Revised Question:
How does experimental animation redefine aesthetic realism? In other words, how can such a subjective medium truthfully represent the nature of reality?
Preliminary Thesis: Something about openness of interpretation being critical to reception. Style leading to projection. Refine.
PRIMARY SOURCES
Small People with Hats. Dir. Sarina Nihei. Royal College of Art, 2014. Animated Film.
Web.< https://vimeo.com/97202679>
Small People with Hats is a seven minute long animated short by Sarina Nihei about a group of small people that wear hats, who are tormented by the large, briefcase carrying people. The dynamic of their relationship is very mysterious; the hostility between these two groups is never explained. The briefcase people communicate in codes, symbols, and numbers. The people with hats do not communicate at all. The short somehow emerges as a critique of violence, punishment, rote office jobs, and a cruel mother. It’s impossible to say what the film is about, but it is certainly relevant.
I want to be able to incorporate the role of absurdity in animated representations of reality in my essay. This film will help my research because it was very inspiring to my entire project and the formulation of my question. It tackles very real subject matter while remaining very far from reality. Absurdity is definitely a mode that works well with animation and can capture the incomprehensible-ness of reality in a way that is unique to the medium.
Waking Life. Dir. Richard Linklater. Perf. Wiley Higgins. Fox Searchlight Studios. 2001. Film.
This film is an apt primary source for my project because it is an experimental animation that explicitly deals with the question “what is reality?” and takes an expressionistic approach to realism. Because there are multiple animators, it will help me understand the significance in stylistic approaches one can take to represent a subjective reality. I have not yet seen this movie so the rest of the annotation will have to come after I watch it. Recommended by Danny Loose
La Course A L’Abime. Dir. Georges Schwizgebel, Schwizgebel and Basil Vogt. Studio GDS, 1992. Animated Film.
La Course A L’Abime, which translates to Race to the Abyss is a highly experimental animation from 1992, and it featured on the collection of animated shorts The Animation Show. It appears to be entirely animated with acrylic paint. It is based on the French fictional biography of the great painter Caravaggio, which is also of the same title.
I wanted to use La Course A L’Abime as a source because it is sort of realistic, I wouldn’t neccesarily call it aesthetically abstract, though I certainly wouldn’t call it realism either. It’s more like a crude realism. It seeks to replicate reality, has shadows and light and is pretty accurate in movement. But the as characters morph into different shapes, defining the realism becomes more difficult to do. This intersection is critical to my thinking, and I want to be able to discern how this animation style works to portray reality, particularly because it is based on a biographical novel.
Sílení. Dir. Jan Švankmajer. Perf. Petr Cepek. Warner Bros and Zeitgeist Films. 2005.
Jan Svanmajer’s Lunacy is a film adaptation of two Edgar Allen Poe stories, “The Premature Burial” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” It employs hyper-realistic sound, and stop motion mixed with real footage. This mixed media approach, which is used in many films, is something I feel I need to touch on in my essay, because it highlights a very important part of the attraction to the medium: animation makes a tangible representation of an imagined reality. The hyper-realistic sounds that Švankmajer uses in his films were the primary inspiration for the sound I want to incorporate into my project. I want to talk about surrealism in my essay.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Wells, Paul. Understanding Animation. New York: Psychology Press. 1998. Print.
In this book, Wells talks about the history of animation. The book tackles the question, “what is animation?” He examines the how and why certain animations are perceived as being “more real” than others, and points to Disney’s influence over this medium. Wells discusses the art form and its closeness to personal realities, and how the basis of realism in animation is based on projection. This raises interesting questions about how much “realness” has to do with accuracy and how much it has to do with subject matter.
This is going to be an important article in my research, there is an entire chunk dedicated to experimental animation, and while I’m interested by experimental animation I don’t know much about what defines it. It also goes over the obfuscation of reality in animation. Wells addresses several issues of representation one may come across while drawing characters. This will inform both my project and my research.
Hall, A. (2003), Reading Realism: Audiences’ Evaluations of the Reality of Media Texts. Journal of Communication, 53: 624–641.
Reading Realism studies the way audiences perceive realism. The study was conducted on forty seven adults with little previous knowledge of media studies. The study found six conclusive means of defining realism. They defined realism as “relating to real world experience.” The author of the article, Alice Hall, does acknowledge that despite the results of the study, there is no real way to measure realism. This study will give me some new lenses to analyze how those who are not myself perceive realism. It will also give me some ideas on defining realism differently across styles and genres.
Morgan, Katie. “It’s So Real It’s Fake: An Exploration of Realism in Animation.” It’s so Real It’s Fake: An Exploration of Realism in Animation. Academia, n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2016..<http://www.academia.edu/2941748/It_s_so_real_it_s_fake
_An_exploration_of_realism_in_animation>
In this article the author Katie Morgan actually refers many other animators and authors to try and find a way to define realism within animation, and this turns out to be very difficult. The article talks about hyper-realism as a primary feature of many animations, as well as surrealism and ultra realism. All of these modes differ from actually being “realistic,” which in this article is sort of dismissed as being arbitrary to the basis of realism/ perceptions of reality.
This article will be extremely helpful because instead of talking about the ideological reasons that animation is thought of as “more real” than other more realistic forms of media, it discusses animation style as very large part of a viewers perception of reality. The articles discussion of the many variations of realism, which I did not previously know about, changes my understanding of animating. It will also relate directly to the hyper-realistic sound elements of my final project.
Telotte, J.P “The Changing Space of Animation: Disney’s Hybrid Films of the 1940s” Atlanta, GA: School of Literature, Communication, and Culture, Georgia Tech. Dec 12 2005. Web. April 19, 2016.
This article is about Disney’s animation department and the shifts that took place in the 1940’s. While in the early 1900’s Disney’s realistic style dominated the cultural knowledge of animation in the United States, the 1940’s brought changes more experimental animation into the mainstream. Although, comparatively, the films were still highly tame, and true abstract animation was not yet widely known in the US. Still, popular films like “Flight of the Bumblebee” were made, and the shift in style influenced animation in the US. Because Disney is such an influential company and their animations sort of set the precedent for what animation should look like, I needed an early Disney source. I’m not sure if this is the final one I will use, but because it does deal with Disney realism and how that affected the broader scope of cartooning, it is working out nicely as a source.
NEED TWO MORE SOURCES.
ESSAY OUTLINE:
- Introduction and Thesis
- What is realism and how can it be measured?
- Early Disney’s Precedent
- Experimental European Animation
- Representation and replication
- Conclusion, reiterate thesis.