The Art of Animation | a video essay

[Music]

when

i was a kid every weekend my dad and i

would go to the local vhs rental store

and every weekend i'd come back with the

same grin

and the same copy of the iron giant

i love that movie it was the first

animated film i'd seen that tackled

real themes that were relevant to a

modern child becoming the person who you

choose to be

for one at a young age it even taught me

about more serious topics

like prejudice and intolerance and even

death

but most importantly this film was for

me

an introduction to a love of animation

but something i struggled with as a

child is understanding how exactly it

works

how and why are these characters moving

around the way that they are why do they

look more like shapes than people

and why do i feel that they're more like

people than shapes

there are so many different things going

on at the same time and coming to

understand what exactly you're looking

at

means even the simplest of questions

becomes quite a complex one

what is animation google defines it as

the technique of photographing

successive drawings or positions of

puppets

or models to create an illusion of

movements when the film is shown

as a sequence which is about as robotic

a definition as you can get

and what's more is it's also far too

specific as there's so many more things

that go into the art than just the

ability to make something move

for a better perspective ed catmull the

co-founder of pixar defined it instead

as the definition of superb animation

is that each character on screen makes

you believe it is a thinking being

if you sense not just movement but

intention or put another way

emotion then the animator has done their

job

it's not just lines on paper anymore

it's a living feeling

entity but before we can even get to the

point where characters can express these

types of emotions

you need to overcome a few hurdles that

are in the way first

let's start with the uncanny valley it's

a psychological effect coined in the 70s

by japanese roboticist masahiro mori

i hope i pronounced all right to

simplify it it's a relationship between

how comfortable we are observing an

image

and how much that image resembles

reality in this case how much a

character resembles a human

the uncanny valley name comes from this

deviation here

where just as you're starting to get

pretty close to looking natural

there's this point where unless your

image is almost indistinguishable from

reality

it's suddenly going to get very

uncomfortable to look at and in some

cases downright terrifying

this was originally and still is an

issue when designing robots to look like

humans

but it's actually a very transferable

problem to animation

for example think about the first toy

story movie the main characters

themselves represent humans in a very

minimal kind of way

they loosely have the same figure but

they're stylized in a way where they're

obviously supposed to be seen as toys

they're comfortable to look at and at a

guess they should appear on the graph

around here now let's look instead to

the actual human characters

it's a completely different story in

case this wasn't as good

an example as i thought here is the

animation toy story was based on

hopefully that clears things up this

phenomenon doesn't just affect how a

character looks but also how a character

moves

it sounds strangely obvious but if an

animator doesn't nail the actions of how

a character should move around the scene

it feels weird to look at a very popular

method for animation nowadays is motion

capture

which is an evolution of the old

technique of rotoscoping

both use reference footage of real

actors and trace the motion of the scene

turning this motion into animation

because of this

both could even be considered to be a

direct transition between a human

expression

and an artistic one but that's not

necessarily what an animator wants

everything a character does can tell the

audience something about them from how

they move

if a character acts very human in a very

animated world

it probably won't look uncomfortable but

at the same time it risks looking out of

place

that being said movement isn't the only

thing that can lead to good character

design

in animation caricature is key

caricature that's what animation is

great at

and caricature is often is a word that's

often used derogatorily but

actually it means reducing um something

to its essence

and that doesn't just mean making things

bigger in a drawing or making things

louder it also can mean making things

tinier or smaller

it's about intensifying whatever the

essence of that thing is

that's a quote from brad bird the

director of both the iron giants

and the incredibles the latter being a

film that actually takes this concept to

quite the extreme

to cover it briefly let's take a look at

the main character mr incredible or

bob parr his power his personality and

his physical appearance

all correlates with one another due to

his strength bob is physically

huge but at the same time he's arrogant

he's stubborn and he's unstable as a

character

both lying to and endangering his entire

family in order to relive his glory days

he only thinks about himself hence he's

physically very top-heavy

his design isn't balanced correctly

because neither is his character

and you can tell immediately from just

looking at him

all these things contribute in one way

or another to visual storytelling

a technique that animation is nothing

short of exceptional at

particularly in combination with

physical or non-verbal languages

this was seen in some of the very first

animated films as they begun their rise

in popularity around the same time that

silent films did

thus took inspiration from people like

buster keaton and charlie chaplin

in fact viewing animation in silence can

highlight something

along with the previously mentioned

methods due to how expressive you can

make an animated character whether it's

movement body language or facial

expression

the animator has so much control over

the visual languages that at a point

dialogue itself becomes unnecessary one

of my mentors

whose work really really always inspired

me was chuck jones who was a great

warner brothers cartoon director he

always said john

great animation you should turn the

sound off and still be able to tell

what's going on

it's my big mantra to all the filmmakers

is like

how can we tell the story visually

[Music]

when pixar was first founded three short

films were released in the two years

between 1986

and 1988. you might recognize a few from

earlier

all three were directed by john lester

with not a spoke mode of dialogue

between them

luxo jr later became the logo for the

company

tintoy was the inspiration behind toy

story

and red stream was the inspiration

behind 2008's

wall-e all of these examples are no

longer than five minutes each

but wally takes the same concept and

instead centers the plot around it

the only living characters not counting

the cockroach

arrive 40 minutes into the film

and wally himself only says four words

of dialogue

in the entire run time his name eve

directive and

the sheer amount of this film that

communicates ideas to its audience

without having

any meaningful dialogue is a testament

to how much information the audience can

understand

without explicitly telling them anything

it even embodies one of the core rules

of rising to a t

everyone can understand something like

this and for the audience

there's something quite unifying about

that looking back

at the iron giants the character didn't

even know how to speak at the beginning

of the film

can you do that blah blah blah

but the animators did something very

similar to what wally accomplished

taking something rigid and lifeless and

making it expressive

human or put another way they animated

the inanimate i stated the common

definition for the sole reason of

digging it up by its roots

as when the industry was first conceived

it was named after an already very real

word

because to animate something is not to

just make something move

to animate is to give life

and the modern day practice of animation

does just that because the art

of animation is to give art

life and that's why i love it