art animation?

[Quentin Turnour]

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...)

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.

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 


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!"

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

Hope this helps. Sorry if it confuses. 

Quentin Turnour, Programmer, 
Access, Research and Development
National Film and Sound Archive, Australia
McCoy Circuit, Acton, 
ACT, 2601 AUSTRALIA
phone: +61 2 6248 2054  |  fax: + 61 2 6249 8159
www.nfsa.gov.au

Film prints shipped to:
att: Cinema Programming
Loading Dock
McCoy Circuit Acton Canberra 
ACT 2601 AUSTRALIA
+61 2 6248 2289 / cynthia.piromalli at nfsa.gov.au


The National Film and Sound Archive collects, preserves and provides 
access to Australia's historic and contemporary moving image and recorded 
sound culture. 






Jasper Sharp <jasper_sharp at hotmail.com> 
Sent by: owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
19/05/2010 07:39 PM
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Subject
RE: art animation?






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. 

Jasper

Midnight Eye: The Latest and Best in Japanese Cinema
www.midnighteye.com

More details about me on http://jaspersharp.com/




> Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 15:53:23 +0900
> From: asakof at tkd.att.ne.jp
> To: KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
> Subject: art animation?
> 
> I'm curious about the use of the term "art animation"... 
> Is it used by English speakers? 
> In Japanese, it refers to a category of 
hand-drawn/puppet/clay/traditional
> animation differentiated from the more commercial and mainstream
> entertainment anime. 
> It sounds like Japanese conveniently borrowing and combining English 
words
> (wasei-eigo) to mean something. 
> Thanks for any advise. 
> Fujioka Asako 
> 

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