Chapter 1: What is a Movie?

Essay: Evolution of Animation Techniques

While there are countless possible types and combinations of animation, three basic types are used widely today: hand-drawn, stop motion, and digital.

To create hand-drawn animation, animators draw or paint images that are then photographed one frame at a time in a film camera. Since twenty-four frames equal one second of film time, animators must draw twenty-four separate pictures to achieve one second of animation. Stop motion records the movement of objects (toys, puppets, clay figures, or cutouts) with a film camera;

Spirited Away hand drawn animation	Wallace & Gromit

the animator moves the objects slightly for each recorded frame. Digital animation, which may begin with drawings, storyboards, puppets, and all the traditional tools of theater and animation, uses the virtual world of computer-modeling software to generate the animation.

Mr. Incredible

Hand-Drawn

In 1914, Winsor McCay's classic animation Gertie the Dinosaur required over five thousand drawings on separate sheets of paper (Solomon 14). The difficulty of achieving fluid movement by perfectly matching and aligning so many characters and backgrounds led, the next year, to the development of cel animation. Animator Earl Hurd used clear celluloid sheets to create single backgrounds that could serve for multiple exposures of his main character. Thus he needed to draw only the part of the image that was in motion, typically the character or a small part of the character. Although the highly flammable celluloid first used for this process has now been replaced by acetate, this type of animation is still called "cel" animation. Until the advent of digital animation, this method was used to create nearly all feature-length animated films.

Stop Motion

The objects moved and photographed for stop-motion animation can be full-scale or miniature models, puppets made of cloth or clay, or cutouts of other drawings or pictures. Underneath some figures are armatures, or skeletons, with fine joints and pivots, which hold the figures in place between the animators’ careful manipulations. Though more sophisticated types of stop-motion animation are available, many animators still use this method because it is relatively inexpensive and quick to produce.

Wallace & Gromit

Among the first American stop-motion films was The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, a Prehistoric Tragedy (1915), by Willis O'Brien, who went on to animate stop-motion dinosaurs for Harry O. Hoyt’s live-action adventure The Lost World (1925), then added giant apes to his repertoire with Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933), and Schoedsack’s Mighty Joe Young (1949). (See "A Short History of Special Effects.")
Inspired by O'Brien's work on King Kong, Ray Harryhausen set out at thirteen to become a stop-motion animator and is now most famous for his work on Jason and the Argonauts (1963), a Hollywood retelling of the ancient Greek legend. More recent feature-length stop-motion animations influenced by Harryhausen’s work include Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride (2005) and "claymation" animations by Nick Park such as Chicken Run (2000, with Peter Lord) and Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005, with Steve Box).

Digital Animation

John Lasseter’s Toy Story (1995) was the first feature-length digitally animated film. A commercial and critical success, it humanized computer animation and obliterated the fear that computer animation was limited to shiny, abstract objects floating in strange worlds. Toy Story'sfocus on plastic toys, however, helped disguise the limitations of early digital-animation techniques. Five more years of development enabled digitally animated movies such as Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson's Shrek (2001) to present compelling characters with visually interesting skin, hair, and fur.

The production of digitally animated features begins with less costly traditional techniques that allow filmmakers to test ideas and characters before starting the difficult and expensive computer-animation process. Thus, in the early phases, filmmakers use sketches, storyboards, scripts, pantomime, puppets, models, and voice performances to begin developing stories and characters. By creating a virtual wire-frame character with

virtual joints and anchor points, digital animators use technology to do some of the same work stop-motion animators do by hand. Typically, a clay model is created and then scanned into the computer with the use of a digital pen or laser scanner. Animal and human actors can be dressed in black suits with small white circles attached to joints and extremities, allowing for "motion capture" of the distinctive movement of the actors. In creating the latest Tiger Woods video games, for example, animators used this motion-capture technique to record the athlete's movements and to mimic them in the virtual world. (For more on motion capture, see "A Short History of Special Effects.")

Mr. Incredible wire-frame	Mr. Incredible

In digital animation, animators manipulate virtual skeletons or objects frame by frame on computers. To clothe the wire-frame figures with muscle, skin, fur, or hair, the animators use a digital process called texture mapping. Digital animators also "light" characters and scenes with virtual lights, employing traditional concepts used in theater and film. Specialists work on effects such as fire, explosions, and lightning. Compositing is the process of bringing all these elements together into one frame, while rendering is the process by which hundreds of computers combine all the elements at high resolution and in rich detail. Because the backgrounds, surface textures, lighting, and special effects require a tremendous amount of computer-processing power, animators typically work with wire-frame characters and with unrendered backgrounds until all elements are finalized, at which point a few seconds of screen time may take hundreds of computers many hours to render. Although the process is extremely expensive and labor intensive, digital animation’s versatility and aesthetic potential has made it the method of choice for studio-produced feature animation. Aardman, the claymation production company behind the popular Wallace and Gromit movies, designed their latest project Flushed Away (2006) with the stop-motion plasticine look of their popular Wallace and Gromit characters but created every frame of the film on a computer.

After a string of traditionally animated failures, including Brother Bear and Home on the Range, Walt Disney Studios announced in 2005 that the studio would no longer produce hand-drawn features. Ironically, Pixar mastermind John Lasseter has now assumed the position of chief creative executive at Disney, and this king of digital animation has announced plans to revive the studio’s hand-drawn tradition. This move comes as no surprise to those familiar with Lasseter, who began his career drawing cel animation and is a vocal proponent of the hand-drawn animation of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, the director of the Disney-distributed Academy Award - winning Spirited Away (2001) and the Oscar-nominated Howl’s Moving Castle (2004).

Spirited Away

The most sophisticated, lifelike, digitally animated human characters to date appear in Hironobu Sakaguchi and Moto Sakakibara’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001). The process used to create these characters was so time consuming and expensive that it contributed to the failure of the film's production company. Nonetheless, Final Fantasy set the standard for digitally animated human characters. But for many animators and audiences, "realistic" figures are not necessarily the ideal. In 2004, the stylized characters in Pixar’s blockbuster The Incredibles trumped the motion-capture-guided "lifelike" figures in Robert Zemeckis’s The Polar Express in both box-office and critical response.

(For more on the perils of realistic animation, see "The Uncanny Valley.")

Mr. Incredible

 

FOR FURTHER READING

Barrier, Michael. Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in its Golden Age. Oxford University Press, 1999

Bendazzi, Giannalberto. Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Crafton, Donald. Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898-1928. University of Chicago Press, 1993

Grant, John. Masters of Animation. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2001.

Maltin, Leonard. Of Mice and Magic: A History of Animated Cartoons. Plume, 1987.

"Notes on the Origin of American Animation, 1900 - 1921." The Library of Congress.

"Origins of American Animation." The Library of Congress.

Solomon, Charles and Ron Stark. The Complete Kodak Animation Book. New York:

Eastman Kodak Company Rochester, 1983.

Thomas, Frank and Ollie Johnston. Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New York: bbeville Press, 1981.

Aardman Animation http://www.aardman.com/flash.asp.