Animation Essay, Research Paper

The word animate comes from the Latin word anima, or soul, and literally means “to give life to.” Animation is a technique that makes lifeless drawings or objects appear to live and move. Animation is used to make cartoon movies and television shows. It can also be used in television commercials or films. Animation is sometimes used in combination with live action in movies. Animation is not limited to recording things that really happened, it could show viewers many things that live action cannot, from the movements of a single atom to a view of an entire galaxy. An animated character can fly without wings, fall off a cliff without getting hurt, or be squashed flat as a pancake and pop back into shape. The only limits to what animation can show are the limits of the artist’s imagination (Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia). Simple animation toys like the phenakistiscope, the zoetrope pictures on the inner surface, and popular flipbooks predate the invention (1894) of motion pictures. Since its beginnings in the 19th century, animation has developed into a form of media that uses sophisticated video and film techniques that combine traditional arts with electronic imagery. Many exciting movie special effects have been created with animation techniques. There are two basic types of animation. In one technique, two-dimensional (flat) drawings are animated. The other technique involves the animation of three-dimensional objects such as puppets or clay figures. To make an animated film, a series of drawings–or an object placed in a series of positions-is photographed, one picture at a time, by a motion picture camera. In each picture, or frame, the subject’s position is changed slightly. When the completed film is run, the subject appears to move. Artists and writers first prepare a storyboard, which is an illustrated script. The storyboard looks like a giant comic strip, with sketches showing the action of the story and dialogue (the characters’ spoken lines) written under each sketch. Next, the music and the dialogue are recorded. Then the work of animation begins. The animation of drawings is the technique most often used to create animated films and television shows. The animators follow a chart listing the length of time and number of frames needed for each word, sound, and action in the entire script. To look smooth and natural, a single action that takes one second of screen time may require as many as 24 drawings. For example, if a script calls for a character to raise his hand, the first picture the animators draw shows the character with his hand at his side. In the next drawing, his hand is raised slightly, and a third drawing shows his hand still higher. Drawing after drawing is made in this way until, in the 24th drawing, the action is completed. More than a million drawings may be used in an animated feature film. Most television cartoons use fewer drawings per second. As a result, the characters’ movements may not look as lifelike. The animators draw every movement of every character that will appear in the film. When the drawings are completed, they are traced onto sheets of clear plastic called cels. Colors are then painted on the reverse sides of the cels. Other artists paint the backgrounds in the film. The finished cels are laid over the backgrounds and photographed with a special camera that shoots one frame of film at a time. The camera operator follows a chart that tells the proper sequence of the cels and which background is needed for each frame. The operator takes a picture, removes the cell and replaces it with the next one, then take another picture. The soundtrack, containing the music, dialogue, and sound effects, is added after the photography is completed. Some animated films are made without using cels. Instead, the drawings themselves are photographed. Pencil, charcoal, and colored pencil can produce subtle, shaded effects that are very different from the bright colors of the painted cels. Three-Dimensional Animation. Three-dimensional figures and objects can be animate using a process called stop-motion photography. Animators often work with special puppets, which are made of flexible plastic molded around a jointed metal “skeleton.” In recent years, figures and objects made of clay have become popular subjects of stop-motion animation. Using a special motion picture camera, animators film the figure or object. After each frame is photographed, the camera is stopped, and the animators adjust the figure’s position slightly. When the film is developed and projected, the figure appears to move. Stop-motion photography is used to make short animated films and television commercials. It is also used to animate the imaginary creatures that appear in live-action fantasy and science-fiction movies. The giant ape King Kong, as well as some of the creatures in the Star Wars series, was animated using stop-motion techniques. (Grolier)

Before the turn of the century the French conjurer and filmmaker Georges M?li?s had demonstrated the possibilities of the stop-motion photography, frame-by-frame technique by which animated films have generally been produced. By 1907 J. Stuart

Blackton in the United States had made an animated film, Humorous Phases of Funny Faces; and a year later, in Paris, ?mile Cohl embarked on a series of witty cartoon films. Cohl’s successors in the silent period included such distinguished animation artists as Robert Lortac, Benjamin Rabier, and Joseph H?mard. The earliest American animated films were derived from newspaper comic strips, where characters such as “Mutt and Jeff,” “Happy Hooligan,” and “The Katzenjammer Kids” originated. The first American artist to draw for film was Winsor McCay, with his Gertie the Dinosaur and a series called Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. The most famous cartoon personality before

Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, however, was Felix the Cat, created by the Australian cartoonist Pat Sullivan and animated by Otto Mesmer. Meanwhile, the Russian Ladislav Starevich used other silent animation methods, such as stop-action techniques,

To animate his exquisite little puppets as early as 1911. Lotte Reiniger, a German artist who adapted the ancient techniques of the shadow show, completed the world’s first full-length animated film, Die Abenteuer des Prinz Achmets in 1926. (Encyclop?dia Britannica)

Walt Disney rapidly achieved preeminence through imaginative use of sound and colour, the vitality of his characters and the inventiveness of his gags. Disney’s The Three Little Pigs (1933), with the optimism of its theme song, came to be a symbol of the New Deal era. In 1937 Disney made his first full-length cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. His studio continued to make full-length animated films (such as the extraordinary Fantasia 1940), and developed techniques that combined animation with live action. Experiments with these hybrid animations also had been

under way abroad for example, in the Soviet Union, where, in The New Gulliver (1935), Aleksandr Ptushko combined live actors and cartoon figures in the same scenes. (Encyclop?dia Britannica)

The 1940s and ’50s saw reactions against the Disney style. Such artists as Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Tex Avery, Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, and Chuck Jones continued in the same style of animation but added a new anarchic and surreal comedy. The

artists working for United Productions of America most of whom, including Art Babbitt and John Hubley, had broken away from Disney–reacted against the detail and naturalism of the Disney style with spare, nonnaturalistic drawing inspired by

contemporary art and such practitioners as the Romanian-born Saul Steinberg.

In Canada the Scots animator Norman McLaren experimented with stereoscopy (two-dimensional depictions that through perspective appear three-dimensional), synthetic sound, and other techniques, many of which were further developed by the school of animators he built up. Among McLaren’s colleagues and disciples was George Dunning, who subsequently worked in Great Britain, where the animated cinema was vigorous after 1950. Other notable animators working in Britain included John Halas and Joy Batchelor, already established there during World War II; Peter F?ldes; Bob Godfrey, an inspired exponent of low comedy; and Richard Williams, a Canadian whose studio sought to emulate the Disney craft traditions. (Encyclop?dia Britannica)

In Eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, the most notable animated films were created in Czechoslovakia, where Jir? Trnka developed a singular tradition of animation work with puppets, and Yugoslavia, where the Zagreb Studios produced such distinguished practitioners as Vatroslav Mimica, Dusan Vukotic, and Nikola Kostelac. By the late 20th century the animated film had become a remarkably varied and supple medium, ranging in its possibilities from the lyrical documentary visions of Hubley’s Of Stars and Men to the Rabelaisian farces of the Japanese Yoji Kuri. The development of computers and electronic video equipment brought about a whole new generation of animation styles and techniques. (Encyclop?dia Britannica)