Boiling Lines and Lightning Sketches: Process and the Animated Drawing

Abstract

Animation has often involved some degree of drawing, but 'boiling' and animated sketching are two unique forms of drawn animation that overtly foreground the process of drawing. In this article, the author looks at these two specific approaches to drawn animation, paying special attention to the history, process, and evolutionary qualities of animated sketching; he focuses on the processes and material essence of the 'boiling' image. Both of these approaches produce forms that are at once immobile and mobile and, within this dichotomy of movement, the process of drawing is further accentuated. These will be discussed in light of broader discussions of the theory and process of animation and drawing. Additionally, these discussions will be set against a (somewhat informal) backdrop of process philosophy in an effort to further underscore the importance of the drawing process in the production and presentation of these two methods of animation.Historically, drawing has constituted the process and material basis for the bulk of the world's animation. The most widespread approach has involved the creation of multiple completed drawings that were then sequentially replaced, one at a time, in order to create the illusion of a unique and persistent form that moved. For example, 10,000 individual drawings of Mickey Mouse and friends (each slightly different in pose) might be necessary to produce a seven-minute animated film of the characters running about. This form of replacement animation has a very long history, emerging well before the advent of cinema; but instead of using film and projectors, the multiple finished drawings were presented within such devices as the zoetrope, the phenakistoscope or the flipbook. 1 However, there are at least two other slightly different approaches to the creation of

Animating for Interactivity: The Walk Cycles of Prince of Persia (1989) and Ninja Gaiden (1988)

“…A well-known example of a pre-cel walk cycle is Gertie’s gait in Gertie the Dinosaur (McCay, 1914). The film’s jittery imagery – what Torre (2015) calls early animation’s tendency towards ‘boiling lines’ – reveals that, without a means to layer drawings, each frame must be completely redrawn or traced from a previous frame. By layering transparent cels over background images, cel animation systematized and standardized the separation of foreground from background, which allowed animators to reuse animations – such as the walk cycle – as a loop.…”

(In)Animate Semiotics: Virtuality and Deleuzian Illusion(s) of Life

“…Whilst Torre's process-cognitivism clearly stresses both the distributed and fragmented character of perception, foregrounding the multiple layers of processing (image, movement and colour, for instance) that are synthesised in any phenomenal outcome, it likewise expresses a number of Kantian traits. This is perhaps most noticeable in Torre's leaning towards identity and generality -indeed, it seems significant that Torre's exposition dwells for the most part upon seemingly vital, but nevertheless figurative animated form -the 'boiling lines' of William Kentridge and Bill Plympton, along with the 'living sketches' of Stuart Blackton and Lev Yilmaz (Torre, 2015;Torre, 2017). Arguably, this emphasis upon animated objects and animated characters is accompanied by a similarly quasi-Kantian conception of the self (or subject) as the owner or producer of phenomenal experience.…”

“…Despite Deleuze’s somewhat lacklustre engagement with the animated film, a number of latter-day animation theorists have seen significant resonance between animated phenomena and a series of core Deleuzian concerns. In recent years, various attempts have been made – most notably by Schaffer (2006), Lamarre (2009, 2010), Torre (2014, 2015, 2017) and Jenkins (2016) – to construct a series of Deleuzian positions in animation theory. This reappraisal of the significance of Deleuzian thought with respect to the formulation of a theory of animation in many ways mirrors Deleuze’s own re-evaluation of the philosopher Henri Bergson’s relationship to cinema (Deleuze, 2005: 1–3).…”