Cel Animation

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Gertie the dinosaur, from Winsor McCay's 1914 film of the same name. The earliest widely popular animated short films in the US, it was drawn frame-by-frame entirely by hand on paper.

Celluloid or cel animation is a film-based media form, where transparent individually-created films frames are projected with light sequentially onto a reflective screen, creating an illusion of motion. Although contemporary cinematic animation has been transformed through use of the computer, historically cel animation has been created by hand. Due to this manual quality, traditional cel animation pre-dated the photographic automation that became 20th century cinema.

This visual phantasmagoria derives from the phenomenon of 'persistence of vision,' or the visual perception of minute sequential differences. As fundamentally discontinuous not just in sequence but in visual representation, cel animation is inherently modular. Its fundamental construction gives cel animation a rarely-acknowledged aesthetic range. Historically, its hand-drawn nature and demand for labor has made animated cartoons visually oversimplified, yet the computational capacity of the computer has made the form exceedingly complex.

Precursors

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The phenakistoscope's sequential images appeared to move when the disc was spun.

Many technical genealogies have been written about the precursors to what became established in the early 1900s as 16mm motion picture cinema. In perceptual effect, these devices can be divided visually into hand-painted or hand-drawn, as contrasted with mimetic, and temporally into static and dynamic representation.

In static visual terms, Western art established the painted, typically rectangular visual image. In the 18th century, the magic lantern transposed painting onto a small transparent surface, which could be projected on a wall, as a slide projector does. The camera obscura, an ancient device, constructed a dark, enclosed room with a single small perforation; as light refracts through the hole, an inverted image appears on the far wall, effecting both a mimetic and constructed effect. In the mid-19th century, photography's inscription of light onto transparent film with chemical processes transposed mimetic images onto tin and paper.

In dynamic visual terms, image sequences have been found on ancient pottery and tablets, but came to 'move' only in the 19th century, with parlor amusements like the phenakistoscope. This device has hand-painted or hand-drawn figures rounding the edge of a circular disc; when the disc is spun, the figures appear to move. Photography's mimetic images were static until technicians such as Étienne-Jules Marey's experiments in chronophotography began to impose mechanical order on movement. Edison's kinetoscope first imposed a mechanical seriality upon motion, and cinema was born.

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Marey's stroboscopic chronophotography revealed a discontinuity in motion.

Cinematic Presence

Many early animated films placed animation in the context of live-action film. J. Stuart Blackton's "The Enchanted Drawing" was a form of 'trick' film, in which Blackton used film's inherent discontinuity to appear to turn real objects, such as a bottle, into hand-drawn representations on paper. Walt Disney's earliest film, "Alice's Wonderland" (1923), shows a girl wandering into his animation studio, where he proceeds to astonish her with crude but vivacious moving drawings on his drafting desk. In his early films, shown in vaudeville theaters, Windsor McCay found that audiences did not believe the illusion of animation. At the end of his widely-popular "Gertie the Dinosaur" (1914), he drew a small life-like representation of himself being picked up in Gertie's mouth.

The two forms increasingly sought to differentiate each from the other. While cinema grew out of early hand-drawn sequences, mechanization, coupled with mimesis, enabled cinema to achieve a new standard of verisimilitude. "A mechanical eye was coupled with a mechanical heart; photography met the motor", as Manovich (296-7) writes. Cinema's ease with mimetic images soon distanced it from the crudity of animation, "cinema's bastard relative, its supplement and shadow" (298). While films like McCay's and Disney's showed cinema audiences an entirely new kind of spectacle, cel animation's painted quality quickly became trivialized in comparison to cinema's realism. Animation became a child's pleasure, something it arguably remained for the majority of the 20th century.

Perhaps ironically, animation's very sophistication meant that it was a labor-intensive and exacting form. To make animated films several minutes long took thousands of drawings.

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McCay's drawings for 'Gertie' took up thousands of pages.


the very sophistication of the medium

Following earlier divides, cinema's mimesis contained the potential

The crude and labor-intensive quality of animation


Outline:

Presence Gumbrecht Example: McCay’s Gertie the dinosaur

Illusion of motion Persistence of vision

Intertwine theory with history: Animation as a system Modularity From simple to complex


Early animation Late animation

History and theory: Manovich Gitelman Crary

Differentiation from film Mixture of live-action and animation Example: Disney’s Alices’ Wonderland Wonders of animation

Representation of space Crary

Abstraction of vision into mechanism Subjective truth and perceptual effects

Example: Disney’s Fantasia


Representation of time Doane and Freud Crary Example: Road Runner Stopping of time

Persistence of vision


Televisionization of animation Economic and cultural changes Example: Scooby Doo Disney’s mid-period “English” films

Future:

Special Effects as supplement Dichotomy Example: Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

Special Effects as enhancer of verisimilitude: Manovich

Example: Jurassic Park

Digital video, with live-action as a supplement Manovich

Example: Avatar