Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

CORE Digital Pictures in Toronto, Canada, created a
range of persuasive children’s television with Angela
Anaconda, The Savums, andFranny’s Feet; and individual
artists such as Karl Sims, Yoichiro Kawaguchi, William
Latham, Ruth Lingford, James Paterson, Amit Pitaru,
Tomika Satoshi, Johnny Hardstaff, Marc Craste, and
Run Wrake have challenged the dominant look and styles
using the available range of computer software packages to
create what might be described as the avant-garde or
experimental end of the CG form. It is clear that as
different software packages become more affordable and
user-friendly, and the use of the computer as a creative
tool becomes both a domestic and industrial orthodoxy,
the same degree of breadth and variety that has characterized
all other approaches and techniques to animation will
characterize computer-generated imagery. In many senses,
in the same way as the term ‘‘new media’’ now seems
redundant, it is possible that ‘‘CGI’’ will also become part
of an assumed lexicon of creative practice in animation.
ALTERNATIVE METHODS
The term ‘‘alternative methods’’ merely begs the question—alternative
to what? Within the context of animation,
the methods discussed below essentially operate as
alternatives to the trends in industrial production contexts,
largely resisting the dominant aesthetics of contemporary
CGI in feature work, traditional puppet and
model animation, and orthodox cel or drawn material.
There is also a resistance to the ‘‘Disney style,’’ both
visually and thematically, and inevitably a more personal
or auteurist approach to the work, which often customizes
a technique to achieve a highly individualized look.
Previously, these kinds of films might have been
termed experimental animation, and to a certain extent
this does embrace the auteurist sensibility present in such
work, and the strong links it often has with an avantgarde
approach or the personal approach of fine art.
‘‘Experimental animation’’ as a term has become more
associated with nonobjective, nonlinear work—which
some claim is the purest form of animation—but in other
ways this misrepresents a whole range of work that is
not necessarily highly progressive in its ‘‘experimentation,’’
but merely of a different order from ‘‘classical’’
or traditional 2D cartoons or 3D animation. It is essentially
‘‘developmental’’ animation in the sense that it is
often a response to, and a resistance of, orthodox techniques,
in a spirit of creating a personal statement or
vision not possible in a big-studio context, or within
the field of popular entertainment.
The abstract films of Walter Ruttmann (1887–
1941), Viking Eggeling (1880–1925), and Hans
Richter (1888–1976) in the early 1920s are commonly
understood as a benchmark for some of the formative
Animation
ways in which animation was used in the service of a
modernist approach to filmmaking. Richter’s Rhythmus
21 (1921), made with Eggeling, sought to use the movement
of shape and form as an expression of thought and
emotion in its own right. Ballet Mecanique (Fernand
Léger, 1924), featuring full animation, painting directly
on film, and Méliès-style effects, as well as live action,
demonstrated a wholly self-conscious use of technique as
a model of creative resistance to modernist machine
cultures and consumerism. The kinetic combination of
abstract form and sound to create a kind of ‘‘visual
music’’ was pioneered by Oskar Fischinger (1900–
1967) during the 1930s in experimental works such as
Composition in Blue (1935). Lotte Reiniger (1899–1981)
successfully combined abstract work with a visual narrative
more accessible to wider audiences using the technique
of cut-out, silhouette animation, most particularly
in her full-length work The Adventures of Prince Achmed
(1926). She collaborated with Berthold Bartosch
(1893–1968), who later made The Idea (1932), a
thirty-minute poetic narrative of high technical innovation
and achievement.
As the industrial model of animation production
emerged at the Disney Studio and elsewhere between
1928 and 1941, experimental work continued. Mary
Ellen Bute (1906–1983) and Leon Thurmin worked with
the idea of drawing with electronically determined codes
in The Perimeters of Light and Sound and Their Possible
Synchronisation (1932), while Alexander Alexeieff (1901–
1982) and Clare Parker created the ‘‘pin screen,’’ where
raised pins were lit to create particular images in Night on
Bald Mountain (1934). Particularly influential were Len
Lye (1901–1980) and Norman McLaren (1914–1987),
whose work for the GPO Film Unit, under the auspices
of John Grierson, significantly advanced experimental
forms. Lye’s Colour Box (1935) was painted directly on
film, while his Trade Tattoo (1937) used stencilling on
documentary footage. McLaren, who continued to work
with Grierson at the National Film Board of Canada,
experimented with many techniques, including direct
‘‘under-the-camera’’ animation, pixellation, cut-out and
collage animation, and shifting pastel chalk, making many
influential films including Begone Dull Care (1949),
Neighbours (1952), and Pas de Deux (1968). Lye and
McLaren essentially recognized that animation was a
cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary medium, and they
exploited its affinities with dance, performance, painting,
sculpture, and engraving.
This period of high experimentation in the 1930s
was arguably the purest expression of what animation
could achieve beyond the American cartoon and
European 3D stop-motion puppet traditions, demonstrating
that animation had credibility as a ‘‘fine art.’’
Cartoon animation still remained unrecognized as an art
SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM 93