Animation and History

ESTHER LESLIE

Animation's Ahistory

Does animation have a history? Does it evolve as would any other medium that is born and grows up, all the while refining and developing its techniques? This appears to be how film developed. Film moved from the front-on static-camera view to the dollying and swooping camera eye; from black-and-white, through hand tinting, to color; from silent to noisy; and from 2-D to 3-D, while developing editing techniques and honing its acting styles. Then came the day, quite recently, when film merged, through CGI, with animation. This thing that was called film, and still is, evolves from simplicity to complexity, blaring out a narrative of progress, at least in the commercial realm. Each new film is to be bigger, better, more immersive, more expensive, more profitable, and more "life-like" (if not more realistic) than the last. The latest gambits are 3-D and HD, though they are also part of the increasing entwinement of film and animation via the digital. In its quest to be ever more real, film mobilizes the irreal arts of animation. Does animation proceed through time and technique in the same progressive way, rarely looking back? Can one tell for sure when any one animation was made? Can one date a single animation by its technique, its ideas, its structure, the quality of its coloration or film stock? Of course, it is possible to perceive celluloid's deterioration and posit oldness. Of course, the coloration or absence of color may give a clue. The technical properties of the strip along with the music and the ideas may well indicate the date when it was made. But animation is not as clear-cut as film, because in film the passing fads of a world out there impress themselves upon the medium more definitely through a technical and a social reaction. Every detail, the fashions, the hairstyles, the makeup (even if the film purports to be a historical one), the attitudes, the quality of color, the pace of the editing, the rhythms of the soundtrack, the clarity of the image, the shape of the bodily gestures, all this bears a date stamp. Film, in general, bears a rigidly progressive relationship toward both social and technical developments (though now part of that technical development has absorbed into itself the technical capacities of computer-generated animation). Film reflects its age into itself. But animation does not, or not quite so straightforwardly. It would be barely possible to place in any chronological order, in some line of responsible historical development, the myriad flimsy fragments that make up animation's legacy, for these fragments, by their very (different) nature, are so detached, reattached, and misattached from and to the world outside of them that they pose only questions, riddles, essays. Animation makes many starts. It makes many false starts. Animation starts and stops, by nature. It combines and cuts and undercuts, and reconstructs and constructs, tricks and reveals the trick and perhaps all at once. Film may do this too, but it tends to obscure the traces of the work upon it. In the mid-1930s Walter Benjamin described the output: "The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice."

Animation is too obviously manifold to set out upon a single line of development. It begins with shadow play or with thumb cinemas, with zoetropes or magic lanterns, with lightning sketches or cel animation, with hidden wheels and pulleys or with stop-motion photography. It starts and stops in many places. It is at one and the same time a beginning and a culmination. To accept a thought such as this could explain the never-flagging bounciness of Walter Ruttmann's cavorting shapes of the early 1920s. Or it could allow an understanding of why Disney's feature cartoons are reissued periodically, not as historical items but as entities to occupy the present, even if nowadays morphed into 3-D. The banal way to put this is stated by Alan Bergman, the president of the Walt Disney Studios, in a press release: "Great stories and great characters are timeless, and at Disney we're fortunate to have a treasure trove of both." In wayward terms, the sentiment taps into something of the otherworldly character of animation, which makes it truly ahistorical in relation to our world.

But this is not to say that animation always exchanges its relation to its moment for an arrival in ours. Its moment of making marks itself on the animation too, but perhaps more covertly than film's historical moment does. What does Ruttmann's outburst against Lotte Reiniger and her silhouette animation suggest about animation's particular hold on its moment of making? Reiniger animated cutouts, black delicacies set in flat fairy-tale worlds of filigreed detail. Ruttmann was a collaborator on what is now labeled the oldest surviving feature-length animation. Reiniger's fairy tale, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, was released in 1926. Ruttmann sat assembled with the other animators for the first time to watch the marked copy and is reported to have exclaimed, "What has this to do with 1923?" What did the dancing shadows, trapped in a flat world of genies and...