Contents

Strategies for a Reduction to 2D Graphical Styles in 3D Computer Graphics with Hybrid Aesthetics
by Yen-Jung Chang

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Animated Documentaries as Masking: When Exposure and Disguise Converge
by Nea Ehrlich

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The Transformation of the Teenage Image in Oshii Mamoru’s The Sky Crawlers
by Sheuo Hui Gan

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Animating unique brain states: The animated documentary and ‘psychorealism’
by Samantha Moore

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Decoding the Real: A Multimodal Social Semiotic Analysis of Reality in Animated Documentary
by Javad Khajavi

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Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or, SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff
by Shannon Brownlee

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The Secret of Kells, a film for a post Celtic Tiger Ireland?
by Maria O’Brien

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“An Experiment in Pure Design:” The Minimalist Aesthetic in the Line Films of Norman Mclaren
by Aimee Mollaghan

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Tradigital Mythmaking: New Asian Design Ideas for Animation
by Hannes Rall

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Woody’s Roundup and Wall-E’s Wunderkammer: Technophilia and Nostalgia in Pixar Animation
by Colleen Montgomery

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Actors in Sin City’s Animated Fantasy: Avatars, Aliens, or Cinematic Dead-ends?
by Pierre Floquet

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Complete Volume

The complete volume will become available for download as PDF by the end of the year.

The ontological existence of animated-film characters depends on the whim and inspiration of their creators, which entails two major components. Firstly, the animator will explicitly appear in the cartoon and interfere within the animation, such as Emile Cohl’s or the Fleischer Brothers’ hands. Or else, in Tex Avery cartoons, references to the script are repeatedly intruding into the film, as meant interruptions or narrative punctuations in the drama. Secondly, the relation animator / character (who could then be spelt: char – actor) can be staged with distance, or even denied: so cartoon characters “pretend” to own their existences, self, will power, free will. For example, still in Avery cartoons, the repetitive asides to the public have a double impact: they first focus upon the pragmatic distance that is usually and implicitly established between the actors and their audience. Second: the same distance, together with the awareness to play a part, underlines a prefilmic existence of the character: Averian creatures give the illusion they are actors, both questioning and enhancing the essence of cinema, that is to say: “the illusion of life”.

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“Two words: ‘Sput-nik.’ Once the astronauts went up,
children only wanted to play with space toys.”
- Pete the Prospector, Toy Story 2

Although Pixar Animation’s corporate identity has long been tied to the studio’s advancement of digital animation technologies, many of Pixar’s films paradoxically seem to highlight, and even champion, disused, archaic and obsolete technologies over their digital successors. The above quote neatly hypostatizes this sentiment: Pete the Prospector, a mint-in-the-box collectable toy, laments the effects of the space race and the development of rocket science, on the technologization of children’s toys, children’s play, and American culture more generally. The Prospector character, like Woody the cowboy (the protagonist of the Toy Story series) is a low-tech pull-string doll. Both dolls are merchandising spin offs from a fictional 1940-1950s television show in the film entitled “Woody’s Roundup”: a Western adventure series enacted with wooden marionettes and cut outs. Once a popular program, with the advent of space exploration technologies, or so The Prospector claims, audiences quickly lost interest in the show’s Old West frontier narrative as a new frontier myth began taking shape in the American cultural imagination. Beverly J. Stoeltje aptly terms this twentieth century frontier myth the “Space Age Myth,” wherein covered wagons and pioneers/cowboys are supplanted rockets and astronauts as the push for Westward expansion is transfigured into the drive for expansion into outer space (1987, p. 240). The show was thus abruptly cancelled, and Woody and the rest of his “Roundup gang” quickly fell out of fashion.

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Introduction

“Tradigital Mythmaking” might seem to be an unusual venture at first—a German animator and animation scholar working with young Asian artists to create new concepts for animation that are based on Asian mythologies and artistic traditions. An excursion into my own artistic and research background will establish the project in a wider context and explain its motivation. My own past and ongoing work has largely been defined by the search for a very personal and genuinely German style of animation. I came to Singapore in 2005 to teach animation at the new School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technological University. The multi-cultural society of Singapore offers a beautiful kaleidoscope of the rich traditions of the regional arts—of course, prominently Chinese art, but also Indian, Malay, Indonesian and Philippine art-styles. I found that this wonderful diversity was not yet reflected in animation. My local students seemed to look primarily elsewhere for inspiration: they were mainly influenced by manga and anime and also tended to copy the design style of the Hollywood feature animation as established by Pixar, Dreamworks and Blue Sky Studios.

My initial impressions and findings were supported by scholarly research in the field. According to Engel (2009), “Very often, there is a reliance on derivative concepts in character design and storytelling. The Japanese anime-style and the American school of caricatured realism are used as templates to ensure commercial success. While the commercial prospects of such an approach are questionable, it obviously prevents full artistic success. Originality and innovation are missing” (p. 5). Other scholars such as Hodgkinson (2009) agree that “This is a common problem with much Asian animation, where the computer 3D style, along with the Japan’s anime aesthetic, dominates animation thinking and production. Many traditional Asian stories lose artistic connection with the story’s roots and relevance” (p.1).

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During the 1960s Scottish animator Norman McLaren undertook a series of inquiries into the nature of the line that culminated in three films, Lines Vertical (1960), Lines Horizontal (1962) and Mosaic (1965). Although McLaren has always been associated with innovation in animation technique and aesthetics, often times his more formal concerns have remained overlooked, underexplored, or even dismissed by critics such as Malcolm LeGrice.   This paper seeks to readdress this by looking at the Line trilogy in relation to the development of minimalist tendencies that emerged in both art and music in the twentieth century.  Further to this McLaren has asserted that the structure of his Line films is influenced by the structure of Indian music, a music whose formal construction is intrinsically bound to notions of the spiritual. This paper will draw on these notions in order to examine how the process of simplification intrinsic to Indian music and by extension minimalism, across the arts, has an innate spiritual quality to it that can allow McLaren’s films to function on both a formal and spiritual level simultaneously.

The first two films in the series, Lines Vertical and Lines Horizontal, were an experiment in “pure design” (NFBC 1960, p. 1) with the aid of Evelyn Lambert, McLaren’s frequent collaborator at the National Film Board of Canada.  McLaren and Lambert distilled the process of animation down to its most basic elements, form and rhythm, to see if it was possible to make a film with a single line moving at varying speeds.  Lines that were 19” in length, the length of Lambert’s ruler, were engraved directly into the emulsion of the film.  At the end of each 19” segment the line would change direction marking a natural break in the action. The program notes for both films states that McLaren and Lambert “reduced picture and action to the bare minimum required to hold the eye and delight the senses.  What you see is simply a sheaf of lines, constantly gyrating, grouping harmoniously on the screen in accord with music” (NFBC 1960. p. 1).   From this statement three conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, McLaren was interested in exploring animation in its purest form. Secondly, McLaren was trying to create films that could appeal to audiences at a universal sensory level and finally, the films had an inherent musical rhythm to them that could allow musical soundtracks to be synchronised to them on a later occasion.

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Maria O’Brien – The Secret of Kells (2009), a film for a post Celtic Tiger Ireland?

The Secret of Kells (2009) (dir. Tomm Moore) is a feature length animated film that plays with myth, truth and fiction to propose an originating story for the Book of Kells, a highly decorated 8^th century  insular book containing the four gospels of the Bible.  The film was conceived and produced by Cartoon Saloon in Kilkenny, Ireland but due to the limited funding available in Ireland for feature length animation, the film was made with co-producers in Europe (including Les Armatuers in France, Vivi Film in Belgium, and France 2 Cinema) and animation teams in Brazil and Hungary; though still primarily in Ireland. 

The film deals with organized religion and the church in a way that moves on from recent Irish fiction films that show an anti-clerical fixation (fuelled by an almost never ending series of clerical scandals) such as The Magdalene Sisters (2002) and Songs for a Raggy Boy, (2003) (Brereton, 2008); but shows the universality of nature as an inspiration for the creation of the Book of Kells.  This move away from the organized church as a narrative focal point makes the film more accessible to international audiences, as evidenced by the film obtaining worldwide distributors, particularly a US distributor and nomination for an Oscar, but can perhaps be seen as a exploitation of Irish myths to obtain funding within Ireland and to export Ireland as a source of mythic origins to attempt to speak to a global viewer in universalist terms.

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Masculinity Between Animation and Live Action, or,

SpongeBob v. Hasselhoff

SpongeBob SquarePants is known as a visually appealing, scurrilous entertainment for children, and an escapist, psychedelic pleasure for adults.^[1] The big-eyed yellow sponge (voiced by Tom Kenny) who lives on the ocean-floor beaches of Bikini Bottom has charmed audiences since Nickelodeon first aired the programme in 1999. The 2004 SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is also a valuable theoretical text, as it contrasts live action with animation meaningfully in its narrative and ideology as well as its aesthetics. The contrast of medium primarily corresponds to the film’s investigation of gender and age difference: grotesque, adult hypermasculinity is associated with live action, while animation is associated with ambiguously gendered, polymorphously perverse childhood. Ultimately, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie represents a victory of childhood over adulthood and, in the same move, of animation over live action.

The tension between animation and live action – and related forms such as motion capture and rotoscoping – is a complicated tangle with a rich history. At the 2010 Society for Animation Studies Annual Conference, Harvey Deneroff and Victoria Deneroff (2010) argued, through social practice theory, that strain arises between animators and motion capture artists in part because each group is accustomed to different ways of working. At the same conference, Lisa Bode (2010) analysed how the marketing and reception of motion capture often emphasizes actors’ work while it marginalizes the work of animators. These conference papers contended that status, power and financial compensation are at stake in the tensions between animators and other film artists.

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Reality is what we take to be true. What we take true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality. (Zukav, 1979, p. 328)

Introduction

Although animated documentary as a mode of representation has been around for about a century, academic studies began to consider various aspects of this increasingly popular medium almost a decade ago. Indeed, during the last few years, we can see an increase of scholarly interest on this subject. In spite of all these interests and attentions, however, “there is still a relative paucity in scholarly work on the form” (Honess Roe, 2009, p.2). This paucity of research in the domain of animated documentary has several reasons. A first reason might be, because animated documentaries are very diverse in forms and styles, and therefore it is difficult to analyze such diversity (Moore, 2010). It might also be rooted in that animated documentary, in its most radical form, tries to call ordinary ways of representing reality into question, and therefore it can be considered as an exceptional way of representing reality. Finally, and more importantly, the lack of a practical model for analyzing represented reality in animated documentary might be a further reason for scarcity of research in this area.

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The animated documentary and ‘psychorealism’

The starting point for this paper is ‘psychorealism’, a term which Chris Landreth coined for the way in which animation can depict internal realities; I will discuss my interpretation of psychorealism, and apply it to the making of the 2010 film An Eyeful of Sound.

In 2004 Chris Landreth won the animated short film Oscar® for his film Ryan, an animated documentary about his interviews with the animator Ryan Larkin. Barbara Robertson (2004) notes in an interview with Landreth, that at first he began taping interviews with Larkin in a fairly standard documentary fashion with a view to making something along the lines of Aardman’s Creature Comforts films.

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The postwar emergence of manga and anime as mass media directed at children emphasized the importance of shōjo and shōnen (boys and girls) characters that encouraged its targeted audience to achieve easy identification. As teenagers gradually became the intended key audience, an increasing range of imagined lives were displayed in these visual narratives. From the late 1950s onwards, popular culture and related merchandizing focused on the teen years as an idealized time period that eventually became viewed less as a period of transition than an end in itself. Over the last thirty years the teen years in Japan have become less a time of preparation for the adult world than an apogee that can only be followed by a decline into the confining expectations of career and family during the remaining decades of life.

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