Filip Stojanovski
Professor Bob Mesle
Honors Junior Seminar
Graceland University
April 22, 2000

Contemporary Storytelling: Comics and Animation

Foreword

The goal of this paper is to provide information that would contribute to the understanding of three related art forms, and their resulting influence in society. The wide usage of these art forms in communication mediums makes the receivers take them for granted: their presence and effects often pass unnoticed. The art forms in question are comics, animated cartoons and interactive applications. They all share common historical roots, usage of storytelling techniques, as well as conceptual similarities in the process of production.

I have been interested in visual arts since childhood, especially in drawing. While in primary school, I wanted to be a comic book artist. At the time, I maintained a fairly large collection of diverse comics, which were almost all in Serbian or Croatian, the most widely used languages in former Yugoslavia. Although foreign artists--from Italy, France, or the USA--made most of these comics, there were several successful local artists who proved that you could make a living from it without moving to the West. Ex-Yugoslavia also had two, internationally acclaimed, "schools" of animation: Zagreb and Skopje. Good domestic animations were shown on TV side by side with cartoons from the USA and USSR. The country was socialist, but non-aligned, not a part of either of the two sides in the Cold War. There were cultural imports from both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The break and the severe economic recession that struck the Yugoslav federation in the nineties brought the publishing, and especially the comics publishing, to a standstill. A whole new generation of kids--potential readers--enclosed behind the new borders and saturated with politics, grew up in an environment where the TV news replaced cartoons, sleazy tabloids replaced comics, and low-quality music replaced almost all other forms of entertainment. Naturally, I wasn’t quite pleased with this development.

I was glad when I recognized some elements of comics and animation returning with the advent of digital technology: computer graphics, games and Internet. And I am hopeful that, if economic and political situation improve, there will be a revival of storytelling in these areas, storytelling based on imagination and humanness, not on party propaganda and intolerance.

"Omnia mutatur, nihil interit" - everything changes, but nothing is truly lost (Saiman & Muth, 1996, p.22). This is where I come from, and here is the story…

 

Small Glossary of Terms

"In the beginning was the Word," claims the Gospel of John (Jn1:1, Buttkick et al, 1952). I find it at least hypothetically useful to start an argument with a set of definitions. They can be upgraded during the course of the discussion, as new information comes along, but such as they are, they provide a starting point for gaining insight. The terms used in this paper seem quite common. I will define them in brief, using the "Merriam-Webster Dictionary of the English language" (online edition) as a base.

The basic term is cartoon: a single drawing, often humorous, a caricature. The etymological roots of the word lie in the Italian word "cartone," which is a piece of paper used for preparatory drawings, sketches for other art works, such as great frescos and paintings of the Renaissance. It seems that this "auxiliary" role in the world of art followed the simple drawing until today, without proper recognition of worth among the general populace.

The "Merriam-Webster dictionary" defines the comic strip as "a group of cartoons in narrative sequence." The term first appeared in 1920, although this art form was used to amuse the readers for quite some time before it. Subsequently, this art form evolved to tell stories from other genres, but retained the core of its name. The term used today is comics, which is defined by the theorist Scot McCloud (1993, p.9) as "Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer." Comics, just like trousers, exist in plural form only. The key element is the sequence, its composition not from one, but at least two drawings, telling a story.

Another branch growing from the word cartoon is the animated cartoon. The "Merriam-Webster Dictionary" documents the term as first appearing in 1915 with the meaning "a motion picture made from a series of drawings simulating motion by means of slight progressive changes in the drawings.

" It is related to animation, the act of endowing a soul (latin "anima") upon something otherwise lifeless. Besides the actual process, the word animation also stands for its own product, "a motion picture made by photographing successive positions of inanimate objects (as puppets or mechanical parts)."

 

Comics: Bits of History

Usage of visual representations, or images, to convey information dates from prehistory. The cave paintings of Lascaux might have carried a similar kind of message to the frescos of the Sistine Chapel. They were a means to reach great numbers of people with particular information, often formed into a story. The significance of the visual element was not lost with the advent of literacy. This is because the letters of the alphabet are also images, visual symbols representing concepts, and literacy, propelled by the print, only contributed to the importance of using the visual sense.

During the Middle Ages, the unwritten rule of separating pictures from words when creating mainstream art that had been enforced since the Renaissance was nonexistent. Medieval frescos often have written names of characters and descriptions of the events on the same painting plane. Drawings and ornaments, often related to the action, illuminated the text of medieval manuscripts. Although narratives made out of sequences of adjacent images appear in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, this time period is abundant with works of art that can be considered comics in the modern sense. And they did not appear just in Medieval Europe, but also in China, Japan and pre-Columbian Mexico (McCloud, 1993, pp.10-16).

One example of such artwork is the Tapestry of Bayeux. The tapestry is embroidery that tells the story of how Duke William of Normandy became the conqueror and king of England in 1066. The artwork itself is a strip of linen, 230 ft by 20 in (70 m by 51 cm), that is currently exposed in the Bayeux Museum, in France (Encyclopedia.com, Bayeux Tapestry, 1999). It is a famous historical source on the events and the costumes of the time. Attributed to William's wife, Queen Matilda, it was probably stitched by female workers of the court. The textual content is in Latin, the language of writing in that part of Europe at the time.

The tapestry has quite a clear propagandistic function: justifying the Norman Conquest of England. Its story reveals that Harold, the king of England at the time of conquest, was sort of an imposter and an ungrateful fellow, who deserved to be killed in battle

by the noble Normans. William, whom the late king Edward named the hair to the English throne before Harold, could not accept the insult to his honor when Edward changed his mind on his deathbed. Thus, William gathered great knights dressed in chain mall armors, built great ships, and won the day at Hastings, killing Edward and seizing power. So ends the story of the tapestry of Bayeux (Peregrinator, 1999). In the aftermath, William met little significant resistance by the Saxon populace because he organized an array of castles full of soldiers aligned to him as vassals. England was never the same, being greatly influenced by the French culture and language brought by the Normans.

 

The Modern Age

Back to the story of the comics as a medium, and moving from the Middle Ages, there is a prevalence of pictorial elements in the woodcuts that accompanied the printed word after its appearance by the end of 15th century (McLuhan, 1963, p.160). But what propelled comics to the spotlight was the intricate set of circumstances that surfaced with the advent of what we consider to be the beginning of modern journalism.

By the end of the 19th century, the primary mass medium in the industrialized, urban America was the newspaper. Giant media companies, such as those headed by the famous Hearst or Pulitzer printed them, feeding the need of the public for cheap entertainment. The new working and middle class, which lacked the closeness of community relations that was an attribute of the rural culture, was hungry for something to fill the gap. Giant newspaper empires gave them events to talk about, and even participate in. The reporting was based on stirring emotions, sensationalism and scandal. The campaign related to the American-Spanish war over Cuba was a blatant example of how the public opinion was molded in favor of the war by using emotional reporting (Encyclopedia.com, Maine, battleship, 1999). The owners battled for the readers by unscrupulous descriptions and even the creation of sensations. The whole movement was called "yellow journalism," maybe because the newspapers were printed on cheap yellowish paper, or maybe because of the Yellow Kid.

The Yellow Kid, a comic strip by R. F. Outcault, first appeared in 1894 and gained fame in 1895 as part of the New York World, "the publication with largest circulation in America," (Olson, 1999). The Yellow Kid was very popular, attracting readers with its caricatured drawing and adult humor. It depicted the life of a group of kids in a New York alley, often in a crude and stereotyped way, but was selling the papers.

 

The Great Adventurers

Because selling comics proved to be such a good business, many other publishers and artists followed in Outcault’s footsteps, and by the thirties the market expanded in the direction of a younger audience. Although daily or weekly newspaper comics and cartoons continued to make social commentaries, the subject of this new generation of comics was not the present. Most of them told stories about places far away, and about larger-than-life heroes. Americans, in and out of the Great Depression, needed a relief from the crude reality. The genre of adventure novels came to age with Edgar Rice Burroughs as its foremost writer.

During this time, a new kind of publication emerged, totally devoted to comics: the comic book. With the help of skilled artists such as Harold Foster and Burne Hogarth, Burroughs’ stories of Tarzan were adapted for comics, marking the beginning of the era of adventure heroes. Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, Fill Corigan, Rip Kirby, Superman, Batman, and a throng of other comics heroes soon followed Tarzan’s footsteps.

Foster later created "Prince Valiant" (Jakupovic, 1999), an epic story set in the Medieval Europe based on the legends about King Arthur of Camelot, and strongly supported visually by imagery that "resurrected" the feel of that time period. It marked the height of "photographic realism" in comics, where each image was drawn in a way to resemble the reality in as many aspects as possible. Foster believed in doing extensive research to the point of going on location in England to draw the scenery authentically. In "Prince Valiant," Foster did not use the usual bubbles to store the text, but put it in boxes below the pictures (Goldberg, 1994). This was possibly done because he tried to represent the scenes as completely as possible. Although personally successful, with "Prince Valiant" being considered a masterpiece in a class of its own, Foster did not have many heirs among his colleagues who would continue to use his style of storytelling.

Somehow, most of the other comic authors moved away from realism, in the direction of exaggeration of physical traits (the superhero comics) or more stylized (seemingly simpler) drawings. The reason for this departure from realism goes far deeper than the need for investment of less effort and time in the production of the comics, tackling the very nature of this medium. But, in order to be understood at the core, comics had first to survive in the world at large.

Over the years, the spread of comics was sometimes obstructed by censorship. Censorship was sometimes politically motivated, as in Mussolini’s Italy (Castelli at all, 1999, pp. 3-4), where comics as a medium were banned because of their link to America.

Although not done by the state, censorship existed on the other side of the Atlantic, too (Kamalipour & Carilli, 1998). Its main proponents were the publishers, making it connected with the "market forces," and only indirectly with politics. The big distributive syndicates "advised" authors to make comics that would not endanger the intellectual status quo; if they would like to see them be published. The idea was to keep a low profile on sensitive issues, in order that the mainly white, middle class audience, already conditioned to receive "just entertainment" from reading comics, would not be disturbed. Thus, comics that did not support the worldview (including the prejudices) held by the majority, had less chance for publishing, and becoming popular.

As a reaction to this situation, a whole genre of so called "underground comics" sprout in the sixties, with authors such as Robert Crumb, who openly challenged and ridiculed the values of American society. This movement, although significant as a historical example and inspiration for future artists, did not impact the mainstream American comics industry of its time. This is analogous to the way the flower power "rebellion" hindered the expansionist course of U.S. foreign policy only in appearance: in spite the loud domestic opposition to involvment in wars, the U.S. Army continued the bombings in South East Asia, just was more covert about it.

Mainstream comics did not feature non-white characters as protagonists for quite some time. Before World War II, colored people were often portrayed as ignorant savages, servants, villains or targets of ridicule. Alex Raymond, the author of "Flash Gordon," portrayed Ming, the main villan, an Asian. Lee Falke, the author of "Mandrake the Magician," made Lothar, who had supposedly been a prince in his African country, a servant to his hero. Right after the Second World War, coloured people were mostly ignored as characters. This situation persisted until the seventies. Although today there are comic strips from and about people of Afraican Americans ("K-Chronicles" by Keith Knight, "Boondocks" by Aaron McGruder), a glance on the comics page of any contemporary newpaper still reveals a dominance of white comics authors and characters.

Censorship may have slowed the evolution of comics, but did not limit its spread in the long run. Comics found their way, or re-emerged, in most of the industrialized world. Three distinct comic "cultures" are present today: the American, the European, and the Japanese.

The American comics, based on short adventure stories, often with the same set of characters, but without much characterization and repetitive plots, became famous for the superheroes of the publishing houses of Marvel and D.C. The European comics were also serialized, but with longer episodes, which presented more details about the characters (SE-G, 1999). The main European comics centers were France, Italy and Belgium. American and European comics used different styles of drawing, from realist to very stylized and grotesque, but did it with consistency once a particular style was chosen. By the end of the 20th century, this practice was contrasted with the international introduction of Japanese comics.

Japan, as a country and a culture, draws its comics roots from its rich visual arts tradition. Comics ("manga") in Japan were and are not just "kids’ stuff," but an integral part of everyday life (HIES, 1999). The same goes for Japanese animation, called "anime". In the recent years, they were widely recognized and sought out outside Japan.

Japanese visual storytelling media cover wide range of uncensored topics with their own distinct style of drawing. The peculiarity of the Japanese drawing style is the mixture of realistic elements (such as the backgrounds and the depiction of movement) with simplified features of the main characters. The growing popularity of manga and anime may serve as an example that can help us understand the nature of the appeal of comics and animation in general.

 

Language of Comics: The Vocabulary

According to Scot McCloud (1993, pp.24-59), the language that the comics use is the source of their fascinating force. This language has its own distinctive vocabulary and grammar. The vocabulary that comics use consists of visual imagery (McCloud refers to a general class out of which all other pictorial representations, including letters and other symbols, are derived as icons). Use of simplified, "cartoonish" drawings allows the reader to identify with the characters. To put it simply, the more details are available, the more things are revealed which can exemplify the difference between the characters and the viewer. So, fewer details provide less opportunity for obstructions of identification.

Use of simplified drawings allows the reader to concentrate on the action and the presented ideas, rather than on the visible traits presented. The technique of simplification is used in other storytelling mediums too, such as the movies. There the simplification is done by the shallowness of the story structure and portrayal of the presented characters. This (and effects of marketing) explains the wide appeal of movies or TV shows that tell simple, even infantile stories. The reason (which at the same time is the result) is that the viewer is able to identify with the character without much effort, to accept a role in the story. When filmmakers use vague or non-descriptive pieces of data, such as "in the near future", dates without a year in them, or avoid mentioning the names of places, they also try to use this storytelling technique. An obvious example its application is provided by the popularity of the "first person" genre of video games. In these games, such as "Doom" and "Quake," the player does not see the character, but the computer screen shows the environment as seen by the character. This provides almost total identification, and accounts for the high addictiveness of these products.

McCloud (1993, p.30) calls this concept "amplification through simplification". Elimination of details that are not essential to the purpose of the work of art is enabling some other details, which were not eliminated, to step into the spotlight, with the viewer’s attention totally focused on them. As McCloud (1993, p.30) puts it, "By stripping down the image to its essential ‘meaning,’ an artist can amplify that meaning in a way that realistic art can’t."

This kind of reasoning can be used to explain the success of Japanese comics, mentioned earlier (McCloud, 1999). Their drawing style that depicts the characters, especially their faces, in a very symbolic way (distinctively simple) allows the user to identify easily with them. The elaborate details of the backgrounds, and the length of the stories as an influencing variable, support this immersion of the reader in the reading, because they present elements relevant to this task. Additional support is provided by the use of visual cues that involve the reader more, such as the big eyes that trigger the innate mammal instinct for protection/liking of the offspring (mammal babies, cuddly or not, have a round head and eyes that are proportionally bigger than in adults).

 

Comics’ Grammar: Closure

McCloud (1993, p.63) refers to the concept of closure as crucial in sealing readers’ involvement when partaking in reading comics. Closure is defined as the notion of observing the parts, but perceiving the whole. It is omnipresent in everyday life – humans perform "rounding" of impressions all the time. From recognizing a building by just glancing at some part of it to watching a series of still photographs shown at a rate of 24 per second and seeing movement while in a cinema, closure is often automatic.

Comics do the same, making the reader an accomplice in the act of storytelling. Use of the reader’s imagination when trying to make the connection between the two images on the page makes the reader involved. The real action of the comics does not take place in the rectangles with drawings inside, but in the mind of the reader. What is unseen tells as much about the story, as that what is explicitly seen. The space between the images, "the gutter," has as much to say as the images themselves. Similarly like the absence of colored people from "the funnies" in the Sunday newspaper after World War II was saying at least as much about the racial discrimination as the presence of stereotyped caricatures in the earlier ages.

In regard to closure, a drastic example is the process of watching television, analyzed by Marshal McLuhan in his most famous book "Understanding Media" (1963, pp.332-335). It is not the content of the program, but the perceptional properties of the medium that force it to the viewer. The human eye can accept very little of the information (just some of the few million pixels created by the motion of the ray of light across the TV screen) offered by this very low definition medium, thus forcing the mind to supplement for the gap. As a result, TV creates an involved, addicted viewer. In fact, concerning the level of required closure, the television is a medium that can match comics, and has indeed been identified as its prime competitor in this regard (McLuhan, 1963, p.165). The fact that the viewer’s involvement is automatic and involuntary, togather with its propagandistic value, makes it rather harmful. Its centralistic nature, which conditions the viewer to watching without questioning, is what makes it such a good advertiser (brainwasher).

According to McLuhan (1963, p.169), the advent of comics, as well as other mediums that are capable of creating involvement in a similar fashion, indicates a profound change in the way humans perceive the world around them.

 

Moving Towards Animation

It is obvious that the core elements of the language of comics are also used in animation. The visual iconography is similar, and use of closure is apparent in the activity of the viewer to supplement for not seeing continuous movement, but a series of pictures flashing on the screen. The difference between these two related mediums is the following: comics use movement through space (of the page) as an element of the storytelling, while animation uses movement through time. The images are not juxtaposed spatially, but temporally. The space (the position of the screen, and the eyes of the viewer) is unchanged during the storytelling process. What is changed is the content of that piece of space.

 

Origins of Animation

Although humans have been telling stories with the use of motion over time (dance, puppet shows) since they evolved as a species, the roots of animation are far more recent than those of comics. That is so because there is far more technological expertise required to produce the needed effects. Early animation devices have their roots in the experiments with the properties of light. Various inventors have built devices with the purpose of fooling the eyes of the viewer by presenting them with successive images with slight progressive changes, placed in the same spot. Such devices included the magic lantern, the flipbook and the thraumtrope (Kinsey, 1970, p.10-11).

These devices were used as novelties or toys for amusement, but did not have a big impact. They could show short scenes, but could not tell real stories. The conditions for moving into that direction started to emerge in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, with the advent of photography and the growing ability to create intricate machines. One of the main discoveries that cleared the path for cinematography was George Eastman’s invention of the flexible photographic film. The film was introduced on the market around 1885 (Kodak Eastmen Company, 2000). But even before that, there were efforts to expand the use of photography to re-create (the illusion of) motion. A prime example of this trend was the work of Eadward Muybridge.

 

An Early Animator

Eadward Muybridge was a colorful person that lived a life similar to one of the heroes of adventure novels. The following biographical account is mostly compiled from the notes presented in the foreword of his books of prints (Maybridge, 1994). Born in 1830 in England, at the age of 20 he came to San Francisco, initially working as a bookseller. At the time, California was the center of the gold rush, and San Francisco was probably one of the most dynamic places on Earth. It can only be presumed how this impulsive young man spent his time in that beehive, but what is documented is that in 1860 suffered a stage-coach accident, and came to his English home to recover.

During the period he spent in England, Muybridge was introduced to and captivated by photography. In 1867 he returned to San Francisco and opened a photographic workshop. Over the next few years he gained recognition and fame as an expert in this area. His most noted works were series of landscapes of Yosemite Valley and the Pacific lighthouses. His expertise and reputation secured Muybridge a place as an official photographer for the expeditions organized by the U.S. government to explore the regions of Alaska (after its purchase from Russia) and Guatemala.

In 1872 Muybridge was contracted by Leland Stanford to help him solve a problem. Stanford was one of the most powerful men around, a member of the ruling oligarchy with ties in business and politics alike: he was head of the Central Pacific Railroad, and ex governor of California. Privately, Stanford was an avid horse breeder and liked to bet. The legend has it that he made a large bet, claiming that at some point during a fast trot, a horse has all four legs off the ground simultaneously. Muybridge was supposed to supply photographic proof for Stanford’s side of the argument. The photographer accepted the contract and started working on chemical components to enhance the process of photographing in order to meet the task. His work on the project was interrupted when he was tried for murder of his wife’s lover in 1874, but after his acquittal on the ground that he did the right thing by killing the adulterer, the work resumed.

Muybridge constructed delicate machinery (Maybridge, 1994), composed of a battery of cameras positioned alongside the track where the horses were ridden, which took pictures of the horse, as it passed in front of them. After taking a large number of photographs, some really did capture the horse at the point when it had all four feet off the ground. This solved Stanford’s problem, proving him right, but left Muybridge with material and an invention that inflamed his restless spirit. Seeing the whole while looking at the parts, he decided to organize the sequences of photographs in such manner that they would present an illusion of motion. This lead to the invention of the zoopraxiscope – an apparatus that showed photographed animals in motion. Muybridge took his device and the story of his invention on a promotional world tour, presenting in front of audiences in packed auditoriums, to commoners and royalty alike.

In search of more resources that would enable him to develop the technique further Muybridge teamed up with the University of Pennsylvania to produce a remarkable project. He was to document the motion of humans and animals, for scientific and artistic purposes. The University’s team of scholars, lead by the famous realist painter Thomas Eakins supervised the project. Muybridge was given resources to develop an environment where different kinds of motion were photographed by 3 batteries of cameras (front or back, from the side and at an 60 degrees angle) (Linder, 1999). The work was commenced during 1884 and 1885. It ended in the publishing of Animal Locomotion; an electro-photographic investigation of consecutive phases in animal movements, consisting of plates showing the various stages of motion of male and female humans, horses and other animals (part of the project was conducted in a zoo).

The significance of his work far outlived Muybridge, who died in Kingston-upon-Thames, England, in 1904. His influence is still present, not only as one of the first modern animators, who tried to leap over the boundary that separated still photography from the movies, but also in other areas connected with visual arts. Artists who are trying to learn from nature still use literally the same photographs, because they depict motion by showing details that are simply unnoticeable when working with live models. The people who to this day benefit from Muybridge’s work include painters, (like members of the realist movement that flourished by the end of the 19th Century, cartoonists (McCloud, 1993. pp.108-109), and animators (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, pp.334-335).

 

Classical Animation

People started using cinematography to tell stories that included animated elements very soon after its invention of in 1895, with the goal of presenting the stories that resulted from their imaginations. Early science fiction movies of George Melies are abundant with special effects that can be classified as animations. In the U.S.A. the studios of Thomas Edison were making experimental movies that started to pioneer some of the animation techniques that are still used (Simon, 1999). The principle of stop motion: filming (photographing) inanimate objects one frame at the time, with doing slight changes in between, was used with drawings (Falk, 1941, p.12), puppets, clay and even human beings.

Although these animations seem crude and unsophisticated when judged by the standards of the next era, they did move in the direction of more elaborate portrayal of the fantastic world of the human imagination. An early example of animation that meets higher standards of use of the medium was Windsor McKay’s "Gertie the Dinosaur," which appeared in 1916. Gertie was the first animated character that possessed and expressed distinctive marks of personality, showing more than the rudimentary emotional states (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, p.22). It was drawn well, and the animator made full use of perspective and background as elements in the scene. But, once McKay stopped working, most of his techniques were forgotten. It took about a decade for the world to see their revival by the mind and hands of Walt Disney.

It seems that Disney used a simple formula: create good products so the audience returns for more. He correctly reckoned that quality of entertainment product is essential. So, his goal became to create animations that do not only provide an illusion of motion, but an illusion of life. Disney pioneered the use of sound, color, and feature length stories in animated movies, which proved quite profitable (Falk, 1941, pp.22-23). His gathered financial strength was later used to spawn an entertainment empire composed of movie and TV production, theme parks (Finch, 1945, pp.148-160) and sale of trademarked merchandise items, including comics. The mixing of the strife for artistic excellence and the ability to turn it into money secured Disney’s position in the business world and in history also.

The time period when it all began was the Great Depression, when movie theaters lured audiences with the promise of escape from the dreary reality. Movie shows were composed of a feature presentation and auxiliary elements. Today these auxiliary elements are replaced by commercials for the new releases. At the time, they composed of animated cartoons, other sorts of short films, as well as cinematographic news from the world.

Disney did not hold a monopoly on this market. Several other cinematography firms had cartoon studios, often headed by creative geniuses comparable to Disney: Max Fleischer, Paul Terry, Fred C. Quimby, Walter Lanz, Leon Schlesinger and Charles B. Mintz. By the beginning of the Second World War, each of these studios employed at least a hundred staff members and produced 18-42 cartoons per year (Falk, 1941, pp.24-31).

 

Making an Animation

Disney, the industry leader himself, considered making animated movies "strictly a team effort" (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, p.303). The elaborate process of making animated cartoons developed by the employees of Disney’s studios requires effort, precision and coordination. It is sometimes referred to as making of cell animation, because each frame is drawn separately as a single cell, then photographed, thus becoming a part of a sequence of cells that make the movie. The frame rate for animations varies from 12 (Macromedia, 1999) to 24 frames per second, and on the average it is about 18 frames per second. This may play a role in the increase of the closure effects, since the standard frame rate for movies is 24 frames per second.

According to the methodology used by most of animation studios, the process of making an animation is partitioned into several distinct stages, which can overlap, but in general do follow a sequential pattern. Making an animated cartoon is composed of work on the following: the story idea, the script, development of characters, development of a storyboard, drawing of key frames, the animating of the characters, and the synchronization of the sound.

 

The Story Idea

The development of an animated movie starts with an idea for a story. The idea can be taken from some other medium, such as print, but in order to fit into the structure of an animated movie it often has to be adapted. The primary thing that has to be acknowledged about this phase is that, although changes in the script during the subsequent phases are possible, the process does not start without a clear notion of what is to be achieved by it. For this purpose, the story idea is turned into a synopsis, a sketch of the story. The synopsis undergoes several cycles of revisions, each adding more depth and detail to the original idea. In the end this makes the synopsis eligible to grow into a script.

 

The Script

The script provides a detailed description of the animation’s storyline. It describes the scenes, the actions and the behavior of the characters in as much detail as possible. Once it is very clear what every scene should express, the animator starts of devising ways to do it. The main players in this part of the game become the characters.

 

Character Development

The act of watching an animation (or a movie, or reading a book, or participating in any storytelling activity), implies agreement by the viewer with the assumption that, while the projection lasts, this artificially created world exists. No matter how different this world is from reality, it has to be true to its own rules. Otherwise the viewer feels cheated, unsatisfied and uninvolved.

Consistency is of great concern to animators, once the rules are set. The rules may be as diverse as the character’s body becoming twice the size of the head, that the character can talk or that the law of gravity is not working, but once established, they have to be obeyed. In order to preserve the consistency, the maker of an animation documents all the relevant data about the character. This data comes in two forms. The first is the description of character’s properties and behavior in different situations, including "biographical" elements. The second form of data is visual: the artist draws the characters in every position possible, thus learning about the capabilities and in a way, interacting with it. The compilation of such information is called "character analysis" (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, pp.551-561).

When drawing a character, great attention is placed on avoiding the Gemini Syndrome (Culhane, 1990, p.156). The Gemini Syndrome occurs when too much symmetry is used in drawing a character. This makes it look fake, "wooden" (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, p.61) and contributes to loss of interest. Although symmetry is appreciated as an aesthetic concept, it is not often observed in nature. So, it is easier to persuade the viewer that something is real if that something is a bit skewed, asymmetrical and imperfect in this regard.

Another element in creation of believable characters is learning from nature. Disney has made this a must for his crew, especially when animations involving animals are concerned. He once said: "I definitely feel that we cannot do fantastic things based on the real, unless we first know the real" (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, p.71). The point was to learn how the actions are done in nature, and then expand on that knowledge by adding capabilities to the characters. It was not unusual to use live animals as models in the process of character development (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, pp.339).

The height of the learning from nature trend is when the technology is used to get as much information as possible. In this regard, Muybridge’s efforts come to mind. The animators often use the technique of filming live action footage, in order to examine it later frame by frame, thus improving understanding about the conduct of the participants in the scene (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, pp.319-345).

The bottom line is that characters have to provide emotional involvement for the viewers. Even to those people who take pride in the power of reason, an activity that is not connected with emotions seems artificial and unreal. It is not unusual for humans to often attribute human emotions to objects and occurrences that do not posses them: the weather phenomena, rocks, plants and animals. They simply consider emotions essential element of the process of communication (Lumsden & Lumsden, 1996, pp. 456-458), even if the communication is not mutual. So, the animators have to play along to this tune if they want their work to be successful.

One of the elements in creating the emotional effect relies on the ability of humans to mirror other people’s emotions. That is why the characters are supposed to express emotions in a way understandable to the humans. This is often done through subtle use of non-verbal behavior, which seems more believable than direct declaration of a certain emotional state (Lumsden & Lumsden, 1996, pp.145-148). Use of the eye movements, facial expressions and bodily positions comes to the forefront. The same is valid about the ways that the character moves, gestures and occupies space. Once the characters are sufficiently developed, the storyboard is produced.

 

Storyboard

The storyboard is a visual tool that presents the flow of the action. It looks like a very detailed comic, and includes sketches of the behavior of the characters during the story, as specified by the written script. It specifies the changes of camera angle, changes of position or changes of direction of the movements of the participants in the action. This sketchy record is then used to draw key frames.

 

Drawing Key Frames and Animating

Classical animation includes the use of drawings, which are photographed with a special camera, and then joined in a film sequence. Such drawings (or paintings) are called cells, and the whole process "cell animation." Because some of elements in the drawings do not change from cell to cell, it is best to re-use what is already drawn. This way the drawings consist of several layers of transparent plastic (celluloid), each containing different elements of the scene. For example, one layer for the far, immobile background such as the sky and the horizon, another for the closer background such as a group of trees, and a third for the character.

The design of the scenes also plays a role in the emotional involvement of the viewer. Because the background is static, covering 90% of the field of vision, animators pay great attention to filling in details that would make it as believable as possible (White, 1988, p.154). The use of colors, line styles and patterns also enhances the emotional effect (Thomas & Johnston, 1981, pp.483-486). Similarly to the style of drawing of Japanese comics, the elaborate backgrounds provide a sharp contrast to the stylized characters, helping the viewer enter the world of the story with greater ease (McCloud, 1993, p.43).

When the cell is photographed it becomes a frame – part of the motion picture. The important frames in which changes in size, position, direction or shape occur are called key frames. Usually the lead artists draw these cells first. Then, the act of animating takes place: the animators draw the cells that are in between the key frames. This process is more based on calculation than on artistic creativity, involving drawing slight changes in the position from one drawing to the next. Because the cells drawn are in between the key frames, it is sometimes referred as "in-betweening" or "tweening" (Macromedia, 1999). After the cells are drawn, they are photographed and included in the movie.

 

Sound Synchronization

Different theorists share the position that the use of sound is of vital importance in wrapping up the whole animation. The background music sets the mood in a powerful way. But what adds the final touch to the process of convincing the viewer of the "reality" of the experience is the synchronization of characters’ speech. The speaking scenes get a different treatment than the rest of the movie. When making such scenes, the conversation of the actors is recorded before the drawing (White, 1988, p.134). Then, the editors do extensive temporal analysis of the recording, documenting the time of utterance of each distinct sound, and calculating which frame is related to that moment. This information is forwarded to the animators, who can draw the appropriate facial expressions to appear at the appropriate time for the sound (Culhane, 1990, pp.212-213). This makes the movie complete, and ready for viewing.

 

Epilogue: My Personal Animation Experience

In order to gain first hand knowledge of making animations, I decided to try to produce one of my own. I started with the idea to explore the process from beginning to finish: starting with a story idea, through the making of animation, to officially publishing the finished work. The process would not be complete without the last part, because a piece of art is worthless without its audience.

The plan was to publish the animation on a web site called "HotWired Animation Express" (http://www.hotwired.com/animation), which expresses readiness to publish "little stand-alone stories that take our visitors on a mental vacation." HotWired is one of the most influential sites on the web (related to Wired magazine), with a long record of achievements in the promotion of the digital revolution. Exhibition in a place like this would provide exposure of the work to the widest possible audience, as well as first-hand insight in the workings of the professional relations.

To achieve this goal, I decided to use Flash, a program that can be obtained from the web "for evaluation" for a limited time period free of charge (http://www.flash.com), and is intended for creating 2-D animations. Flash’s interface provides functionality very similar to the technology of making cell animations: the content of the frames can be "hand-drawn" (using the mouse) or imported through scanning. The visual elements can be positioned in layers, emulating the process of producing cells explained earlier. It also provides help in some aspects of the processes of tweening and morphing, especially when working with simple shapes. Flash can save the work in various digital formats, and on top of that provides full support for interactivity.

I downloaded the program and set out to enhance my knowledge of its operation. My previous experience was quite helpful, for I have made some short and simple 2-D computer animations before. Nevertheless, while trying to master the program, I extensively used the online help manuals. During this phase, I made several short animation experiments, including one that was a recreation of the work of Eadward Muybridge. I scanned some of his photographic series of animals in motion, and extracting the separate pictures, combined them in a sequence: an animation that can be displayed on the computer screen. This provided encouragement for future efforts, but also showed me that no matter how short it is, if the animation is decent, it takes a lot more time to produce it than assumed by a layman.

On the content side, I started with the idea to write several short stories, and connect them into one whole interactive presentation. This was supposed to have some properties of hypertext (text with links inside that enable the reader to jump from location to location in the narration in non-sequential manner). I also spread the word that I look for short stories that could be adapted into animations. This was quite useful, because as a consequence my friend Bojan Antic offered me a synopsis for one of his own. I accepted the story and started working on the animation, developing the characters and designing the scenes. Another friend, the musician Vasko Buraliev, provided me with background music to support the mood of the story.

Unfortunately, the time factor stopped me from completing this animation before submitting of the presentation and this paper. It takes a whole day of work to animate a scene lasting several seconds. The life of the student is often complicated, but I hope that in the near future I would be able to tie the project together and achieve the initial goal. The results can be viewed via my web site http://filip.stir.org.

 

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Source: http://filip.stir.org/en/writings/comics_animation/


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