Spencer Roberts; Histories of Animation

Spencer Roberts; Histories of Animation

Sources:

The World history of animation – Stephen Cavalier

Art in motion: Animation Aesthetics – Maureen Furnis

A history of Motion Graphics – Michael Betancourt

The Vatican to Vegas – A history of special effects

Hollywood Flatlands – Esther Leslie

The history of animation – Charles Solomon

A note on thinking histories

-       Plurality and complexity of history

-       History / histories

-       Tony Fry, (“an affront to personal memory”) – Design Critic, standing outside of everything.

Motif for the lecture:

The Wolfman – Tim Hope 1999,

-       Animator

-       Computer Graphics animation that went against the ‘realism’ of its time.

-       Simple cartoon drawings mapped in a 3D Studio

-       Went on to work with the Mighty Boosh

-       Later used in PlayStation 2 for an ad in edited form

-       / video is terrifying, creepy song, creepy kid

-       “Kiss my white, chalky lips”. Disturbing.

-       / Goes through different phases, begins in observatory when he transforms the entire piece changes too. Absurdity, feed into the theme.

Technologies:

Zeotrope – Invented 1934 by William George Horner – British mathematician

Allowed mass audience participation / viewing through multiple slots

Related to similar devices; phenakistoscope, praxinoscope

Rotoscope:

Max Fleischer – 1915

Apparatus of capture

Prior to this it was hard to draw, stable / content / slow life like movements

Fleishcher was the art director for Popular Science Monthly.

Snow-white

Koko the Clown – 1916, His brother joe helped make the machine

Another brother, Dave, posed in a clown suit.

Cell Animation:

1915

Controversy over ownership between John Randolf Bray (newspaper compic artist) and Windsor McCay (Gertie the dinosaur and little nemo in slumberland) Bray visited McCay’s studio and the recreated and patented many of the techniques.

Windsor McCay: Vaudville, comic strip & animation – Gerite the Dinosaur 1914 à

World building and surrealism Little Nemo in Slumberland (comic strip) 1905 – 1911

Gertie the dinosaur à slightly odd when considered from a narrative perspective. In Gerite the Dinosaur (on Cartoon Network) we can witness various tendencies and clashing.

/ Apparatus of Constancy 

Tension between ART and INDUSTRY – Marueen Furniss

Contemporary 3D Rotoscopes:

Pixar – Disneyworld

Studio Ghibili – Ghibli Museum. 

Commercial- 

CGI

Low - Fi

Pixar:

Realist

Embrace of: character, cause and effects, narrative, tends towards closure of text, affinity with industrial production techniques 

Orientation:

Anti-realist

Emilie Cohl- Fantasmagorie 1908

/ Often positioned as THE VERY FIRST animation – endless morphing of scene into scene etc, Esther Leslie: Phantasmogoric brief description of the animation.

/ Bruce Bickford – Prometheus’ Garden, 1988

Claymation.

Weird and bizarre video. Creepy. 

“An illogical narrative of cruelty and torture executed…

Cohl was a member of the avant garde arts group….

Mikhail Bakhtin,

Medieval laughter – plays with forms of social and religious groups

Highest stands as the lowest…

Melting POP © Alexandre DUBOSC from Alexandre DUBOSC on Vimeo.