ANIMATION

by Mary Phelan

Since the stirrings of the Renaissance man has played with matter, breathing life into clay and paint, disbanding the ethereality of altarpieces for the robust materiality of oil paintings and marble sculptings. From the extraordinary movement of Bernini’s St Teresa through the automatons of the clockwork age, to Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s literary work, the most ‘real’ of our creations have been those of the imagination. And in the twentieth century, the art of animation is the penultimate triumph of mind over matter. Since the invention of the movie-camera, just over one hundred years ago, light has become more real than matter.

The first photographers captured reality with a mixture of light and chemicals. Quite early on in the history of film, film-makers began to substitute live actors with drawn images. The name Walt Disney is synonymous with the making of animated movies but he was not the first animator. As early as the 1900’s animators James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl were at work in the USA and France, respectively. In 1923 Walt Disney moved to Hollywood. His series, Alice in Cartoonland, featured a small girl moving around in an animated world. The bizarre and morphing world of Lewis Carroll lends itself to the art of the animator as does the telling of the fairy tale. These age-old stories, filled with imaginary creatures and supernatural happenings, are grist to the mill of the animator. People and objects appear and disappear, frogs and bears turn into princes and children step into parallel worlds.

‘Anything is possible in animation’.

However, despite the non-limitations of the animated vehicle, animators are venturing more and more often into materialist themes. Mark Pinsky writes about what he calls the ‘Gospel of Disney’, the message that each feature-length animation carries is that hard work and virtue will definitely make your dreams come true. This can be seen in Disney features like Pinocchio and Cinderella. But in our increasingly globalised world, animators are turning the capitalist credo on its head. What is capitalism, after all, but the realisation of an individual’s dream grown so big that it becomes the material vehicle for the lives of others.

Two animated features in particular illustrate this new dissection of capitalism. Hayao Miyazaki made Spirited Away in 2001. The story centres on Chihiro, a pretty young girl who is very unhappy because her parents are moving home. They unwittingly fall prey to the power of an enchantress who turns them into pigs. Chihiro enters a strange underworld and endures several trials in order to return them to the ‘real’ world. On the surface the story appears to be a typical fairytale. There are clear divisions between beauty and ugliness here, good is rewarded and the myth of greed punished is an echo of the Greek tale of Jason and the Argonauts. The storyboards are brilliantly coloured throughout with striking images of both the real and enchanted worlds.

But there are post-modern currents underlying this tale. Besides Chihiro’s parents, other characters in the story fall prey to greed. The career of Haku, the river spirit, is thwarted because of the building of apartment blocks near where he used to swim. The story could be a parody on consumer culture. After all, the witch Yabubu, comes across as a modern-day capitalist sitting in her apartment counting her money while the workers enchanted into slavery run her enterprise, the bath-house of the spirits. The wicked witch of the West no longer has a pointed hat and broomstick; she simply brands everything.

There are no strands of myth, no beautiful people in Belleville Rendez-Vous (Sylvain Chomet 2002). We are presented with an eerie post-modern landscape in which pockets of ‘ordinary’ people survive amid a population bloated from the excesses of life. Even so there is something of the caricature about Champion and his grandmother, Madame Souza. They are so ordinary that they come across as extraordinary, the painfully muscular Champion trying to complete the Tour de France on a ramshackle bicycle egged on by Grandma who is determined that he will ‘be somebody’. But Champion is kidnapped by a gang working for a vicious businessman who needs the fast-disappearing fit population to continue running his betting empire. Grandma and pet dog Bruno set out to rescue Champion, helped along the way by a line-up of grotesques, including the Bellville triplets, a trio of geriatric women still struggling in the music business after their glory days on Vaudeville. The images are either side-splittingly funny or profoundly disturbing, according to your state of mind. But funny or not, Sylvain Chomet’s movie does have an air of portent about it. The artwork is breathtaking; the delicate line work lending itself by turns to monochrome, half tone and full-blown colour. If both these movies comment on the evils of capitalism and consumerism, Shrek 2 positively screams about them.

There is no subtlety here. The brightly-coloured storyboards pour venom on shopping malls, multinationals and special offers. The kingdom where Shrek and Fiona visit her parents is itself a parody of Disneyland LA or Paris, or Florida. Take your pick. And their sound marriage is nearly undone by a wicked, capitalistic and self-promotional plot. The irony is that Shrek 2 is so far the biggest box-office grossing movies of 2004.

In addition to the success of the feature-length animation the cartoon ‘short’ is very much alive and has been with us from the beginning. In the 1900’s the most famous cartoon short was Winsor McCoy Draws Little Nemo created by Winsor McCoy, an animator working for a firm called Vitagraph.

The Guardian Newspaper reports that Tom and Jerry are the cartoon characters favoured by grown-ups and that animal cartoons are now more popular than those featuring ‘real’ people. Eh? What has happened to all those mid-length features that comment ironically on post-modern life, i.e., The Simpsons, South Park, Beavis and Butthead? They are, of course, another story.

Links and Books

The Gospel According to Disney by Mark Pinsky