<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">I'm think I'm going to jump in deep
here... IMHO in my experience, this terminology is but only very occasionally,
for those contemporary gallery visual artists Jasper refers, who work in
animation and often by art critics writing in gallery culture. In the wide
sense of English-langauge cinema animation history and culture - that I
think Asako is alluding to (?) - the nomeclature tradition seems to me
to be quite different. Is this a(nother) case where Japanese screen culture
articulates more refined taxomatic distinctions of form than English-language
screen culture - just as EL programmers and publicists rarely articulate
that a documentary is an essay film, a science film, a sponsored documentary
etc. (Or when we do, there is a certain flippant off-handedness about is,
as in Rocdoc, Moc-umentary...)</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Sure in the mind of programmers, critics
and historians of animation, the distinction is clear and what you work
with whenever you think about what you want program, or what you want to
write or talk about. The problem is when you go to say its name,
and market different sorts of animation to the public. Then the divisions
and history gets blurry and are better left unpacked for your audience.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">As often the case in Eng-L Western
cinema, there is a binary: "Cartoons" or "Animation";
Hollywood Classic - and everything else reacting against its craft, workflow
and commerce. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">We all know these histories. The Cartoons,
or the Hollywood 'Classical' animation tradition, is what began in the
1900s with a variety of New York and then Hollywood commercial studios
generating one-reel shorts for nickelodeon-style programming, often initially
animating popular newspaper cartoon strips. Then what was vertically integrated
into the Hollywood studios to service their distribution and exhibition
needs, either as studio in-house units (Warners and MGM's 'Termite Terraces')
or as subcontractors (Disney long provided titles for UA, then RKO). Hollywood
Classic animation probably would have stayed as Cartoons, and as a sort
of frenetic Sing-along slideshow, had not Disney toned-up and tried to
'de-'Toon' classical animation with SNOW WHITE in the late 30s. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Against this, you can propose a Western
'Animation' tradition, with its names: Lye and UK Crown Film Unit and UK
artist film-making of the 1930s, evolving into the house of the National
Film Board of Canada; the East European surrealist tradition, which perhaps
grows from the folk animation of Reiniger or Starwwicz; American experimental
animation, which maybe grows from BALLET MECANIQUE, et al. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">I can clog up Wikipedia and this list-serv
arguing over their precedence. But on reflection, it is astonishing that
in English we don't wash these taxonomies in public, especially as so many
modern animators emerged from fine arts backgrounds. It's all just Animation,
even if of a certain kind. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">I think this is because independent
animators fought a long war of cultural survival against the Cartoons and
Hollywood studio animation, from at least SNOW WHITE until the 1980s. This
perhaps made it imperative not to make any distinction - apart from the
fact that you weren't making Cartoons, which had been received in western
popular culture since the 50s as for kids and for Mickey Mouse, Bugs
Bunny, The Flintstones and today Shriek. Plus the notion that when animation
was 'Art', it was Disney's features - ironic, as (FANTASIA excepted) until
the 60s Walt was chasing techniques such a rotosoping and plane cameras
that tried to mimic live action and not graphic play. I remember
the marketing drill whenever cine clubs ran animation programming in the
1970 and 80s: "This is animation, but it’s like nothing you have
ever seen before!"</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Maybe as a result, Western animation
taxonomies tend to be technical, not formal. You practice in Claymation,
in Stop Motion, Digital, in Hand-Made films, in Sand animation, in Rotoscoping.
Today, you can even go retro and practice in Cell animation, rather like
folk music. At best, and if it was hard to pin down (like Robert Breer),
you practised 'Experimental' Animation. But you are rarely in a school
or a style. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">One favourite formal division some
western writers on animation proposed (at least in the pre-Digital era)
was a divide between what happens to forms in different animation traditions.
Cartoons tell stories that can't be told by live action. Animation was
interested in alchemy, in transforming forms, in the metamorphosis not
possible with live action. A Bugs Bunny cartoons just allowed Hollywood
classic narration to run, fall down, defy gravity and mortality, or crack
jokes faster than humanly possible, merely continuing the poetics of Silent
slapstick and sound Screwball comedy. The animation of Len Lye, Mary Ellen
Butte or Jan Švankmajer transforms matter in time and space, whether drawn,
found, 2-D or 3-D. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Another is a more subtle, socio-economic
reading of animation as process. Hollywood Classical Cartoons were made
in factories and on assembly-lines; cartoon animators were lower-middle-class
white-collar workingmen, who'd graduated from trade educations in graphic
design, illustration for the mass press, in draftsmanship. It's parallel
is in the ex-journalists who lived in the writer's bungalows; its logical
outcome in Disney’s animator's strike in 1944. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Animators were middle-class or upper-middle
class, art school educated, who thought in terms of ateliers or collectives
and who were mostly appalled at the studio's human resource management.
It remains somewhat true today, as many great entry-level animators decide
whether to stay on their own, or take a job offer to work as an animator
at Pixar or Aardman. A lifestyle thing.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">THE SIMPSONS, Pixar, computing power,
post-modern irony and homage, Cable TV; they’ve all thrown this up in
the air quite a bit. CGI's taken away many of the taxonomies of Technique:
a Canadian NFB short, TOY STORY 3, AVATAR, a war movie that wants to pretend
that its hero's lost his leg in battle; all made with from same computer
code. But I think the clue remains in Intention. English-language critics
may have rarely talked about Art Animation. But they are keen now to chase
down and talk about artistic achievement in animation, and not in binary
art/commerce ways. We rarely call the best cartoons Cartoons anymore. It's
Hollywood studio animation.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Sure: new animation studio bosses (and
I'll add George Miller's HAPPY FEET to this) seem to want to continue Walt's
dream of converging animation with reality. They celebrate each additionally
delineated digital hair on a character's head as the highest aspiration.
But never before has critical discourse applied auteur theory to
Hollywood feature animation. We know why a John Lassiter-directed work
is art and different from Dreamwork's MADAGASCAR.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">THE SIMPSONS and SOUTH PARK are mostly
throw-backs to the tradition of Hollywood animation as stand-up/screwball/or
situation comedy with illustrations; it's the writers who are the auteur
here. But they've also neatly killed the idea and illusion of the Cartoon
as a genre of visual style. If you check out BBC Children's programming,
or Nickelodeon, it’s a free-for-all of boutique animation artists and
personal style, verging on experimental and abstract. And the parent's
love it, because it’s not DreamWorks.</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">I think we also look at western animation
history different, perhaps understanding better how it was made, the cultural
forces at work and why guys who never went to art school can have genius.
The graphic imagination of Tex Avery, of Chuck Jones' WHAT'S OPERA DOC
or Disney's VICTORY THROUGH AIRPOWER is now understood as it wasn't then
- as formalist play of the highest quality. Contra, some Eastern European
puppet animation that in the 1950s was celebrated as great art at film
festivals now manifestly flunks as animation. Its clearer now that, beyond
the folksy winsome carving of the puppets, there’s really little animation
in there. </font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Courier New">Hope this helps. Sorry if it confuses.
</font>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="sans-serif">Quentin Turnour, Programmer, <br>
Access, Research and Development<br>
National Film and Sound Archive, Australia<br>
McCoy Circuit, Acton, <br>
ACT, 2601 AUSTRALIA<br>
phone: +61 2 6248 2054 | fax: + 61 2 6249 8159<br>
www.nfsa.gov.au<br>
<br>
Film prints shipped to:<br>
att: Cinema Programming<br>
Loading Dock<br>
McCoy Circuit Acton Canberra <br>
ACT 2601 AUSTRALIA<br>
+61 2 6248 2289 / cynthia.piromalli@nfsa.gov.au<br>
<br>
<br>
The National Film and Sound Archive collects, preserves and provides access
to Australia's historic and contemporary moving image and recorded sound
culture. <br>
<br>
<br>
</font>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<table width=100%>
<tr valign=top>
<td width=40%><font size=1 face="sans-serif"><b>Jasper Sharp <jasper_sharp@hotmail.com></b>
</font>
<br><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Sent by: owner-KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu</font>
<p><font size=1 face="sans-serif">19/05/2010 07:39 PM</font>
<table border>
<tr valign=top>
<td bgcolor=white>
<div align=center><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Please respond to<br>
KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu</font></div></table>
<br>
<td width=59%>
<table width=100%>
<tr valign=top>
<td>
<div align=right><font size=1 face="sans-serif">To</font></div>
<td><font size=1 face="sans-serif">kinejapan <kinejapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu></font>
<tr valign=top>
<td>
<div align=right><font size=1 face="sans-serif">cc</font></div>
<td>
<tr valign=top>
<td>
<div align=right><font size=1 face="sans-serif">Subject</font></div>
<td><font size=1 face="sans-serif">RE: art animation?</font></table>
<br>
<table>
<tr valign=top>
<td>
<td></table>
<br></table>
<br>
<br>
<br><font size=2 face="Verdana">Yes it is used, basically in the same sense
it is used in Japan - non-commercial projects generally attributed to a
solitary auteur animator like Suzie Templeton, Barry Purves or Yuri Norstein.
<br>
<br>
Jasper<br>
<br>
Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema<br>
www.midnighteye.com<br>
<br>
More details about me on http://jaspersharp.com/<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
> Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 15:53:23 +0900<br>
> From: asakof@tkd.att.ne.jp<br>
> To: KineJapan@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu<br>
> Subject: art animation?<br>
> <br>
> I'm curious about the use of the term "art animation"...
<br>
> Is it used by English speakers? <br>
> In Japanese, it refers to a category of hand-drawn/puppet/clay/traditional<br>
> animation differentiated from the more commercial and mainstream<br>
> entertainment anime. <br>
> It sounds like Japanese conveniently borrowing and combining English
words<br>
> (wasei-eigo) to mean something. <br>
> Thanks for any advise. <br>
> Fujioka Asako <br>
> <br>
<br>
</font>
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