore, beginning by suggesting that we have lost the instructions booklet for its use

symbolism and metaphor

symbols are more succinct, metaphors can connect one thing to something completely different making them important for political subversion

Jorges Luis Borges

Argentinian novelist, censorship is the mother of metaphor,

"The Hand"

Jiri Trnka,

- puppet animation

-recognition of the role of the artist and importance of free expression in the face of totalitarian regimes that the animated form has seen

Fabrication

- like making things duh

- constructed objects and such

- like stop motion

three dimensional animation is directly concerned with the expression of materiality and the creation of a certain metareality which has the same physical property as the real world

Associative Relations

principally based on models of suggestion and allusion which bring together previously unconnected or disconnected images to logical and informed rather than surreal effect.

Tale of Tales

Yuri Norstein, snese of timelessness possesses a mystery in itself, these small scenarios it seems are eternal harmonious, somehow utopian in their insistent relevance. a number of things occur, however, which disrupt this sense of harmony. A wind of change blows beneath a tablecloth, blowing it away, as a train passes

Diegetic sound

sound whose source is visible on the screen or whose source is implied to be present by the action of the film: voices of characters, sounds made by objects in the story, music represented as coming from instruments in the story soace (=source music)

non-Diegetic sound

- sound has no visible or implied source

sound whose source is neither visible on screen nor has been implied to be present in the action:

narrator's commentary, sound effects which is added for the dramatic effect mood music

"Gerald McBoing Boing"

Bob Cannon

- little boy only says boing boing

- about diegetic and non-diegetic sound

Acting and Performance

acting in the animated film represents the relationship between the animator and the figure, object, or environment he or she is animating. The animator must essentially use the techniques employed by the actor to project the specificities of character through the mechanistic process of the animation itself.

Konstantin Stanislavski

- wrote the book on method acting

system is a systematic approach to training actors, Stanislavski was the first in the West to propose that actor training should involve something more than merely physical and vocal training.His system cultivates what he calls the "art of experiencing"

Art of Experiencing

It mobilises the actor's conscious thought and will in order to activate other, less-controllable psychological processes—such as emotional experience and subconscious behaviour—sympathetically and indirectly

choreography

even more can illustrate the prominence of the dynamics of movement itself as a narrative principle, a direct extension of theatrical staging, not been properly allied to theories of dance, an anomaly made even more strange given the proliferation of animated films whcih directly use dance

Rudolf von Laban

- used choreography to narrate movement

developed movement system of modern dance in Germany Animation and dance are closely related and effectively narrate the possibilities and meanings of movement. Different theories of dance may be applied to the animated form, but here the basic principles of Laban's theories have been used to provide an initial vocabulary to tell a tale not available in words.

Penetration

one of the outstanding advantages of the animated film, internal workings of an organisim can be shown in this medium, depths of a mans soul is more than a phrase to the animator: it can also be a picture

feet of song

erica russell

pas a deux

monique renault and gerrit van dijk

A is for Autism

Tim Webb-

- the autistic boy's drawings

Animation is a particularly appropriate medium with which to reveal the condition of autism because it can represent in itself the introspective results of self-absorbed imaginative activity which is part of the distantiated psychology of autistic thinking. Webb's film successfully negotiates the terrain between the chaotic alienation of the autistic state of mind and the unique qualities and experiences which also characterise the same sensibility

Structuralism

- you can't understand reality without structures (or certain truths)

reality cannot be understood in isolation, thus we need overarching structures to comprehend it A huge field, compromising many different topics - anthropology, literary theory, myth, and linguistics. Criticism - there are lots of battles about this topic (post-structalism, post modernism, deconstruction, etc). Claude levi strauss

Frames

very powerful, different kinds, political, religous, theoretical, creative, useful for new perspectives, must be aware when we are wearing them

Semiotics

the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation, study of making of meaning, saussure studied this within language, pierce developed this further within the realm of symbols an signs

sign

signified/ signifier

ex: snow white apple is signifier that signifies death

Peirce's Triad

Symbols, icons, indexes

Symbols

culturally specific connection to signified

icons

resembles the signified, pictures and clipart

indexes

- signs and signifiers as causes and effect

signs where the signifier is caused by the signified (smoke=fire, feet in snow=person walking)

Syntagmatic analysis

roland barthes, collection of objects together produce a collective meaning or paradigm

paradigmatic analysis

the starting point of the paradigm to look at signs or syntagms which make up this resulting paradigm

semantic analysis

study of meaning, our ability to understand narrative particularly in very old paintings often requires us to understand the moral codes, customs, beliefs, values and visual metaphors of the given era and culture. investigator to get what is going on in the image

Monoscenic narrative

snapshot of a narrative at a specific moment of time

synchronic narrative

brining multiple narrative elements together at one time

-one image that tells a narrative/growth,(think scrolling image)

Diachronic narrative

combining multiple monosecnic and diachronic images to form a narrative

- think comic book page/ storyboard

"The Blue Umbrella"

- storyboard for it was diachronic narrative

- anthropomorphic objects

Morphologhy

study of forms, russain theoretical studies, apart at the time from formalist thought

Propp's Morphology

morphology of the folktale, translated it in the fairy tale, fairy tales can also be seen as a way for children to cope with childhood trauma, how to deal with death, strangers, fear, etc. most of all right of passage/growing up. which also can be described as a character arc

Brother's grimm

academcis who studied folk tales, popularized stories such as sleeping beauty, snow white, and many others

- basically created the structures in fairytales we still see today