THE FILM AND THE PUBLIC - ROGER MANVELL https://archive.org/stream/filmpublic00manv/filmpublic00manv_djvu.

txt The Animated Film The animated film is quite obviously a special branch of the motion picture, and its origins can be found in the early attempts to make silhouettes and jointed figures move behind an illuminated screen long before the application of photographs to the cinema. Still pictures and reliefs in series (for example, the reliefs on the Parthenon friezes) and other early forms of art celebrating the various stages of an action or the details of some historical event (like the Bayeux Tapestry), are also a part of the history of pictorial story-telling, and so lead us through directly to the animated film. The old shadow theatres are the predecessors of Lotte Reiniger's silhouette films, and the hundreds of beautifully painted little pictures designed by Emile Reynaud for his Theatre Optique in the eighteen -eighties are the forerunners of the kind of work Paul Grimault was to create in films like Le Petit Soldat. The animated film is entirely free from the need to photograph actuality or the solidly artificial world of the studio set. It is an extension of painting on the one hand and the marionette and puppet theatre on the other. It can achieve forms of plastic design unknown in terms of the natural world. It creates its own rhythms of movement - a kind of pictorial music meticulously interwoven with the sound track. For, except in a very primitive form of which the best examples were Pat Sullivan's series of films featuring Felix the Cat, the animated film could not be developed fully until the period of the sound film, since it needed to devise a relationship between music, sound effects, and picture which was more intricate technically than in any other form of film-making. The various styles of the animated film can be divided quite simply in this way: 1. Films using drawings: i. Abstract design (e.g., many films made by Len Lye and Norman McLaren). ii. Diagrammatic films (e.g., many of the instructional films made by the Shell Film Unit). iii. Highly stylized design (e.g., most films made by U.P.A. and the Halas-Batchelor Units). iv. More representational design (e.g., Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs , Grimault's Le Petit Soldat, and Halas-Batchelor's Animal Farm). 2. Films using cut-out or plastic models: i. Silhouette films (e.g., Lotte Reiniger's The Magic Flute). ii. Films using flat cut-out figures (e.g., Bartosch's Uldee). iii. Puppet films (e.g., the films of Starevitch, Trnka, Pal, and Ptushko). The production of animated films requires the development of a particular kind of technical skill and patience. This work needs a form of imagination which can keep the end in view through long periods of preparation and carefully organized detail. Hundreds of experimental sketches must suggest to their animators creatures which will show an organic, developing form of character once they spring into motion; the characterization must be both strong and fantastic at once, like Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, or Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio, the Devil in Le Petit Soldat, U.P.A's Mister Magoo or John Halas's Napoleon in Animal Farm. For there is all the difference in establishing character in a still caricature - an isolated movement of revealing expression in a cartoon by an artist as brilliant as Giles or Ronald Searle. But imagine for a moment such characters projected into action for a ten-minute story or even a full length feature film!

And nothing in front of you to start with but blank sheets of paper! The studios which have achieved success in this difficult art are naturally few in number. There are, of course, individualists who have made a certain reputation working alone on particular films like Uldee or Joie de Vivre, and there are the avant-garde film-makers who, at certain stages in their careers, have made short abstract films, like Hans Richter, Oscar Fischinger, Fernand Leger, and Len Lye, or the puppet film-makers Pal, Ptushko, and Starevitch. But the establishment of a studio with a steady output of films, whether on a large scale like Walt Disney's in America and, more recently, John Halas's in Britain, or on a smaller scale like Norman McLaren's in Canada, happens but rarely owing to the comparatively small returns, commercially speaking, from any but full-length cartoon films. Filmmakers in the Communist countries, such as Trnka in Czechoslovakia, gain their livelihood through State sponsorship. John Halas has for some fifteen years kept in production in London mainly through a combination of Government and industrial sponsorship, and Norman McLaren is an artist who has for many years been on the payroll of the National Film Board of Canada. Disney for a long while in the nineteen thirties kept himself in production through the profits made from undertakings linked with his cartoons (such as royalties on toys and picture books). Animated films are as complicated to produce commercially as they are technically. There is no space here to give an adequate account of these technical complications; they are described fully in such books as Le Dessin Anime, by Lo Duca, The Art of Walt Disney, by R. D. Feild, How to Cartoon, by John Halas, and my own book, The Animated Film. The normal procedure, with variations in each studio, is, first, to establish the main ideas for both characters and story (assuming, that is, that the characters are new ones, and not, like Donald Duck or Mister Magoo, already familiar). The next stage is that of the 'story-board', the breakdown of the action into a long series of still pictures, like a strip cartoon, giving the key stages in the story, and showing the shape the film will take and the kind of pictorial design it will have. By this time, plans for the sound-track will be taking similar shape; decisions will have to be taken on how far music will control movement in the action or comment directly upon it, how far the sound effects will be interknit with pictures and music, and how far human voices will be involved (supplying character dialogue or narration). Any wellselected commercial gramophone disc from the soundtrack of a Disney film will show the care that goes into this side of the work for these animated films, and how much detail can be overlooked in a single viewing. The disc for Mickey 9 s Moving Day is a good example. The orchestration of music, effects, and voices is made to respond to every phase and detail of the pictorial action until each second is accounted for in sound accompaniment or counterpoint. 'Mickey-Mousing' has become a technical term for this correspondence between sound and image, whether it occurs in an animated film or not. Special character voices have been developed in the different studios for the animated figures of Mickey Mouse (who is always spoken by Walt Disney himself) and the growing range of birds and animals in this kind of film, like M.G.M's Tom and Jerry. It is the same for all human figures, like Mister Magoo. U.P.A. and the British Larkins Studio often use a narrator speaking in verse. Very varied styles in design characterize these different studios. All use colour vividly, for the cartoon is a dramatic medium and colour is part of its impact on the audience. Stylization seems to be taken to its limits in U.P.A's Rooty-Toot-Toot or the Larkins' Studio film on the structure of I.C.I. , called Enterprise. More traditional forms of representation guide the design for most of Grimault's and Disney's animated films, though Disney occasionally permits an extravagance of the imagination, as he did in

some sequences of Fantasia. The work of John Halas and Joy Batchelor shows a considerable range of style, usually based on a lively simplicity of line and a fine sense of colour composition. This simplicity, the simplicity of the comic strip, is the basis of the Canadian cartoon design shown at its best in a film like Romance of Transportation. Rhythm and continuity are the mainspring of the animated cartoon, and this is as much a matter of sound as it is of image. Pace is of great importance to the effect of most cartoons. The editing of a cartoon film is partly in the drawing itself, it is true; the calculation of the exact point of change-over from one viewpoint to another can be determined to the smallest fraction of a second on the drawing board or in the time-measurement of the music. It is the speed with which most cartoons move (especially the American cartoons) that so often makes it difficult to appreciate the detailed effects by means of which they are built up. These effects are as complex as the dance numbers of the high quality musicals like On the Town; indeed, there is a very close link between these two kinds of film-making. Each has created a very exact imaginative discipline of its own. Their style of design has become closely allied to the more lively forms of contemporary draughtsmanship, particularly in the field of stillcartoon and comic strip, though the influence of other artists, for example, Matisse, can be seen in the more revolutionary designs of the U.P.A. studio. It was Gordon Craig who claimed in his books on the theatre that more could be expressed by a puppet than by a live actor. This is a paradox; more can be expressed merely because so much less is expressed than by the living personality. Puppets are figments of humanity, and they stylize human traits and so highlight the comic aspects of human nature to a fantastic degree, after the fashion of the cartoonists. This can also be done for serious ends, though caricature is usually comic or satiric. Uldee is a serious, and indeed a moving film, with its simple figures like woodcuts, and its grey silhouettes dramatizing the ideological struggles of our times. So, too, is the Halas-Batchelor animated feature film Animal Farm, based on George Orwell's fable. But serious cartoon and puppet films are almost non-existent; their production is too expensive for their costs to be regained in the cinemas. Puppet films of any significance have been rare in comparison with the drawn film; the exceptions to this include George Pal's early advertising films, Ladislas Starevitch's Le Roman de Renart and The Mascot, Alexander Ptushko's The New Gulliver and the post-war films of Jiri Trnka.