Dissecting <i>Bambi</i>: Multiplanar Photography, the Cel Technique, and the Flowering of Full Animation
2012; University of Texas Press; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/vlt.2012.0007
ISSN1542-4251
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
Resumoion and flatness as the exemplary characteristics of animation as a medium. Paul Wells describes how, “in many senses, Disney had aligned animation with aspects of photographic realism, and misrepresented the form’s more distinctive characteristics” (Understanding 24). While Mickey Mouse has been linked to modernism and the avant-garde, Disney’s brand of realism is often used to illustrate a form of animation “fallen” from its original potential and to demonstrate how, as in the live-action cinema, “an ideology of the realism of depicted events had taken over” (Thompson 108). Spatial realism is not only naive but directly contrary to the imperatives of the avant-garde and critical theory, which, according to Esther Leslie, “has always been . . . to flatten out, to bring to the surface in order to make the base show itself for what it is” (297). Although the cel technique and multiplane camera greatly expanded the aesthetic capabilities of animation, Disney’s particular appropriation of it, in Leslie’s opinion, constitutes a betrayal of the radical potential of his early cartoons. She writes, in reference to the multiplane camera, that this movie-style technique negates flat space and the self-referentiality of the drawn cartoon and substitutes a deep cartoon space. It was the definitive reversal of the modernist revelation of materials. If the modernists used the illusion of depth, it was to investigate the illusion. The modernist return to zero, stripping away all the clutter and effects of culture, was reversed in the refurbishing of the screen with objects stretching into every corner (Leslie 148). A portion of Leslie’s screed against Disney derives from the need to assert the importance of animation in the face of its scholarly marginalization, and she rightly points out that the reflexivity of McCay’s Gertie is notably absent from Disney features. Leslie continues to criticize the development of realism: The feature-lengths, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs onwards, reinstitute the laws of perspective and gravity, and lead a fight against flatness, while producing traditional dramaturgical characters. They no longer explode the world with the surrealistic and analytical cinematic dynamite of the optical unconscious. There is no doubt about their “naive realism”—a derogatory tag that Adorno and Benjamin had devised together. Cartoons, whatever they were before, surrender through commercialism—and become Adorno’s commodity form that offers a false appearance of integration and wholeness, and that magically conceals the labor which went into its production. (121) Leslie is exactly right that spatial realism serves to obscure the animator’s labor, which had been so central to McCay’s and Fleischer’s cartoons. We can see in her celebration of flatness a productive tension between the spatial transparency of Disney’s “illusion of life” aesthetic and the spatial opacity of a modernist sensibility in which all objects exist in the foreground. The ongoing discussion of the “superflat” aesthetic in contemporary animation and visual art provides an insightful corollary to this debate. Thomas Lamarre remarks on how superflat exploits the conventions of cel layers without the conceptual or spatial separation of the multiplane camera. Instead, background objects come to the fore instead of fading beyond the viewer’s notice; this results in the ultimate planarity of the superflat image, in which “no element within the image is more important than any other element. The result is a visual field without any hierarchy among elements. You could also call this a distributive visual field, since elements are distributed rather than hierarchized” (Lamarre 136). The value of this discussion of flatness is that a deconstruction of spatial realism should proceed by an analysis of that which becomes transparent, namely, the background. Moreover, an acknowledgment of the background reveals the importance of the gap in complicating the interaction between naturalism, realism, and animation technology. The choice to focus on the background derives partially from the relative paucity of attention devoted to analyzing what in fact occupies the majority of the frame. But the backgrounds directs us, as does cel technology itself, to the issues of transparency and the static—or, more specifically, the way an animated image exploits the combination of these elements to achieve its claim to realism. Indeed, even Earl Hurd’s initial patent application for cel technology emphasizes its use of a background: In my process a single background is used for the entire series of pictures necessary to portray one scene. The background shows all of those portions of the scene that remain stationary and may conveniently be drawn, printed or painted on cardboard or other suitable sheet. I prefer to paint the figures of the background in strong blacks and whites upon a medium dark gray paper and when the transparent sheet carrying the movable objects is placed over this gray tone of the background, the objects on the transparent sheet appear to stand out in relief, giving what may be termed a “poster effect.” (Qtd. in Crafton 150) Hurd’s comments make clear the fundamental interpenetration of space with movement in the cel technique: those things that are motile exist in the animate foreground,
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