COMBINING LIVE ACTION WITH 2D ANIMATION The combination of live action (real people and places as traditionally photographed in cinema) with cartoon footage was an irresistible creative temptation for filmmakers. The rotoscope is a combination camera–projector that makes this possible. It projects previously filmed footage onto a series of cells that animators then use to create the cartoon elements. Because they can see the film footage on their cells, they can precisely align the animation with the live-action elements. The cells are then filmed and composited with the live action.
The MGM musical Anchors Aweigh (1945) featured an impressive and funny rotoscoped scene in which star Gene Kelly danced with Jerry the mouse, a cartoon character. The dance choreography was carefully worked out, and the result was a highly convincing illusion.
But the most elaborate blend of live action and animation, achieved with nondigital means, is unquestionably Disney’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). The film features more than 1000 shots in which live action and animation are joined, and the story premise is remarkably clever. Taking place in the 1940s and modeled on Hollywood’s own films noir of that period, the story features private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) investigating the murder of a cartoon character. His quest eventually takes him to Toontown, where all the film industry’s cartoon characters live and which is a kind of alternate universe where cartoon laws apply (a character, for example, who falls out of a window will hang in the air for a moment before dropping).
Director Robert Zemeckis, cinematographer Dean Cundey, and effects artists
from Industrial Light and Magic took elaborate steps to maximize the illusion that Eddie really co-exists with Roger Rabbit and the other ’toons. To blend the two domains, they used elaborate camera moves and atmospheric texture such as filming 372
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WALTZ WITH BASHIR (SONY PICTURES CLASSICS, 2008)
Animation is a very flexible mode of screen reality because it departs from the tradition of photographic realism that has been so powerful and pervasive throughout cinema. But this does not mean that an animator cannot investigate the real world. Waltz With Bashir, for example, is an animated documentary, conjoining two modes of screen reality that are almost never combined with one another. Filmmaker Ari Folman uses animation to explore the events surrounding the massacre of Palestinians gathered in a refugee camp during the 1980 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Frame enlargement.
the ’toon characters through smoke or fog. Full-figure cutouts stood in for Roger and Jessica Rabbit and other ’toons, and lighting, camera moves, and the live actors’
performances were rehearsed in relation to these cutouts, which were then removed for filming. Finally, everything was shot on wide-gauge VistaVision film to maximize clarity and resolution, important because all the effects shots were done with traditional optical compositing, which involves multiple-rephotographing of the blended elements.
It’s not just the amazing blend of live action and animation that makes
Who Framed Roger Rabbit a great film. It is also extremely well-written and well-performed and is filled with a love for cinema and its great cartoon characters, many of whom make guest appearances—Bugs Bunny, Tweety Bird, Dumbo, Porky
Pig, Pinocchio, Donald Duck, Yosemite Sam, Mickey Mouse, and Betty Boop. And it’s a picture that has given us one of the great movie lines—“I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
3D Animation
3D animation involves the use of puppets or other real models or animation within three-dimensional (3D) computer space. The animation of puppets or models is a traditional tool of cinema and has been used widely in various methods of stop-motion animation . This involves posing a model, exposing one frame of film, then re-posing 373
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WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT (DISNEY, 1988)
Rotoscoping enables filmmakers to combine live action and animation. It has a long history in cinema, and it reached its pinnacle of accomplishment in Roger Rabbit , where real actors and cartoon characters combine to create an animated film noir. Frame enlargement.
the model, exposing another frame of film, and so on, with a matte or mask used to block that portion of the frame in which live actors will be inserted.
Many classic special-effects films used this technique. Willis O’Brien’s The Lost World (1925) brought its dinosaurs to life as animated miniature models, with live actors matted into the shots. King Kong (1933), about the giant ape who lives on Skull Island, is probably the most famous example of this type of animation. In this film, O’Brien inserted the live actors into the effects shots as film footage projected behind the puppets and miniature models.
Ray Harryhausen was another genius at stop-motion animation, perfecting his
own system called “Dynamation” in a series of films based on Jules Verne novels, on Greek myths, and on tales of the Arabian Nights ( The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad , 1958; Mysterious Island , 1961; Jason and the Argonauts , 1963; and Clash of the Titans , 1981).
One of Harryhausen’s most famous and brilliant sequences is Jason’s battle with a group of skeleton warriors. Because Harryhausen had to move all their arms and legs, animating the seven skeletons required him to make 35 separate movements for every frame of film, or 840 movements every second (35 × 24 frames per second), all of which had to be choreographed with the live actor in order to simulate a convincing sword fight.
More recently, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) used stop-motion techniques to animate its puppet figures, as did Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s Team America: World Police (2004).
Since the 1990s, visual effects have moved inside the computer, and animation has benefited from this revolution. Popular cartoon features today— Toy Story, 374
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THE LOST WORLD (FIRST
NATIONAL, 1925)
3D animation has deep roots
in cinema, going back to the
silent era. The dinosaurs in this
special-effects film were animated
as miniature models (18 inches
high) by moving and photo-
graphing them a frame at a time,
with a portion of each frame
blocked (matted) from exposure.
The film was then rewound,
with the exposed area matted
this time. Live actors were then
photographed in the area of the
frame that had been originally
matted and unexposed. The
finished image combined live ac-
tion (the actor in the lower-right
frame) and animation (the bron-
tosaurus). Frame enlargement.
Shrek, Finding Nemo —tend to employ digital animation , with characters created as models inside three-dimensional computer space. This gives animators all the impressive visual-effects tools that live-action features have been using to impress audiences. Digitally created lighting effects can be very elaborate and, when used with texture mapping of skin and other surfaces, can create remarkable illusions of depth.
Unlike traditional 2D animation, which employs a real camera, the all-digital films are shot with a virtual camera , which is a program that simulates the many ways in which a camera might view the scene, mimicking the optical effects of different lenses, depth of field, rack focusing, and panning-and-tracking movements.
As a result, the illusion of depth and motion perspective is much more powerful in digital animation, and these films capture far more of the visual qualities of live-action features than 2D animation could accomplish.
Furthermore, digital animation can be more efficient because the animator only needs to create key frames , those points at which the characters’ positions change substantially. Once the key frames are specified, the computer will then fill in all the intervening frames of motion.
The efficiency and creative power of digital have led to a significant
increase in the production of animated features. Until the 1990s, animated features were relatively rare and hardly existed outside of Disney. Now, however, they are plentiful and are among the biggest box office films of any given year.
Two studios—Pixar and DreamWorks—have specialized in digital animation fea-
tures. Pixar formed in 1986 and signed a coproduction deal with Disney in 1991, and its first feature was Toy Story (1995). Other Pixar hits include Monsters, Inc. (2001), Finding Nemo (2003), and The Incredibles (2004). Pixar combined high-quality digital animation with an innovative blend of humor aimed at adults as well as children.
This blend has proven extremely popular—parents enjoy these films along with their children.
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Modes of Screen Reality
UP (PIXAR, 2009)
The virtual camera—computer simulation of camera movement, angle, and lens
perspective—has revolutionized animation, and the increasing sophistication of digital software enables animators to create detailed renderings of three-dimensional fantasy worlds. The animated feature film has returned in digital form as a contemporary blockbuster. Pixar’s films look back to the Disney tradition in that photorealism is not the goal. Instead, like Disney’s animators, Pixar’s artists embrace caricature as a means of creating believable characters and getting to emotional truth. Frame enlargement.
DreamWorks’ features— Antz (1998), Prince of Egypt (1998), Shrek (2001), Shrek 2 (2004), Shark Tale (2004), and Madagascar (2005)—offer a similar blend of state-of-the-art computer animation with adult wit and children’s gags.
A key factor in the success of these films is the use of star voices. This dates from Robin Williams’s turn as the wizard in Disney’s Aladdin (1992). Tom Hanks and Tim Allen voiced Toy Story , and Renee Zellweger and Will Smith voiced Shark Tale (2004). More recently, stars have been paid enormous revenues to do these films. DreamWorks paid $10 million apiece to Mike Myers, Cameron Diaz, and Eddie Murphy for Shrek 2. Ancillary rights bring in even more money, with a 5 percent royalty on all merchandise using an actor’s voice. On this scale, Eddie Murphy would get 50 cents from the sale of every $10 talking toy based on his donkey character.
In this regard, digital animation has brought cartoon features into the world of movie blockbusters, requiring high-power stars and aggressive marketing in order to generate tremendous revenue streams.
PERFORMANCE CAPTURE In the world of 2D animation, the rotoscope was invented in 1917 and was used occasionally to project live-action footage onto a cell, and an animator then drew over the top of the photographic image. In this case, rather than being combined with animation, the live action furnished a visual template for the animation.
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A CHRISTMAS CAROL (DISNEY, 2009)
Jim Carrey (right) plays Scrooge in this animated version of Dickens’ Christmas tale.
Carrey’s performance was transformed into digital animation for director Robert Zemeckis, who has made a series of performance capture-based films. In them, Zemeckis aims to give animation a strikingly photo-realist appearance. Frame enlargement.
In the digital world, performance capture works in a similar way, using a live actor’s performance as the model for an animated figure. The actor wears a special suit with reflective markers at the joints and is filmed by multiple cameras, each of which sends a beam of light to the markers. The light is reflected back into the camera lens and recorded onto film as a series of white dots against a black background. The dots correspond to the location of the reflectors and provide a 2D portrait of the filmed movement. By comparing in a computer the views taken by the multiple cameras, a 3D model of the movement is created.
Robert Zemeckis made The Polar Express (2004) in this fashion. Actor Tom Hanks, in a skin-tight body suit and with 152 reflective pellets on his face (to capture facial expressions), was filmed by more than 100 cameras. Digitizing his performance and rendering it as animation enabled him to play five different characters, including a child, inhabiting an all-digital world. The results were somewhat less than satisfactory—the faces of the animated characters looked flat and un-expressive. Zemeckis used the technique again on Beowulf (2007), with approximately the same results.
Zemeckis brought 2D animation to one of its greatest achievements in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He believes that performance capture and digital animation will be tremendously liberating to the filmmaker, with nothing that cannot be visualized, the only limits being those of the imagination. At the same time, this method represents a digital extension of an old and traditional technique, namely, rotoscoped images.
The Future of Animation
Animation is an enduring mode of cinema, and it has co-existed with live-action movies since the beginning of the medium. The pleasures offered by animation lie in its ability to depart from photographic realism in order to create a visual world that is 377
Modes of Screen Reality
more imaginative and magical than what live action can accomplish. A photographic image is more constrained by time and space than an animated image. The talking fish of Finding Nemo seem quite real as animated beings; they wouldn’t seem real if the filmmaker tried to make the film by photographing actual fish. Whether 2D or 3D, animation will always be present as an essential mode of cinema, enabling filmmakers to create works of imagination that they could not achieve with live action.
SUMMARY
Because the camera has a double capacity, functioning as a medium that can both record properties of the visual world set before it and manipulate and transform the appearance of that world, filmmakers can create differing styles or modes of screen reality. The mode of ordinary fictional realism employs an audiovisual and narrative design that aims to replicate on screen, with a fair degree of resemblance, the spectator’s understanding of space, time, causality, and the dynamics of human behavior.
The expressionistic mode makes available to filmmakers a range of extremely
explicit stylistic distortions and manipulations that are used to express heightened, extreme, or abnormal states of feeling, thought, or behavior. The mode of fantasy and the fantastic establishes a realm of time and space far removed from ordinary reality in which character behavior can retain recognizably human dimensions or possess magical and extraordinary powers and abilities. The mode of animation frees filmmakers from the constraints of live action, enabling them to populate a screen world with talking non-human characters and bend the laws of time, space, and behavior even more radically than in the mode of fantasy.
The mode of cinematic self-reflexivity is available to filmmakers who wish to reveal and display the constructed and artificial basis of the cinema. Typically, filmmakers employ this mode for either a comic effect or for communicating an urgent social message directly to their audience. In the latter case, filmmakers will use this mode if they feel that the necessity of having to speak indirectly through characters and a story will prevent them from getting their message across or may leave the message itself muddied and muddled.
While the cinema has several distinct stylistic modes available to it, the divisions and boundaries between these modes are not hard and fast. In fact, many films incorporate one or more distinct modes. Musicals such as Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris , for example, typically draw on ordinary fictional realism as well as fantasy and the fantastic. These stylistic modes are extremely flexible, and filmmakers can move in and out of several different modes.
Screen reality is constructed partly by the manipulations of film design discussed in this chapter, and it can vary widely across films. It is, however, also constructed by viewers. Representational reality seems real only when a viewer decides that it does.
Representational conventions change over time, as does the viewer’s response to them.
Contemporary audiences react with disbelief when gunshot victims in 1940s movies clutch their stomachs, double over, and slowly sin
k out of frame. Screen reality exists in relation to viewers who judge its perceived levels of credibility and validity. By manipulating film structure, filmmakers hope to influence viewers’ judgments, but their ability to control viewer response is limited. Like so much else about film, the creation of screen reality is a collaborative production.
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KEY TERMS AND CONCEPTS
animation
fantasy and the
realism
cells
fantastic
rotoscope
cinematic self-
historical realism
screen reality
reflexivity
key frames
stop-motion
digital animation
mockumentary
animation
direct cinema
multiplane camera
3D animation
documentary
neo-realism
2D animation
documentary
ordinary fictional
virtual camera
realism
realism
expressionism
performance capture
SUGGESTED READINGS
Jonathan Bresman, The Art of Star Wars: Episode I: The Phantom Menace (New York: Del Rey, 1999).
Lotte Eisner, The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
Irving Singer, Reality Transformed: Film as Meaning and Technique (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1998).
Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
Mark Cotta Vaz, Industrial Light and Magic: Into the Digital Realm (New York: Del Rey, 1996).
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Index
Index
Page references followed by "f" indicate illustrated
Movies and Meaning- Pearson New International Edition Page 57
