The film scholar David Rodowick, in his Virtual Life of Film, writes that ‘every film is an animated film’ – if the definition of the term animation is to be taken as ‘the automated reconstitution of movement from a succession of still images.’[1] I suppose that Rodowick is just saying what everyone else is thinking in this age of unfettered moving image production, but seeing it in print feels brazen and wrong. He was following Manovich, who more famously suggested that ‘digital cinema is a particular case of animation which uses live action footage as one of its many elements.’[2]
I will follow Stephen Reinke in considering this extended problematic: ‘In the end, animation is triumphant, but at the price of an enormous levelling: It becomes everything.’[3] Surely what this highlights is the pure inadequacy of the existing lexicon of film terminology, which continues to be, I would argue, primarily based on outmoded principles of film production, including binary oppositions of live action and animation, which seem to be in some way locked in a constant battle for supremacy.
The result: the neutralisation of the term animation, meaning that we lose an analytical tool which could help to explicate the changing ontology of digital cinema. Further, this reveals that the wider film and new media scholarly community would seem to have a blindspot when it comes to recognising or acknowledging the specificities of animation (as a medium and as a field of study).
Deleuze invents new terms – the ‘privileged instant’ and ‘any instant whatever’ – as a way of articulating a disassociation between live action film and photography (thereby suggesting that animation has nothing to do with cinema, but that’s another story), and talks of ‘intensity’ as a measure of the audience’s investment in the film space. I would argue that such a rethink needs to be extended to digital cinema. For example, Paul Wells suggests that rather than defining animation based on technical distinctions, it may be more pertinent to define it in terms of narrativity [4], and this theme is echoed throughout animation studies (if not film or new media studies) – most effectively perhaps by Philip Denslow, who simply asks ‘What is animation if not the desire to make real that which exists in the imagination?’[5]
Animation in this narrative sense is not every film, it is a specific genre – it is the interior, the possible world, the dream space, the non- Euclidean fantastic. It is also not just films for children or CGI (Let’s call Pan’s Labyrinth and Avatar animated films, for example[6])
Here we have, therefore, already 2 distinct definitions of animation:
1. Animation is all film – since everything is technically possible in digital film, so all digital film is technically animation;
2. Animation is a specific genre that privileges the unique characteristics of animated storytelling, for example metamorphosis, the transgression of physical laws, anthropomorphosisis.
So – does anyone have any suggestions for new terms for this new language? To kick off, I propose that the term ‘animatography’ should replace cinematography, to more accurately critique and analyse the essence of digital cinema.
Having worked as the Programme Leader for the widely regarded Animation department at Newport in South Wales (both Bachelor and Masters), Caroline is currently taking a sabbatical to write up her PhD on embodiment and narrativity in contemporary mainstream fantasy cinema.
[1] Rodowick, D. 2007 The Virtual Life of Film p54.
[2] Manovich,L. 2001 The Language of New Media p302.
[3] Reinke, S The world is a Cartoon : Stray notes on Animation (stray notes indeed, but such enlightening stray notes!), in Reinke,S. Gehman,C Eds. 2005 The Sharpest Point p11.
[4] Well, P. 2002 Animation Genre and Authorship.
[5] Denslow, P. What is Animation in Pilling (Ed) , A Reader in Animation Studies P4
[6] Guillarmo Del Toro, 2006 and James Cameron, 2009 respectively
This relates a lot to a bit in the conclusion of my upcoming PhD. Basically I claim that the big problem is the very fact “cinematograph” as been defined though technique which lead us to define animation through technique. Today’s advance in digital cinema which is indeed a lot more “animation” that it is “live action blurs the boundaries to a point when one can only accept the fact that those technique based definitions of “cinema”, “live action” and “animation” are at best completely outmoded.
While I should probably go over Wells a bit, in my PhD I also offer a narrative base for definition but I use narration as a way to differentiate cinetic art from “cinema” (in short, cinema is moving image, regardless of the technique used, that tells a story, cinetic art is moving image that does not tell a story). While this might be a bit radical, I believe a great deal of the problems we have as film scholar is that (if I may paraphrase a French saying) we’ve been trying to compare pears and apples using the same analytical tools. Secondly, within the scope of cinema (thus narrative moving image) I propose a divide this time based on aesthetics (using ideas from George Sifianos) with on one side what Sifianos calls “natural” images and on the other “surprising” images. Again in this case the technique used is largely inconsequential, you can have animated films that present “natural” oriented images or live action film that present “surprising” images. It’s only within this subcategory that I finally take into consideration the technique used to create the images, live action filming being only one of many techniques that can be used to create moving images, whether narrative or not, whether surprising or natural, etc. (and of course none of those categories are mutually exclusive, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if you didn’t have examples that fit in the blurry zone between ensembles…)
Thanks – I shall investigate Sifianos, he sounds really interesting.
I think this is a really important area for research, and the interesting thing to me is that whatever this phenomenon of effects cinema is, it meets at the crossroads of animation, film and new media. Is not the theorising of it just exposing the insular nature of these scholarly communities, at a time when that blurry zone is expanding to the point that boundaries have been obliterated- there is no more black and white, just grey?! I suppose what I am asking is whether there is now a disconnect between the discourse and practice of contemporary mainstream film production?
“Animation in this narrative sense is not every film, it is a specific genre”
I would go farther than this, and suggest that what most people think of as ‘cinema’ [ie, the Hollywood-style, feature-length, live-action narrative film] represents a tiny subgenre of what is possible in the realm of the moving image. Animation is much bigger and older than cinema. The conventional ‘movie’ is like a mouse riding an elephant — the mouse may make a great deal of noise, but that has more to do with the economics of movie production and consumption than any ‘baked-in’ quality of the medium itself.
Conventional movies have long used animation and visual effects as a shorthand way to communicate a character’s altered state (drug / dream / mental illness etc) — even Wizard of Oz did this in 1939 thru the use of eye-popping color effects — but this is a double-edged sword. While taking advantage of animation’s ability to disrupt narrativity and realism, using animation this way sneakily privileges the live-action movie’s claim to represent reality. Yes, movies in general have become more cartoon-like in recent decades — partly due to advances in technology, but also because the focus is increasingly, and exclusively, on ‘the ride’, ie movies as a means of escape from reality. Having already positioned animation as the language of non-reality, what better way to tell audiences that they are in a fantasy space?
I think the fundamental point here is to do with language and how it is used, as Caroline makes clear. (This is something that I talked about in my post on animated documentary a month or so back.) As well as inevitable nuances and ‘shades of grey’ – perhaps even more than 50 of them – we have to contend with the problems of (and differences between) translation, transliteration, transcription, interpretation (to take but one example, are ‘translators’ and ‘interpreters’ the same thing?) It all comes down to the age-old dichotomy between ‘literal meaning’ versus ‘the spirit’ whenever someone is trying to communicate words or meanings first communicated by someone else, in a different context. It’s interesting that Stephane’s reply talks about French-speaking scholarship and French sayings; there’s much out there that has not been translated into other languages at all (or, if it has been, it has been done poorly or with some ‘hidden agenda’?).
Added to these ‘small scale’ things to do with language (how is a specific word translated etc) are what we might call ‘larger scale’ *rhetorical* uses of language – in other words, the attempts to offer a broader contextual commentary on a certain thing, or assert certain things that can seem quite sweeping . . . which is where we can place comments like the Rodowick one Caroline quotes (or ones like “Every film is a documentary” [Bill Nichols]). I think there is a sense that these sorts of comments – some might call them ‘slogans’ – are there simply to get a response. If so, it usually works. (Though, to be fair, most of these statements are usually followed by chapters of discussion and qualification.)
But, the response needs to be one that revisits and progresses the terms that we use. Otherwise we are in danger of allowing things to collapse into each other, or become one big ‘grey area’, or perhaps stay locked in some binary ‘battle’ between two perceived ‘opposites’ (though Luke’s mouse-elephant metaphor suggests that in animation’s and live-action’s case, it is less a ‘battle’ and more of a weird co-existence).
I’ve just been reading a guide book to Hong Kong and it notes the following about Cantonese (which is spoken in the majority of households in HK): “Cantonese is very difficult for foreigners to learn because of the seven tones involved, each of which can change the meaning of a word. For example, the word ‘gai’, when said in different ways, can mean either chicken, street or prostitute. Even for the Chinese, the various tones only avoid confusion up to a certain point: complete understanding is gained from the context.” Aside from raising at least one intriguing question – namely, how does one avoid confusion when saying in Cantonese “I was eating some chicken in the street with a prostitute”? – it makes me think that we as animation scholars, historians and practitioners are effectively doing the same as speakers of Cantonese when it comes to our use of certain terms. Context, tone, intention – all of these inflect what we mean in certain directions. One person can use the term ‘animation’ and mean, simply, ‘a cartoon’; someone else might use the same term, but then spend an entire book qualifying their use of that term. Both might well be fine.
That language and our use of it matters, and matters a great deal, should be obvious (I can hear some people saying something along the lines of “No shit, Sherlock?!” right now). And I think a call for more precision in how we define things really matters. But it also connects above and beyond ‘mere animation’. I wonder how many of us, in trying to secure funding for a research project or other activity, look at the criteria and think “well, what I’m doing is *really* ‘digital arts’ or ‘connected cultures’, or . . .” And maybe it is – but the point is that we do some of the defining, but we also have some of it done for us (and perhaps by people who know little or nothing about what we do, or are actively hostile towards it and would rather we were doing something else).
I’ll end this comment before it gets waaaay too long by quoting one of my heroes, the journalist John Pilger (one of the few journalists still worthy of the name). In a recent article in ‘The New Statesman’ (available online here: http://johnpilger.com/articles/how-we-are-impoverished-gentrified-and-silenced-and-what-to-do-about-it), Pilger talks about how certain behaviours are normalised by, amongst other things, use of language. He notes at one point: “The traducing of noble words like ‘democracy’, ‘reform’, ‘welfare’ and ‘public service’ is normal.” Anyone who has been following the Coalition governments antics in the UK will see how these words have been turned on their head, confused, made part of a big ‘grey area’. Words should be there to help us understand things better – but we need to be constantly vigilant and work towards that better understanding. What Caroline has called for here is part of that work . . .
and from the non-academic “literature” — fascinating comment by Kazuo Ishiguro here:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/apr/27/six-novelists-favourite-second-art-form?view=mobile
…”Could the problem be that movies are about moving pictures and we tend to remember in stills? “