Implications of the Cel Animation Technique

Thompson, Kristin

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-16401-1_9

Cited by 24 publications

(14 citation statements)

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“…The grail of realism in digital filmmaking becomes less elusive as refinements of digital tools in the creation and production of animation filmmaking in short and feature filmmaking increase at a dramatic pace. There are, however, other success stories, contemporary digital works that foreground their (software) construction, similar to what Kristin Thompson (1980) describes from a period over 100 years ago in filmmaking, when 'an ideology of the realism of depicted events had taken over … [at a time when] many of the early cartoons contained references to their unique mode of production … [and placed] great emphasis on the marvel of mechanically reproduced movement ' (pp. 108-109).…”

mentioning

confidence: 83%

“…In effect, these debates also revisit Thompson’s (1980) critique of Hollywood’s trivialization of animation, with an important distinction that in our contemporary mediascape, instead of ‘cartoons’ being viewed ‘as a minor subset of cinema as a whole’ (p. 111), digital animation, as a technique, style and set of tools dominates much of digital film production, either as animation we are supposed to see ( Wall-E ) or a production tool and method that creates realism, ergo the animation we are not supposed to see ( from Minority Report to Interstellar ). Computer animation artists are extending Thompson’s notion of promoting ‘formal play of a potentially disruptive kind’ (p. 112) into the digital realm; her examples include formal strategies of conflict and distortion of perspective systems and temporal relations.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Editorial

Buchan¹

2016

Animation

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confidence: 83%

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confidence: 99%

Editorial

Buchan¹

2016

Animation

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“…Planes of setting and planes of action seem to have different properties, creating a series of incomplete worlds stacked atop each other like cards in a deck. (This is a consequence of the separation of planes in cel animation more generally; see Thompson, 1980, andLamarre, 2009: 3-44. ) This does not necessarily mean, however, that films like Fleischer's Forty Thieves or Disney's The Old Mill (Wilfred Jackson, 1937) do not depict a world.…”

Section: Being Somewherementioning

confidence: 99%

Whole-Screen Metamorphosis and the Imagined Camera (Notes on Perspectival Movement in Animation)

Pierson

2015

Animation

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This article uses a special kind of distortion of spatial orientation in animation, which the author calls whole-screen metamorphosis, to problematize the relation that theories of camera movement often assume between a camera and its world. Recent developments in digital imaging have prompted confusion among scholars as to whether or not it makes still sense to talk about 'camera movement' -since, in many cases, real cameras were barely used (as in Gravity) or not at all (as in Frozen). The author argues that this confusion is frequently misguided: camera movement, as a tool of critical analysis, has always been based on a phenomenology of perspectival movement, regardless of any use (or non-use) of a real camera. However, animators sometimes play with perspectival movement in ways that undercut the more fundamental impression of a cinematic world, effectively metamorphosing our relation to it. Two kinds of this metamorphosis are explored. One, found in Norman McLaren's Blinkity Blank, creates a Gestalt switch of our impression of space; the other, found in Caroline Leaf's The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa, dissolves the sense of ground that is needed to support an impression of world, in a kind of becominganimal of the camera. These phenomena point to a need for more nuanced accounts of relations between live-action, animated, and digital images.

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“…Those differences, in the case of Reisenbüchler’s films, lie in the animation medium’s approach to stasis. Kristin Thompson (1980: 117) describes stasis as a part of continuous movement in classical Hollywood cel animation, part of, not separate from, the lengthening and shortening of temporal flow. Reisenbüchler’s films are condensed epics, and their use of montage feeds on kinetic energy, and yet paradoxically, many of the shots within them are either completely still or contain only slight suggestions of movement.…”

Section: Globalism Animation and The Sublimementioning

confidence: 99%

The Animated Esperanto: The Globalist Vision in the Films of Sándor Reisenbüchler

Morton

2016

Animation

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This article examines the work of the Hungarian collage animator Sándor Reisenbüchler, whose career lasted from the mid-1960s until his death in 2004. It poses theoretical questions concerning the concept of an animation Esperanto, pivoting off Béla Balázs's early theories of an international film language. Through close studies of two of his films, the author claims that Reisenbüchler develops an animation Esperanto through his construction of landscapes, a significant break from an animation tradition that develops an Esperanto through the body. The article ties Reisenbüchler's animated Esperanto to his globalist, transcendental politics and situates him within the context of Hungary's socialist system. Finally, the article places Reisenbüchler's work in the context of Pannonia, the major animation studio in Hungary, to which he was affiliated throughout his career. The films of Marcell Jankovics, Hungary's most famous animator, suggest a more complicated reading of the interactions between the body and the landscape in the animated Esperanto. In conclusion, the author posits a possible dialectic between internationalism and globalism within the animated Esperanto, and applies this dialectic to Balázs's initial conception of the international film language.

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Implications of the Cel Animation Technique

Cited by 24 publications

References 1 publication

Editorial

Editorial

Whole-Screen Metamorphosis and the Imagined Camera (Notes on Perspectival Movement in Animation)

The Animated Esperanto: The Globalist Vision in the Films of Sándor Reisenbüchler

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